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Granada is a Caribbean nation 100 miles off the coast of Venezuela with a population about that of Dayton’s. If Americans have heard of Grenada at all it’s probably in connection with Ronald Reagan’s Cold War saber-rattling invasion of the island in 1983.
That might change Sunday when Cleveland saxophonist Ronell Regis presents a world premiere performance of “Grenada to the World: The Suite” at Cleveland’s Bop Stop.
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The legendary Patti LaBelle has been on stages large and small since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. As a performer, she’s done it all and seen it all, but she couldn’t have expected what happened at her 2015 performance at the Ohio State Fair in 2015.
“She called a group of guys [on stage] as a thing in her show,” Dane Vannatter wrote me in an exchange yesterday. “She asks them to sing, they can’t, and the audience laughs when she says, ‘Well then dance!’”
Vannatter was one of those guys, but when he opened his mouth to sing, the great soul diva fell silent. She couldn’t have known that Vannatter had been on a few stages himself, and when she gathered herself to address her unexpected guest, all she could say was, “You better sing, fool! My God!”
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Tim Mirth has been experimenting with guitars for a long time. “As a 10-year-old, I found my dad’s guitar, this Gretsch Corvette,” he remembered. “I would sneak it out after school, play with it, try to figure it out. One day my dad comes by, and I thought, I’m not going to get to play with this anymore, but he totally knew me. He showed me a couple of things and ever since I haven’t been able to put it down.”
Thirty years later, he still has the Gretsch. one of the 20 or so guitars in his arsenal. Mirth will select a couple of them to the concert by his Night Terrors band that will open Bop Stop’s 2023 schedule, Wednesday, Jan. 11.
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Dan Weiss talks a lot like he plays the drums. When I spoke with him about his Sunday concert at Bop Stop, his answers to my interview questions were short. To the point. Nothing wasted. Next question?
Yet forward momentum, essential for any drummer, is just one part of his game. Color, an original voice as a composer and a keen ear for texture are in there. They’re all present on Dedication (Cygnus Records), the stunning new release by Weiss’ longstanding trio with pianist Jacob Sacks and bassist Thomas Morgan.
Given his many musical associations with artists as diverse as the saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Lee Konitz, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu, it’s kind of amazing that he’s only appeared in Cleveland twice. The trio played Bop Stop in November 2019, and 19 months earlier he was at the Hingetown club with saxophonist Chris Potter band.
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With its wide dynamic range, speech-like articulation and capacity for playing off-the-scale notes, the saxophone would seem to be the perfect instrument for creative improvised music (some people call it “free jazz” or “avant-garde jazz” or “fire music”). Fine, but anything the saxophone can do, the trombone can do better. So why don’t we hear more trombones in creative music—or in mainstream jazz, for that matter?
It’s a question that Steve Swell, the trombonist who will appear at the Beachland Ballroom Sunday with saxophonist Frode Gjerstad, Jon Rune Strøm on bass and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, has pondered for a long time.
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