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).
Leave a CommentI 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).
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.
I get a lot of new music for my consideration, 407 releases so far this year. Almost all of them are notable for something, and I’d like to give them their due. So, every week, more or less, I’ll offer hot takes on the releases of the preceding seven days. The week of August 28 was so busy–15 new releases–that I spread it out over two posts, and two weeks. Now I’m effectively a week behind with more delays probably on the way as a big review of Cleveland’s Tri-C festival will occupy my time next week. For now, though, savor what was a very strong week for creative music.
Pianist Rachel Eckroth got her start playing with and writing for large jazz ensembles, but lately, the LA-based musician has added color and texture to music by genre-agnostic artists such as Rufus Wainwright, St. Vincent and KT Tunstall.
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