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Tradition might call this week the Dog Days of Summer, but for jazz fans around northeast Ohio, it’s time for The Cats. That’s the name that serious practitioners of the art of improvised music in the Black American tradition give to the ones who can really play.
By any measure, the musicians listed below fit that description and all are on bandstands around the area this week. Here’s what you can expect:
Nathan-Paul Davis makes this statement at the top of his Linktree page:
"I play energy, not notes!" Nathan-Paul calls his music SOUND MEDICINE.
Anyone who has heard Davis play will recognize that he is simply stating facts. No cap. No flex. The energy in a typical Nathan-Paul performance could power a dozen AI server farms for a month.
Thursday night finds the saxophonist in an unusual setting: playing a birthday gig, in this case, his own. The setting, Edwin’s Leadership & Restaurant Institute, is at once familiar, but different.
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The billing of Sax Battle Cry, the pair of concerts that Nathan-Paul Davis and Johnny Cochran, Jr. will present this week, evokes the classic two-saxophone tussles of the past: Dexter Gordon and Wardell Grey, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Johnny Griffin, the various cage matches that were a trademark of the Jazz At The Philharmonic road show. But don’t believe the hype. The meeting of Davis and Cochran is more friendly competition than mano á mano combat.
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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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With its high blue skies, comfortable temperatures, clambakes and promises of a Super Bowl season for the Browns, it’s hard to imagine how September in Northeast Ohio could possibly be better—though a free outdoor jazz festival might be a nice start.
Wish granted. Make way for the inaugural Hingetown Jazz Festival Saturday, Sept. 2.
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