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Tag: Gabe Pollack

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

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

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

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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The More Things Change . . . Dan Polletta Returns to 90.3 FM

Dan Polletta

“Jazz Is Dead” is the perennial Hydra of music criticism. Every time that the abundant evidence to the contrary decapitates that claim, two more spring up: “The jazz record business is dead” or “jazz radio is dead.”

Nostalgia for a half-remembered Golden Age may be the price of admission into any fan club, especially one with a membership that skews old and grumpy. Yet doomsayers aside, there are plenty of signs of life for anyone who cares to look—or listen–for them.

One can be found in northeast Ohio, though you’ll have to look in the dark to find it.  From midnight to 6 a.m., Dan Polletta, who for many years was a voice of jazz radio at WCPN, is back on the air at WCLV.

His return is part of a reordering of the public radio landscape that began when Ideastream Public Media signed an operating agreement with WKSU to make that station the news and information hub, while moving WCLV’s classical music programming from 104.9 FM to a stronger signal at 90.3 FM, WCPN’s former dial position.

That’s the frequency where for 22 years, Jazz with Dan Polletta held down the 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift, a tradition that ended in 2009 when changes in the station’s programming deemphasized jazz and Polletta shifted to becoming a reporter on the culture beat.

Polletta’s 33-year run at WCPN came to an end in August 2020 in a series of pandemic-induced layoffs. The veteran broadcaster freelanced as the host of The Landscape, a podcast produced by Crain’s Cleveland Business, but when the Ideastream added jazz to WCLV’s predominantly classical music programming, Polletta happily returned to 90.3.

“I’m very excited,” Polletta told me by phone earlier this spring. “You know, it’s nice for jazz to have some sort of presence back on the air.”

Radio is an intimate medium where on-air personalities develop close relationships with their listeners. It’s no surprise then that in many ways, Polletta is sticking to a familiar script. “I have always very much made the music the centerpiece of the program,” he said, adding “It’s not about me. It’s about this present moment, sharing this jam. I just feel like I’m sitting down and talking to people about jazz and we’re listening to records together. I know that’s old fashioned, but that’s really the way I see it.”

Still, he acknowledges that the radio world—the media world—has changed, not only since 1987, but since his last live jazz air shift in 2009. “Maybe the breaks are a little bit tighter now. When I started in public radio, we’d go on and on and on about the music and the players–and I get all that. I love all those guys, but that’s probably not going to happen as much in 2022, just to be realistic.”

Polletta also needed to be realistic about how to sustain a flow over a six-hour air shift. “Everybody has a different approach, but the people who say ‘Oh, I just come in and kind of wing it,’ I can’t do that,” he admitted. “I know everything I’m going to play except for the last song of every hour. I try to build sets to flow. I take a lot of time with that–probably too much time, but I think it’s important to construct the kinds of sets where the pieces flow together, and I try to cover a lot of ground stylistically.”

Since he first opened the mic in 1987, Polletta has been a part of the northeast Ohio jazz scene and he’s witnessed how the music and the players have evolved. As the curtain rises on Act II of his jazz radio career, Polletta observes that the scene has always been solid.

“As far as talented local musicians are concerned, there’s plenty enough to hear. What’s changed is the number of national acts that come to town. Part of that is because Nighttown closed and has not yet reopened, but there also used to be a jazz society here that presented concerts and that disbanded many years ago. So thank God for the Bop Stop. What Gabe [Pollack, the club’s director] does is amazing, isn’t it? But I think we had a lot more shows 20 years ago and I think that’s just the nature of jazz too.”

He may be right, but five nights a week, 52 weeks a year, there’s a jazz show that’s as close as your radio or streaming device. To find it just listen for the familiar, authoritative voice of Dan Polletta.

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Saxophonist Diego Rivera Makes Up for Lost Time Saturday at Bop Stop

 

Saxophonist Diego Rivera‘s 2020 gig at Cleveland’s Bop Stop is one that he’ll never forget, but not for the usual reasons. The Michigan saxophonist’s engagement at the Hingetown club was the first event to have been canceled as the darkness of the COVID pandemic descended on a terrified world.

“We actually canceled the morning of the gig,” Rivera said in a Zoom interview. “This was going to be my first performance under my name at the Bop Stop, and we talked for quite a while trying to make this happen. I was really looking forward to it, but Gabe [Pollack, the club’s director] was incredibly professional, very gracious, and really supportive. He was like, ‘You know, it’s the right thing to do. Don’t worry about it. We’ll do this again.'”

Pollack was as good as his word and so this Saturday Rivera will bring a hard-charging quintet to Cleveland for a concert that’s been 25 months in the making.

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