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Tag: Miles Davis

Play Like Where Your From: The University of Akron’s JazzFest Is Back

Published 5 April, 2023 By John Chacona

For a long time, jazz education was an oral tradition. Students learned at the feet of their master or in the adjacent chair in a section of a big band, a lineage that you could witness as well as hear. These days, that formerly oral tradition has largely moved to the university or conservatory classroom but the professionalism of jazz education hasn’t totally done away with the notion of lineage.

Sean Jones
Sean Jones

This week offers vivid proof in the form of the University of Akron Jazz Week an event that brings together three UA alumni, two of whom, Theron Brown and Chris Coles, are now teaching at their alma mater, with internationally prominent trumpet player and Warren Ohio native Sean Jones.

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Looking Backward and Forward At Once, Saxophonist Jim Snidero Returns to Bop Stop

Published 14 February, 2023 By John Chacona
Jim Snidero
photo by John Rogers

Saxophonist Jim Snidero was born in May, but a January birthdate would have provided an appropriate mythological backstory for his career. Like the two-faced god who gave the month its name, Snidero’s alto saxophone style looks forward and backward simultaneously.

Perhaps that is inevitable for the native of the Maryland suburbs who, at 65, has aged out of young-lion status but is a long way from being considered a wizened master. When he returns to the Bop Stop Saturday, Snidero will demonstrate how a mastery born of more than 40 years on the scene can be endlessly refreshed by restless musical curiosity.

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Pianist Theron Brown Keeps Things Going with a Free Concert at Cleveland’s Public Library

Published 5 August, 2022 By John Chacona

Theron Brown

If your idea of a library is a place of hushed reverence, by all means stay away from the Downtown Branch of the Cleveland Public Library tomorrow afternoon where silence will be in short supply thanks to pianist Theron Brown and his trio of Jordan McBride on bass and drummer Zaire Darden. Reverence, on the other hand, will be abundant since these three players are among northeast Ohio’s most persuasive advocates of improvised music in the Black American tradition.

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Roll Call, June 19: Dmitri Matheny, Bill Ortiz, Grant Stewart and Melissa Stylianou

Published 19 June, 2022 By John Chacona

I get a lot of music for my consideration, already 350 (!) new releases so far this year. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, when I’m not previewing live events in Northeast Ohio, I’ll offer hot takes on the preceding week’s releases. Like these.

Portland is known for rain, artisanal coffee and thanks to Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, as the apotheosis of farm-to-table Millennial pretentiousness.

Read moreRoll Call, June 19: Dmitri Matheny, Bill Ortiz, Grant Stewart and Melissa Stylianou
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