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: Sunnyside Records
The last year or so has seen an explosion of recordings by Cleveland improvising artists such as Kent Engelhardt and Stephen Enos, Kevin Martinez’s Reclamation Band, Alla Boara, Bobby Selvaggio, TRIAD, a new project by Dominick Farinacci (more about that one soon) and a forthcoming Cleveland Jazz Orchestra anniversary release.
Into this hive of activity by established artists comes an ambitious live recording date Saturday night by a band that is scarcely more than a year old. Youthful overreach? Not when the band is the Third Law, the composers collective that is a veritable all-ages writers room for some of the most interesting large ensemble jazz being made around here.
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The improvising violist Mat Maneri recalled a conversation with his ECM Records producer, Steve Lake about the nature of music. “
“He thought it was all religious and I said, ‘No, it can’t be that.’ But there is something sacred about that stage and your relationship with the audience that once you’re onstage,” Maneri told me by phone last week.
There’s something sacred about the music that Maneri and his quartet will offer at BOP STOP Wednesday in a concert presented by Cleveland’s essential New Ghosts organization. Drawn from the violist’s latest recording Ash (Sunnyside Records, 2023), the music is a memory project that casts an oneiric spell that is simultaneously elusive and completely absorbing.
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You can’t blame bassist Noah Garabedian for hoping that the engagement Friday at Blu Jazz+ with his cooperative trio Ember will be a little less memorable than his last northeast Ohio visit. “Nobody was there,” Garabedian remembered.
It was Nov. 9, 2016, the day after the election.
Comments closedI get a lot of music for my consideration, more than 430 (!) new releases in 2022. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, when I’m not previewing events in northeast Ohio or profiling regional musicians, I’ll offer hot takes on recent releases.
When I moved to Cleveland in late 2019, one of the bands I most wanted to hear was the Afrofuturist collective Mourning [A] BLKstar. You can probably guess why that remains on my to-do list nearly three years and several COVID subvariants later, but it’s taken on new urgency with the release of Soothsayer (American Dreams Records), the spellbinding solo debut of M[A]B vocalist Kyle Kidd (all pronouns).
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