Carlo | March 7, 2010
In rock ‘n’ roll, comebacks are by no means a sure bet. Some bands never go away, even when they should, like the Stones and the Who. Some go acoustic and minimal, like Ray Davies of the Kinks. Others devolve into their leader, like Roky Erickson, whose 13th Floor Elevators yielded the barbed-wire breakup song, [...]
Carlo | March 6, 2010
The headline is a pun I use as an excuse to catch up with my blog, woefully unattended to for nearly a month. Seriously, it’s a pleasure to write this at my living room window as I watch snow mounds on the deck finally melt.
It’s still cold but it’s bright, the snow crunching less than [...]
Carlo | January 21, 2010
I went to traffic court today for a hearing about the $25 ticket I got Dec. 22, when I was accused of parking too far from the curb.
I parked in the Justice Center garage across the street from the plug-ugly Justice Center and got to the second floor in plenty of time for my 10:45 [...]
Carlo | December 24, 2009
I went downtown Dec. 22 to pick up new glasses at Jerold Optical on Huron Road. I parked at a meter with 25 minutes left. My daughter Lylah and I picked up the specs within 10 minutes and left Jerold, the only full-service optical emporium left downtown.
We saw a cop ticketing my car. I yelled [...]
Carlo | November 1, 2009
I keep running into other lucky ones who attended the Leonard Cohen concert at the Allen Theatre in Cleveland Oct. 25; we all stand in awe (here’s my preview). In more than three hours, Cohen and his amazing troupe of cosmic musicians rekindled my belief, that I’d thought retro, in pop as conveyor of truth. [...]
Carlo | October 14, 2009
Bobby Selvaggio is a post-bop saxophonist from Cleveland with robust tone, astonishing technique and a talent for composing tunes with complex, braided melody lines. On his fifth CD as a leader, Selvaggio unfurls spiky chamber music (“Whirlwind,” a fabulous exchange with pianist Kenny Werner), an exotic, Middle Eastern excursion (the wittily titled “Timbuktu Step”) and [...]
Carlo | October 11, 2009
I reconnected with my past last night when I went to hear Willie Nile at Wilbert’s in downtown Cleveland. I hadn’t seen Willie since the early ‘80s when he was the next big thing, a bantam conflation of Dylan and Springsteen who made critics slaver. I was writing for the Schenectady Gazette in those years [...]
Carlo | September 29, 2009
I’m writing about jazz again. Just cobbled together a feature about Cleveland-based jazz saxophonist Bobby Selvaggio, who’s working his new CD, Modern Times. Just wrote a short about Fra Fra Sound, an Amsterdam septet whose Dya So CD is cool world music. These are for Scene.
I’m also writing debut columns for a yet-to-be-announced, Cleveland-based news [...]
Carlo | September 16, 2009
They always do the second Sunday of every September, when rock musicians who constitute the cream of legacy Cleveland bands get together in Russell at the country home of Buddy and Carol Maver. Members of the Raspberries, the James Gang, associates of the Michael Stanley Band, Rastus, Wild Horses, The Secret, and more blast through [...]
Carlo | September 13, 2009
I saw Barbara Dennerlein Friday in a church and Saturday in a jazz club. She plays pipe organ in churches and the Hammond B-3 in jazz clubs. She swings, singularly and unforgettably, in both.
At Fairmount Presbyterian, the petite, 45-year-old German phenomenon played for about an hour and a half, traversing a desultory blues, a few [...]
