Even at 83, saxophonist and composer Howie Smith remains an endless fount of surprises. You might even call his concert Friday night at BOP STOP a veritable Russian doll of surprises.
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Overjoyed wasn’t the first choice for the theme of this year’s University of Akron Jazz Week ’26 that begins today. “At first we said gratitude, but there was something about it that wasn’t as killing,” said Chris Coles, who curates the four-day celebration and festival with his fellow UA faculty member and frequent musical collaborator Theron Brown.
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Nathan-Paul Davis makes this statement at the top of his Linktree page:
"I play energy, not notes!" Nathan-Paul calls his music SOUND MEDICINE.
Anyone who has heard Davis play will recognize that he is simply stating facts. No cap. No flex. The energy in a typical Nathan-Paul performance could power a dozen AI server farms for a month.
Thursday night finds the saxophonist in an unusual setting: playing a birthday gig, in this case, his own. The setting, Edwin’s Leadership & Restaurant Institute, is at once familiar, but different.
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Growing up in Chicago with a father who played old-school rock and blues, saxophonist Anthony Bruno got an early immersion in the grind of the working musician.
“Whether it was in rehearsal spaces, bars, festivals, green rooms, recording rooms– that was just my life,” he said. “So when I would hang out and talk to other kids in school they’d be like, ‘What did you do this weekend?’ I’m like, ‘I was at this festival, then this rehearsal, and this thing,’ and they’re like, ‘What is that?’ I was like, ‘Oh! That’s not what every kid does all the time?’”
It’s what Bruno does all the time, and increasingly, in Cleveland where he will lead a high-powered quartet at BOP STOP Friday.
Though hip-hop artists have made it a genre unto itself, the mixtape, a homemade cassette of songs, was the Spotify playlist of the 1980s and ‘90s. Mixtapes were playable, tradable declarations of musical allegiances and taste, a medium of exchange and sometimes winsome mash notes to crushes, delivering their message at 1 7/8 ips.
True, it’s hard to imagine jazz nerds assembling cassettes of favorite Maynard Ferguson cuts to give to romantic objects (harder still to imagine they had such objects). Still guitarist Dan Bruce liked the concept so much that he’s making a mixtape live and on stage by arranging songs performed by Liz Bullock, Ray Flanagan, Jinari Kemet and Gretchen Pleuss with an a-list jazz ensemble.