As the weather turns chillier and recreation shifts to indoor locations, the NEO scene is responding with a clambake of compelling offerings this week. Touring artists and local luminaries are throwing down. That’s a challenge for those who like to map out their musical itinerary, but what a nice problem to have, right? Supporting live music is always the right choice, but for a little advice, scroll down. You’re sure to find something interesting.
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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.
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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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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My friends in the “jazz is dead” camp often pose two rhetorical questions in defense of their position: Who will want to listen? and Who will want to play this music?
The answer to the first is unknowable, but the second question will be answered in the most unequivocal way Saturday when NYO Jazz makes Tri-C’s Metropolitan Campus Auditorium the first stop on its inaugural U.S. tour.
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“I hate that a big band is so . . . big,” saxophonist, composer and arranger Stephen Philip Harvey said with a chuckle. “It’s financially a problem, but I just really like big band music.”
Harvey likes it so much that he’s putting aside the financial, organizational and logistical challenges of touring with a big band to bring the Stephen Philip Harvey Jazz Orchestra (SPHJO) to Cleveland’s Bop Stop Thursday night to support the release two weeks ago of the band’s debut recording, Smash! (Next Level, 2022).
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