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At BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio

Published 12 November, 2024 By John Chacona
Pat Bianchi
photocredit: Aidan Grant

It was a simple question that I asked Pat Bianchi: Which is your dominant hand? His answer was more complex than I expected.

“I’m kind of both,” he said. “I write with my left hand. I can write with my right hand, too, so it kind of flips back and forth.”

Ambidexterity is a useful trait for a keyboard player to possess, and because Bianchi’s primary instrument is the Hammond B-3 organ, his feet are also involved.

The lack of a dominant hand is an interesting footnote for sure but it’s also a metaphor for the absence of a dominant aesthetic in Bianchi’s musical choices, something that makes his Friday appearance at BOP STOP an unusually compelling event.

Read moreAt BOP STOP: Grease and Grace Combine In Pat Bianchi’s Organ Trio
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Exile on East Boulevard: Arooj Aftab, Shazad Ismaily and Vijay Iyer Bring Magic To CMA

Published 2 October, 2023 By John Chacona
Love In Exile

Someone once said that all music, even at its most abstract, is about something, and that is the passage of time. That might be, but there are musicians who can transcend time to enter other dimensions in music. Vocalist Arooj Aftab, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and pianist Vijay Iyer who, as Love In Exile, will come to the Cleveland Museum Of Art Wednesday, are among them.

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Kurt Elling and Dan Bruce Turn Up The Musical Voltage This Week

Published 25 September, 2023 By John Chacona

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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At Bop Stop, An Accompanist To The Stars Accompanies Himself

Published 28 February, 2023 By John Chacona

Tamir Hendelman

 

Pianist Tamir Hendelman’s gifts as an accompanist have led to recording projects by some of the most iconic soloists of our time: Natalie Cole, Gladys Knight, Sir Paul McCartney and Barbra Streisand among them. Yet his Sunday’s concert at Bop Stop Sunday will present him with the challenge of accompanying a different sort of soloist: himself.

Read moreAt Bop Stop, An Accompanist To The Stars Accompanies Himself
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