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Tag: Cleveland

Countdown: What To Do, Where To Go & What To Hear, Oct. 5-11


With the outdoor concert and festival season coming to a close, jazz and creative music returns to the small rooms where the music was born. This week’s most compelling shows all feature Northeast Ohio musicians, proving that football and clambakes aren’t the only autumn traditions to honor around here.

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Exile on East Boulevard: Arooj Aftab, Shazad Ismaily and Vijay Iyer Bring Magic To CMA

Love In Exile

Someone once said that all music, even at its most abstract, is about something, and that is the passage of time. That might be, but there are musicians who can transcend time to enter other dimensions in music. Vocalist Arooj Aftab, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and pianist Vijay Iyer who, as Love In Exile, will come to the Cleveland Museum Of Art Wednesday, are among them.

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Countdown: Your Guide To Jazz in NEO, Sept. 27-Oct. 4

Collective action is on the calendar for the next week beginning with the monthly concert by the NEO composers mob Third Law Collective, a fusion-y three-way courtesy of guitarist Oz Noy with bassist Jimmy Haslip and force-of-nature drummer Dennis Chambers and concluding next Tuesday with a New Ghosts-sponsored performance (and that’s precisely what it will be), by DIOR STAPLER, a group that bears an uncanny resemblance to Eurojazz agents provocateurs Die Hochstapler. New Wednesday’s Cleveland Museum of Art concert by Love In Exile (Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily) will get a full preview on Monday. Are you ready?

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Kurt Elling and Dan Bruce Turn Up The Musical Voltage This Week

Kurt Elling and SuperBlue at Cleveland Museum of Art

In his 30-odd years on the scene, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling has topped the Down Beat Critics Poll 13 times and has received the Jazz Journalists Association Male Singer of the Year award eight times. He’s done this while singing texts written by Theodore Roethke and Walt Whitman, a Monkees hit, one of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. Whitney Balliett might have had Elling’s musical choices in mind when he wrote his famous characterization of jazz as being “the sound of surprise.”

Yet none of Elling’s neck-snapping musical eccentricities was as shocking as SuperBlue, which will come to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art Wednesday.

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Countdown: Your Guide To Jazz in NEO, Sept. 20-26

Veronica Swift

Attention Swifties: ya girl is coming to Cleveland tonight. No, it’s not a previously unannounced stop on the Eras Tour, but you wouldn’t expect to find that kind of scoop in this column, would you? The Swift in question is Veronica, who kicks off a late-September clambake of jazz and adjacent musical revelry this week, one that could launch a million crossover dreams.

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