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At Rubber City Jazz & Blues Fest, A Big Night Of Big Bands

Published 8 September, 2026 By John Chacona

*The Sam Blakeslee Large Group at BLU Jazz+*

The 2026 Rubber City Jazz & Blues Festival, which begins Thursday, is big: three days, five venues and 18 events. It has a big-name headliner, too in contemporary jazz master Gerald Albright who will top a double bill with Althea René at Lock 3 on Saturday, Sept. 12. But the biggest noise of the festival presented by Open Tone Music might be the one that a pair of big—or biggish—bands will make in the normally hushed confines of Akron’s Main Library.

The bands are under the leadership of trombonist and composer Sam Blakeslee, who will present music from his Large Group’s recording, New Blood, which will be released Sept. 25 on BJU Records, and Chris Coles, who has convened an 11-piece orchestra to play “The Way of The Sly Man,” a multi-part work composed by the late bassist and educator Dave Morgan.

With “Where We Started” Aidan Plank’s Recording Career Is Well On Its Way

Published 12 May, 2026 By John Chacona

It’s accepted wisdom in the jazz world that a good bass player will never be out of work. So it’s little wonder that on any given day, on a bandstand near you, Aidan Plank will be holding down a rhythm section with his customary taste and command.

Sam Blakeslee Returns To Akron With Charts & ‘Flowers’

Published 17 October, 2023 By John Chacona

photocredit: Desmond White

In the midst of a recording session with his New York big band, Columbus-born, Brooklyn-based trombonist, composer and arranger Sam Blakeslee noticed an interesting dynamic among the players.

“On the first take everyone in the band was like, ‘Who are these people? Why are they playing like this, because it just sounds so different? Why haven’t I heard stuff like this before?’” Blakeslee’s answer: “Because it’s Cleveland.”

“These people,” saxophonists Chris Coles and Nathan-Paul Davis, and the cream of Northeast Ohio’s jazz community, will join Blakeslee on the stage of BLU Jazz+ this weekend for a homecoming so packed with music that it will take two nights to play it all.

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New Composers Collective Lays Down the Law at Bop Stop

Published 25 January, 2023 By John Chacona

Third Law Collective What’s the second-most exciting day in a composer’s life? The day of the first performance of a new piece, of course. So, what’s the most exciting day? The day of the second performance. World premieres are exciting, but many compositions are heard once and then disappear. A second performance confers a bit of staying power.

This is especially true in the concert music world, but composers of creative music in the Black American tradition face many of the same challenges in bringing their work to the stage. Enter The Third Law Collective, a gathering of local composer/players whose project to present and support new composition in northeast Ohio gets underway Jan. 26 at Bop Stop.

Singer Barbara Knight Brings Jazz On A Summer’s Day To Cain Park

Published 10 August, 2022 By John Chacona

Barbara Knight

Barbara Knight doesn’t consider herself a jazz singer, though you wouldn’t know it from the swinging, rhythmically alert performances she’s lavished on northeast Ohio audiences through the years. But hear her out.

“I’ve always called myself a big band singer, rather than a jazz singer,” she said by phone from her home in nearby western Pennsylvania. “If you listen to me, you’ll hear that I am more traditional with my presentation of songs. I’m not using vocal pyrotechnics to do all kinds of crazy things with the melody. I think the people that I sing for are more interested in hearing the melody.”

When Knight and her quintet, John Orsini (saxophones), Phil Lantry (keyboards), Tim Powell (bass) and Glenn Schaft (drums) take the stage at Cain Park for a free concert Sunday, Aug. 14 at 1 p.m., you will certainly hear the melody, but you’ll also hear the wisdom of a singer with hundreds of songs in her repertoire and decades of exploration into their subtleties.