Skip to content

Tag: Sean Jones

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.

Continue ReadingPlay Like Where Your From: The University of Akron’s JazzFest Is Back
Leave a Comment

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.

Continue ReadingPianist Theron Brown Keeps Things Going with a Free Concert at Cleveland’s Public Library
Leave a Comment

Yo NYO! Carnegie Hall’s Young Jazz Orchestra Begins Its First U.S. Tour at Tri-C

Published 27 July, 2022 By John Chacona
NYO 2022
NYO Jazz 2021 with Sean Jones

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.

Continue ReadingYo NYO! Carnegie Hall’s Young Jazz Orchestra Begins Its First U.S. Tour at Tri-C
Comments closed

Smash! Stephen Philip Harvey and His Band of Superheroes Are Here

Published 2 July, 2022 By John Chacona

Stephen Philip Harvey

 

“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).

Continue ReadingSmash! Stephen Philip Harvey and His Band of Superheroes Are Here
Leave a Comment