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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:
When you think about the greats of Pittsburgh jazz the first names that come to mind might be the pianists, an incredible legacy that stretches from Earl Hines through Mary Lou Williams, Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, and Sonny Clark.
That’s pretty hard to beat—until you consider the drummers: Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey Beaver Harris, and Jeff “Tain” Watts. And smack dab in the middle of that roll call is Roger Humphries, who will make his BOP STOP debut at 82 on Friday.
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Though hip-hop artists have made it a genre unto itself, the mixtape, a homemade cassette of songs, was the Spotify playlist of the 1980s and ‘90s. Mixtapes were playable, tradable declarations of musical allegiances and taste, a medium of exchange and sometimes winsome mash notes to crushes, delivering their message at 1 7/8 ips.
True, it’s hard to imagine jazz nerds assembling cassettes of favorite Maynard Ferguson cuts to give to romantic objects (harder still to imagine they had such objects). Still guitarist Dan Bruce liked the concept so much that he’s making a mixtape live and on stage by arranging songs performed by Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Jinari Kemet and Gretchen Pleuss with an a-list jazz ensemble.
The best improvised music in the Black American Tradition offers something for the head, heart and feet. A pair of concerts this weekend at BOP STOP offer a potent distillation of how much music can move us.
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Why are these men smiling?
At the poker table a pair of eights is nothing to get excited about, but on the jazz calendar it’s a winning hand. And NEO is holding it this week thanks to a pair of concerts–both tied to upcoming recordings–featuring dynamic octets led by Stephen Philip Harvey and Bobby Selvaggio.
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