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With its high blue skies, comfortable temperatures, clambakes and promises of a Super Bowl season for the Browns, it’s hard to imagine how September in Northeast Ohio could possibly be better—though a free outdoor jazz festival might be a nice start.
Wish granted. Make way for the inaugural Hingetown Jazz Festival Saturday, Sept. 2.
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Because my interview with this week’s feature artist fell through, I decided to improvise and do something different. Instead of stuffing the Trading Fours roundup of capsule event previews at the end of a 700-word feature article, today they’re the main event. Short and sweet. I’m going to open the comments for this post so you can tell me if you like it or think this should be a one-and-done.
In the language of software developers, a beta project is one that is in development. That’s a pretty good description of the jazz playbook, too, especially as practiced by Lakewood guitarist Dan Bruce. His :beta collective balances a mutable blend of electric and acoustic instruments, composition and improvisation, jazz and prog rock influences. For the latest iteration of his tinkerer’s project in sound, Bruce has added a new wrinkle: the voice of Alyssa Boyd. That makes for an intriguing proposition for us musical beta testers, and as part of the free concert series supported by the Local 4 Music Fund, you can’t beat the price.
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If drummer Anthony Taddeo were a piece of music, he’d be marked Allegro vivace con brio é giocoso. Here’s a bit more Italian to represent the bilingual Taddeo: preso dalla testa ai piedi, an idiom for being in constant motion from head to toe.
This weekend finds the in-demand sideman, dependable session musician and busy bandleader in the familiar setting of Hingetown’s Bop Stop with his Alla Boara project for a two-night engagement that will be recorded for audio and video release.
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Despite the increasing numbers of creative improvising musicians who play it, the double bass in a solo context—on record or in performance–remains a comparatively uncommon sound.
Yet Brandon Lopez, with a new recording and a showcase at this weekend’s Re:Sound festival presented by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project, is the exception that proves the rule.
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After the cultural extinction event of 2020, some lifeforms re-emerged sooner than others. You would expect the ones with the most funding to be among the first to return, though perhaps not at their previous strength. And you might imagine that the more DIY scenes, the ones for which precarity is an ongoing fact, would also survive.
The 1Way at the Go Factory series of free improvisation shows curated by saxophonist Dan Wenninger, is one of the survivors, though it’s more like a cicada than a hardy cockroach. It hasn’t been dormant for seven years; there were a few scattered comebacks last fall. When the series resumes March 28 at the Go Factory loft, with Togishi and the Folger/Bruce/Martinez Trio, it will mark what Wenninger hopes will be a second beginning, a 1Way 2.0.
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