Skip to content

Tag: Cleveland

Roll Call, August 19: Kyle Kidd, Russ Lossing, Pablo Moser and Nicolás Ojeda

Published 19 August, 2022 By John Chacona

I get a lot of music for my consideration, more than 430 (!) new releases in 2022. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, when I’m not previewing events in northeast Ohio or profiling regional musicians, I’ll offer hot takes on recent releases.

When I moved to Cleveland in late 2019, one of the bands I most wanted to hear was the Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar. You can probably guess why that remains on my to-do list nearly three years and several COVID subvariants later, but it’s taken on new urgency with the release of Soothsayer  (American Dreams Records), the spellbinding solo debut of M[A]B vocalist Kyle Kidd (all pronouns).

Read moreRoll Call, August 19: Kyle Kidd, Russ Lossing, Pablo Moser and Nicolás Ojeda
Leave a Comment

Singer Barbara Knight Brings Jazz On A Summer’s Day To Cain Park

Published 10 August, 2022 By John Chacona

Barbara Knight

 

Barbara Knight doesn’t consider herself a jazz singer, though you wouldn’t know it from the swinging, rhythmically alert performances she’s lavished on northeast Ohio audiences through the years. But hear her out.

“I’ve always called myself a big band singer, rather than a jazz singer,” she said by phone from her home in nearby western Pennsylvania. “If you listen to me, you’ll hear that I am more traditional with my presentation of songs. I’m not using vocal pyrotechnics to do all kinds of crazy things with the melody. I think the people that I sing for are more interested in hearing the melody.”

When Knight and her quintet, John Orsini (saxophones), Phil Lantry (keyboards), Tim Powell (bass) and Glenn Schaft (drums) take the stage at Cain Park for a free concert Sunday, Aug. 14 at 1 p.m., you will certainly hear the melody, but you’ll also hear the wisdom of a singer with hundreds of songs in her repertoire and decades of exploration into their subtleties.

Read moreSinger Barbara Knight Brings Jazz On A Summer’s Day To Cain Park
Comments closed

Yo NYO! Carnegie Hall’s Young Jazz Orchestra Begins Its First U.S. Tour at Tri-C

Published 27 July, 2022 By John Chacona
NYO 2022
NYO Jazz 2021 with Sean Jones

My friends in the “jazz is dead” camp often pose two rhetorical questions in defense of their position:  Who will want to listen? and Who will want to play this music?

The answer to the first is unknowable, but the second question will be answered in the most unequivocal way Saturday when NYO Jazz makes Tri-C’s Metropolitan Campus Auditorium the first stop on its inaugural U.S. tour.

Read moreYo NYO! Carnegie Hall’s Young Jazz Orchestra Begins Its First U.S. Tour at Tri-C
Comments closed

Smash! Stephen Philip Harvey and His Band of Superheroes Are Here

Published 2 July, 2022 By John Chacona

Stephen Philip Harvey

 

“I hate that a big band is so . . . big,” saxophonist, composer and arranger Stephen Philip Harvey said with a chuckle. “It’s financially a problem, but I just really like big band music.”

Harvey likes it so much that he’s putting aside the financial, organizational and logistical challenges of touring with a big band to bring the Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra (SPHJO) to Cleveland’s Bop Stop Thursday night to support the release two weeks ago of the band’s debut recording, Smash! (Next Level, 2022).

Read moreSmash! Stephen Philip Harvey and His Band of Superheroes Are Here
Leave a Comment