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“My music is kind of intricate,” Marta Sanchez admitted. Then she quickly added, “It’s not that I’m not attracted towards intellectual music, but I’m attracted to beauty–in music and in art–but both at the same time.”
Listen to Sanchez’s bracing, elegant pianism as you can do Saturday at BOP STOP, and you’ll learn that intellectual rigor wrapped in beauty are magnetically attracted to her, too.
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After my freelance music gig for a newspaper in Erie, Pennsylvania had vanished in 2020 and I had moved to Cleveland, I resolved to document the local jazz scene, one that was all but ignored by media outlets in northeast Ohio. Good people making interesting music is catnip to a culture reporter, and I found a subject right away.
This was Chris Coles whose “Nine Lives” project became the first post in my documentary project covering the local scene. That was November 2021. Now, 30 months later “Nine Lives” is back for a performance Friday at Tri-C. And just like a familiar melody that is transformed by a master improvisor, Coles’ magnum opus returns reimagined as a new work.
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You might have heard about a certain celestial phenomenon occurring today. Cleveland, where I live, is in the path of full totality and hundreds of thousands of astronomical tourists are expected to arrive for the show. But what’s a show without music, right? So herewith a playlist of eclipse-themed music to entertain you while you’re searching for your polarized glasses.
P.S. If you were expecting a Sp*tify playlist, know that there might not be an artist here who will qualify for mini-micro-nanopayments under the company’s new compensation structure. Sp*tify can go where the sun don’t shine.
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Monday, September 25, 2023, marks the centennial of Sam Rivers’ birth. Rivers was a composer, improvisor, theoretician, scenemaker mentor and instrumentalist of Promethean stature. It’s hard to think of anyone quite like him. So it’s appropriate that his centennial is commemorated by “The Sam Rivers Sessionography,” a new book by Rick Lopez that rivals Rivers in its panoptical audacity.
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If there were a Mount Rushmore of Cleveland jazz, maybe on the bluff overlooking the West Flats, who would be on it? Albert Ayler and Tadd Dameron for sure, and maybe Eddie Baccus, too. Joe Lovano is still very much with us, but it’s not too soon to reserve a place for him up there, too.
Lovano’s career accomplishments, including his tenure with Bill Frisell in Paul Motian’s enormously influential trio, loom so large that it’s easy to forget that the saxophonist’s first big gig was with the Woody Herman Orchestra.
Trombonist Scott Garlock, the executive director of the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra with whom Lovano will play two concerts this weekend, remembers.
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