Bop Stop

Hingetown Jazz Festival 2025

by John Chacona
September 4, 2025

Hingetown Jazz Festival Various venues Cleveland, OH August 30, 2025 It would surprise no one if this review of the third Hingetown Jazz Festival in Cleveland began, as such pieces often do, by noting how the festival has grown. But that would not exactly be accurate. By the most ...

Dan Weiss Quartet At Bop Stop

by John Chacona
June 22, 2025

Dan Weiss Quartet Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OH June 6, 2025 In his liner notes to Phillip Golub's Abiding Memory (Endectomorph Music, 2024), Vijay Iyer coined a name for the kind of music made by a set of mostly young, genre-agnostic musicians in New York, “New Brooklyn Complexity," ...

The Bad Plus at Bop Stop

by John Chacona
February 14, 2025

The Bad PlusBOP STOP at the Music SettlementCleveland, OHFebruary 7, 2025 Teachers of jazz--the good ones, at least--emphasize the importance of finding an individual sound. That goes for ensembles, too, and at their Friday appearance at Cleveland's Bop Stop, The Bad Plus demonstrated how, even with a radical overhauling of personnel ...

Ken Vandermark��s Edition Redux at BOP STOP at The Music Settlement

by John Chacona
March 10, 2024

Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux BOP STOP at The Music Settlement Cleveland, OH February 27, 2024 Every jazz concert brings an experience that you've never had before and likely weren't expecting. In the case of the Cleveland concert by protean saxophonist Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux, the source was a new Apple Watch ...

Ben Wendel Group At Bop Stop

by John Chacona
March 28, 2023

Ben Wendel Group Bop Stop Cleveland, OH March 22, 2023 For a long time, California has held a mythic place in the U.S. popular imagination as a fountainhead of new ideas in culture, technology, or in the case of the smartphone ("Designed by Apple in California") of both. So it makes ...

Dan Weiss Trio at Bop Stop

by John Chacona
December 20, 2022

Dan Weiss Trio Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OH December 11, 2022 Are we living in a golden age of the piano trio? The recorded evidence from 2022 would suggest that we are. Piano trio recordings by John Escreet, Fred Hersch, Aaron Parks, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Marta Sanchez, Matthew Shipp ...

Tom "Bones" Malone: Amazing Career That's One In A Million, Part 2

by Matthew Alec
May 20, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 World-famous trombonist and multi-instrumentalist Tom “Bones" Malone talks about his incredible career spanning Saturday Night Live, The Blues Brothers, Gil Evans, Frank Zappa, Blood, Sweat, & Tears, The Brecker Brothers, David Sanborn, Late Show with David Letterman, and so much more with All About Jazz contributor and saxophonist Matthew ...

Tom "Bones" Malone: Amazing Career That's One In A Million, Part 1

by Matthew Alec
May 19, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 World-famous trombonist and multi-instrumentalist Tom “Bones" Malone talks about his incredible career spanning Saturday Night Live, The Blues Brothers, Gil Evans, Frank Zappa, Blood, Sweat, & Tears, The Brecker Brothers, David Sanborn, Late Show with David Letterman, and so much more with All About Jazz contributor and saxophonist Matthew ...

Jazz in Cleveland: A Storied Past, Surviving Present, and an Optimistic Future

by Matthew Alec
April 8, 2021

Cleveland, Ohio. Having lived here for my entire life, the word “city" does not quite describe what Cleveland truly is. There is of course a downtown urban area, one filled with noteworthy neoclassic architecture and an overall stately appearance that is often overlooked by those who live here. That said, most “Clevelanders" don't actually live within ...