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Oops!…I did it again! Last week came and went without a Countdown, and it was a big week of shows, too. Once again, real life intervened (TLDR: we’re preparing to move). Mea culpa, But on to the good news: an early spring efflorescence of musical excellence, and all in the next seven days. Just look at this lineup!
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The Bay City Rollers didn’t make the Rock Hall this year, but here at Countdown, their most famous lyric line resonates:: “S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y, night!” That’s the night when jazz fans in NEO have some difficult decisions to make, but with three great shows in Cleveland and Akron, there are no wrong answers–and we’re here to help.
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Attention Swifties: ya girl is coming to Cleveland tonight. No, it’s not a previously unannounced stop on the Eras Tour, but you wouldn’t expect to find that kind of scoop in this column, would you? The Swift in question is Veronica, who kicks off a late-September clambake of jazz and adjacent musical revelry this week, one that could launch a million crossover dreams.
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At this point, Dave Rempis, who will appear with drummer Tyler Damon at Saturday gig presented by New Ghosts, is a known quantity in Cleveland. By his own count, the Chicago multi-reedist said, “I must’ve played there 12 or 15 times. It’s often more than once a year. Oh man, the list goes on and on.”
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The legendary Patti LaBelle has been on stages large and small since Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House. As a performer, she’s done it all and seen it all, but she couldn’t have expected what happened at her 2015 performance at the Ohio State Fair in 2015.
“She called a group of guys [on stage] as a thing in her show,” Dane Vannatter wrote me in an exchange yesterday. “She asks them to sing, they can’t, and the audience laughs when she says, ‘Well then dance!’”
Vannatter was one of those guys, but when he opened his mouth to sing, the great soul diva fell silent. She couldn’t have known that Vannatter had been on a few stages himself, and when she gathered herself to address her unexpected guest, all she could say was, “You better sing, fool! My God!”
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