Like thousands of northeast Ohio students this week, the Hingetown Jazz Festival is headed back to school adding student ensembles from four area colleges and universities to the lineup of Saturday’s all-day, all-local free festival.
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Tradition might call this week the Dog Days of Summer, but for jazz fans around northeast Ohio, it’s time for The Cats. That’s the name that serious practitioners of the art of improvised music in the Black American tradition give to the ones who can really play.
By any measure, the musicians listed below fit that description and all are on bandstands around the area this week. Here’s what you can expect:
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Nathan-Paul Davis makes this statement at the top of his Linktree page:
"I play energy, not notes!" Nathan-Paul calls his music SOUND MEDICINE.
Anyone who has heard Davis play will recognize that he is simply stating facts. No cap. No flex. The energy in a typical Nathan-Paul performance could power a dozen AI server farms for a month.
Thursday night finds the saxophonist in an unusual setting: playing a birthday gig, in this case, his own. The setting, Edwin’s Leadership & Restaurant Institute, is at once familiar, but different.
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Though hip-hop artists have made it a genre unto itself, the mixtape, a homemade cassette of songs, was the Spotify playlist of the 1980s and ‘90s. Mixtapes were playable, tradable declarations of musical allegiances and taste, a medium of exchange and sometimes winsome mash notes to crushes, delivering their message at 1 7/8 ips.
True, it’s hard to imagine jazz nerds assembling cassettes of favorite Maynard Ferguson cuts to give to romantic objects (harder still to imagine they had such objects). Still guitarist Dan Bruce liked the concept so much that he’s making a mixtape live and on stage by arranging songs performed by Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Jinari Kemet and Gretchen Pleuss with an a-list jazz ensemble.
The best improvised music in the Black American Tradition offers something for the head, heart and feet. A pair of concerts this weekend at BOP STOP offer a potent distillation of how much music can move us.
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