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Tag: Sunnyside Records

Mat Maneri’s Quartet Seeks “. . . joy through sorrow, elation through fatigue”

Published 9 October, 2023 By John Chacona
Mat Maneri 4
photocredit: Mircea Albutiu

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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Brooklyn Cooperative Trio Ember Set To Catch Fire At Blu Jazz+

Published 20 September, 2022 By John Chacona

Ember
Ember: Caleb Wheeler Curtis, Vinnie Sperazza, Noah Garabedian

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.

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Roll Call, August 19: Kyle Kidd, Russ Lossing, Pablo Moser and Nicolás Ojeda

Published 19 August, 2022 By John Chacona

I 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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Roll Call: January 14, 2022

Published 10 January, 2022 By John Chacona
Roll Call: January 14, 2022Roll Call

I get a lot of music for my consideration, already more than 80 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 live events in Northeast Ohio (like now when there aren’t too many of those), I’ll offer hot takes on the week’s new releases.

For a certain subset of the jazz fandom multiverse, a simple personnel list would be sufficient to arouse intense interest in John Hébert’s “Sounds of Love” (Sunnyside Records).

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Noah Haidu Returns to Bop Stop with a New Trio and a New CD

Published 19 November, 2021 By John Chacona

To the jazz fans of northeast Ohio, pianist Noah Haidu‘s September 28, 2020 appearance at Bop Stop was as important for its symbolism as for its musical interest.  The concert, which premiered his “Doctone” CD, was the first in six months at the Hingetown club by touring national musicians. The message was, emphatically, music is back.

“That was really a great gig,” Haidu said Sunday from his home in New York. “That was actually the first time the three of us got on stage together, [drummer] Rudy Royston and  [bassist] Eric Wheeler. We had a chance to record it and listen back. Yeah, it was a beautiful set.”

Fifty-nine weeks later, Haidu is back with a new trio of legendary bassist Buster Williams and drummer Carl Allen touring behind a new recording, “Slowly: Song For Keith Jarrett” (Sunnyside Records). It’s a record that was in the works at the time of his last Cleveland visit, though not exactly in the form that it eventually took.

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