Carlo | November 6, 2009
Weird to think of “Leonard Cohen Live in London” alongside “Allman Brothers at Fillmore East,” but both are paradigms of the live album, capturing artists at the peak of their powers. Cohen’s was recorded in 2008 when he was 73, near the start of his nearly two-year-long tour; the American leg this fall was his [...]
Carlo | November 6, 2009
Sophie Milman is a 26-year-old Toronto chanteuse who may be the hottest Canadian export since Diana Krall. Not only is Milman, a Russian native and a kind of wandering Jew, fluent in English, she sings jazz with an authority common to far more seasoned performers. Backed by Paul Shrofel on piano and Mark McLean on [...]
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
Call Amsterdam-based group Fra Fra Sound’s CD “Dya So” world music, call it jazz, call it anything you want. Formed 25 years ago, the septet takes its name from the Surinamese “Fra Fra,” meaning “mysterious” or “hybrid.” “Dya So,” its latest CD, blends high-life, rai, island chickenscratch, funk, percussion virtuosity and an ever-shifting, ever-surprising front [...]
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 14, 2009
Willie Nile may be the most stirring hard rocker you’ve never heard, and his new album, “House of a Thousand Guitars,” ranks with his best—except for the title track, a musical roar that name-checks guitar heroes in an uncharacteristic, sadly retro burst of self-indulgence. Otherwise, “House” is wonderful, sparked by the infernally infectious hoedown of [...]
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 14, 2009
These Woody Herman recordings from the early to mid-’60s boast modernist arrangements, spectacular solos and a judicious selection of pop covers. These roaring, democratic dates suggest that Herman was a thoughtful sort capable of switching between incendiary soloing and giving his great players plenty of solo room themselves. The Mosaic Select box resurrects three albums [...]
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 [...]
Carlo | December 21, 2006
Thursday, December 21, 2006 Jeff Hagan Special To The Plain Dealer When Paul Simon took The Plain Dealer Pavilion stage last summer and said, with what he apparently thought would be irony, “Hello, Cleveland!” he was surprised to meet with roaring approval. Click here to read the whole article
