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Tag: Gerald Clayton

Can We Talk? Gerald Clayton Comes to Bop Stop for Two Conversations on Improvisation

 

For generations, the jazz business has spent a lot of time and money looking for ways to grow the genre’s dedicated but comparatively small audience. Pianist Gerald Clayton has some advice for them: Ain’t nothing to it but to do it.

“That applies to how to approach playing the music, learning how to play the music, and also learning how to listen to it,” the 38-year-old Clayton said in a phone interview Tuesday. “If we just have folks listening to this music over and over and over, I think the process will come pretty naturally and take care of itself, but I think there’s nothing wrong with having a bit of a liaison, a tour guide pointing out some things to listen for.”

On June 1 and 2 that tour departs from Bop Stop sailing under the flag of Piano Cleveland’s Listening Series with Clayton as your guide.

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The Jazz Gallery All-Stars Finally Land in Cleveland for a March 6 Concert

Back in the 1980s, listings of events in The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section were introduced with this charmingly worded caveat: Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives that are subject to last-minute change; it is therefore always advisable to call ahead.

For presenters and musicians who ply their trades during winter on the Great Lakes, that advice goes double, especially when high winds and more than a foot of snow arrived to slam the door on the Feb. 3 concert by the Jazz Gallery All-Stars at Cleveland’s Tri-C Auditorium. Yet when Tri-C JazzFest director Terri Pontremoli canceled that show, it wasn’t a double bar, but only a fermata.

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