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Hands up: did you have a meteorite explosion on your St. Paddy’s Day bingo card this morning? That was a sound the likes of which I’ve never heard–which, in broadcasting is called a smooth segue to the topic at hand: music.
To say that this week’s constellation of concerts descended from the heavens is a reach, but starry? For sure!
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Summer’s sudden arrival in northeast Ohio has everybody emerging from their deep-winter isolation and hitting the streets. Cabin fever is breaking for national and touring jazz artists, too, and they are hitting area stages en masse this week.
With so many worthwhile shows in the next seven days, I’ll offer a kind of consumer’s guide to where to go and who to hear. There’s a wide range of music on offer this week; you really can’t go wrong with any of these shows.
Countdown . . .
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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.
When the protean Brazilian producer/arranger/composer/instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal died in September at age 89, obituary writers were challenged to find someone to compare him to (maybe Prince came closest). Hermeto, as he was invariably known, summed up his musical philosophy as tudo é som, “all is sound.” No wonder his nickname was o Bruxo, the Sorcerer.
As a student at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, pianist Ben Tweedt came under Hermeto’s spell, an enchantment that inspired an evening of the master’s compositions at BOP STOP Saturday evening.
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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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