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Tag: Gabe Pollack

At CMA, Guitarist Dan Bruce Makes A Mixtape While You Listen

Published 18 November, 2025 By John Chacona
(clockwise from top left) Jinari Kemet, Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Gretchen Pleuss

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.

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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop! The Indispensable BOP STOP Celebrates Ten Years

Published 16 October, 2024 By John Chacona
Alla Boara records at BOP STOP in 2023, photocredit: Jackson Clark

When you think of all the challenges that have faced independent music venues for the past ten years, industry consolidation, soaring rents and the rise of streaming entertainment—then add the COVID-19 shutdown–it’s a miracle that there are any places left to hear live music. The jazz scene, which has lived on the economic knife’s edge for decades, was hit hard. Yet a few places survived, and that’s something to celebrate.

Welcome to BOP STOP, the little engine that could and the beating heart of Cleveland’s scene. This week the club marks its tenth anniversary in its third incarnation as part of the Music Settlement in Hingetown. There it cultivates a training ground for young musicians, brings the world’s most notable artists to northeast Ohio’s and connects our most notable artists to the world. Hell yeah that’s worth celebrating.

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Another Gabe Pollack Moment–And You Can Share In It

Published 29 November, 2023 By John Chacona

Tomorrow evening, Nov. 30 at BOP STOP, I’ll have the honor of presenting the Jazz Journalists Association’s 2023 Cleveland Jazz Hero Award to Gabe Pollack. To borrow the title of a great Paul Motian song, it should’ve happened a long time ago, but scheduling conflicts and my own disorganization got in the way. Oh well, it’s still 2023, isn’t it?

Rather than make a new case for this honor, I’ll refer you to the JJA’s own commemoration of Gabe’s award and repost below an appreciation I published last August. Any similarity in the language is purely coincidental.

If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll come out tomorrow night and give Gabe his well-deserved flowers. Stop by my table and say hello if you think about it. Now here’s that piece:

Word reached me late yesterday that Gabe Pollack, longtime director of Bop Stop at the Music Settlement, will be leaving the Hingetown club to become director of performing arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art (you can read CMA’s announcement here, the Settlement’s here).

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

Published 2 October, 2023 By John Chacona
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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