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Tag: Gartner Auditorium

Cleveland: This Is The Week Of Jazz You’ve Been Waiting For

Published 9 September, 2025 By John Chacona
Omar Sosa
James Brandon Lewis and the Messthetics
Simple-Trio-by-Des-White-3

No burying the lede here: the next eight days might offer the most extraordinary lineup of jazz concerts Cleveland has seen in years.

Starting with the pianists, you can hear Cuban piano great Omar Sosa (Sept. 10), Michael Wolff, Dan Wall (both Sept. 13), Theron Brown and Matt Mitchell (both Sept. 14) this week. Prefer saxophonists? Then how about James Brandon Lewis (Sept. 12), Anna Webber (Sept. 13) and Branford Marsalis (Sept. 16). Add the unpredictable chemistry of The Uninvited (Sept. 11) and, well, you’ve got some choices to make.

Any one of these events would merit the full 700-word feature treatment at let’s call this, but don’t worry. I’m going to keep this short and snackable, though I might publish more nutritious fuller versions later, here or elsewhere, and I’ll let you know about those if and when they happen.

For now, though, let’s shine a light on three mindblowingly exciting shows that will make your muso friends in New York wish they lived in Cleveland.

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Pull UP! Where To Go & What To Hear In NEO March 27 – Apr. 2

Published 27 March, 2025 By John Chacona

Friendly experiencers,

Let’s just get this out of the way: jazz fans, the coming week is absolutely stacked. It’s so full of notable shows that it took two let’s call this posts to begin to cover it–and a third might not get to the bottom of the good stuff.

If the music calendar for the week were a dart board, you could close your eyes and hit a bullseye every time.

So as March goes out like a lion here’s your bulldog edition of Pull UP! Now have fun filling up that calendar.

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Anthony Taddeo’s Jazz all’Italiana Band Alla Boara Sets Sail With A New Record And Tour

Published 18 January, 2024 By John Chacona
Alla Boara

One of the highlights of a performance by Alla Boara, percussionist Anthony Taddeo’s jazz-meets-Italian-folk-music project, is “Mamma Mia Dammi Cento Lire.” It’s a musical setting of conversation between a young woman, wheedling 100 lire from her mother so that she can go to America to start a new life, and her mother who warns that if she leaves her village the feckless girl will drown when her ship sinks. All this is set to an earworm of a dancing melody. The words, brought to vivid life by Amanda Powell, a superb singing actress, have the sly worldliness and teasing insinuation of opera buffa.

Read moreAnthony Taddeo’s Jazz all’Italiana Band Alla Boara Sets Sail With A New Record And Tour
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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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Kurt Elling and Dan Bruce Turn Up The Musical Voltage This Week

Published 25 September, 2023 By John Chacona

Kurt Elling and SuperBlue at Cleveland Museum of Art

In his 30-odd years on the scene, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling has topped the Down Beat Critics Poll 13 times and has received the Jazz Journalists Association Male Singer of the Year award eight times. He’s done this while singing texts written by Theodore Roethke and Walt Whitman, a Monkees hit, one of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. Whitney Balliett might have had Elling’s musical choices in mind when he wrote his famous characterization of jazz as being “the sound of surprise.”

Yet none of Elling’s neck-snapping musical eccentricities was as shocking as SuperBlue, which will come to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art Wednesday.

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