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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Kurt Elling and SuperBlue at Cleveland Museum of Art
In his 30-odd years on the scene, Grammy-winning singer Kurt Elling has topped the Down Beat Critics Poll 13 times and has received the Jazz Journalists Association Male Singer of the Year award eight times. He’s done this while singing texts written by Theodore Roethke and Walt Whitman, a Monkees hit, one of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Waltzes. Whitney Balliett might have had Elling’s musical choices in mind when he wrote his famous characterization of jazz as being “the sound of surprise.”
Yet none of Elling’s neck-snapping musical eccentricities was as shocking as SuperBlue, which will come to Gartner Auditorium at the Cleveland Museum of Art Wednesday.
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Despite the increasing numbers of creative improvising musicians who play it, the double bass in a solo context—on record or in performance–remains a comparatively uncommon sound.
Yet Brandon Lopez, with a new recording and a showcase at this weekend’s Re:Sound festival presented by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project, is the exception that proves the rule.
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Though Sam Blakeslee has been increasingly active on the New York scene for five years, a part of him will always be most at home in Ohio. Want proof? Check out the credits on Busy Body, the new CD by his band Wistful Thinking, which will celebrated with a concert and release party at Bop Stop Saturday.
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