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.
Comments closedTag: northeast Ohio jazz
Stephen Philip Harvey is a composer, arranger, instrumentalist, label executive, educator and beginning several months ago, a radio host—a kind of superhero of music. He’s also a fan of superhero comics. So when I spoke with him recently, I asked him which superhero he most identifies with.
“There was this villain that was played by Neil Patrick Harris on ‘Batman: The Brave and the Bold,’” Harvey said from his office at the radio station. “His name was the Music Meister.” That character used the power of music to achieve world domination.
While Harvey acknowledged that, “that would be a cool power. I’d love that,” his superpower is bringing people together through music, which is what he will do Friday night at BOP STOP and Saturday at BLU Jazz+ when his Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra celebrates the release of its latest album Multiversal: Live at BOP STOP.
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Mid-October on the shores of the Great Lakes often means the beginning of sweater weather, but not at BOP STOP this week, where the temperature turns tropical thanks to a pair of concerts by artists steeped in the traditions of Brazil and Puerto Rico.
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When I was a radio host, I learned about the mute button. It was what you hit to silence your microphone if you needed to cough or clear your throat or utter a word prohibited by the FCC. Those air shifts, at an NPR affiliate and at two college stations, one as a student and the other as the host of an ethnic show, happened years before I moved to northeast Ohio.
So while I have some opinions about the WCSB/Ideastream announcement, that are informed by experience, they are not as strong as some of you might have. Full disclosure: I don’t listen to terrestrial radio, nor to streaming services. The 600-odd new releases that have hit my inbox this year alone and the listening I do to prepare the articles on this site give my ears more than enough to do. Sorry, not sorry.
Still, my project here at let’s call this is to provide a documentary record of creative and improvised music in the Black American tradition in northeast Ohio, the people who make it and the places where it can be heard. If journalism is the first rough draft of history as the saying goes, I am a historian of the now.
And right now, the story is one of anger and betrayal, which seems to be the default affect of our degraded times.
Look, there are real losses here, certainly to the hosts of WCSB programs and their loyal listeners. The reputations of CSU and Ideastream are bound take a hit, too (as I type this there is a silent protest on the CSU campus). As a PR operative who has put in time at both a public broadcasting station and a university, I can tell you that nobody wanted this.
Which makes me wonder why it went down this way. Did anyone involved give a moment of thought to the consequences of their decisions?
As for the music, you can be pretty certain that nobody on either side of this transaction gave it a moment of thought either. Notwithstanding the understandable outrage of some WCSB listeners at what looks like a bag job on behalf of jazz fans, the truth is that jazz and ethnic music–or post-punk music or ambient music or any of the wonderful stuff that once found a home on WCSB–are not in opposition. Music is not a zero-sum game.
Those institutions must have had reasons for making the decisions they made. It would be nice to know what they were, but for now the mute button is firmly held down.
Big orgs are gonna big org. It’s what they do. As for us music lovers, we need to do what we do: go out and hear music the way it was meant to be heard, live, in-person, loud, proud and unmuted.
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Today, the 99th anniversary of John Coltrane’s arrival on Earth, seems like a good time to remind ourselves that music, for all the wondrous sophistication of its scales and structures, is about the people who make it.
That point was reinforced eloquently by DUO, the new independent release by trumpeter Garrett Folger and bassist Aidan Plank, which will be celebrated by a release show Sunday at Negative Space Gallery.
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