06.06-06.13.2018 Jammed | CoolCleveland

06.06-06.13.18
Jammed

Pick a weekend. You can find a festival somewhere around here. So I have a new project: enjoy a festival a week. It won’t be hard to do. Our story below highlights the music festivals packing our upcoming months. And our popular Summer Festivals Guide lays out the rest.

This week, we’re swollen with cool stuff, from Roberto Ocasio’s Latin Jazz Camp to the Cleveland Classical Guitar Festival to Rocket Day at Burke Lakefront Airport, to the Canton Blues Fest and the Put-In-Bay Music Festival.

It Occurs To Me That I Am America contributors sign books at MOCA, working artists discuss their craft at 78th Street Studios’ Watch It Wednesdays, Re:Sound Music Festival sharpens your ears, Walkabout Tremont crowds the neighborhood, Parade The Circle packs Wade Oval, Taste of Lakewood stuffs Madison Park to overflowing, the South Euclid Garden Walk fills the streets, Chautauqua-in-Chagrin explores structural racism. Step outside and break the logjam. –Thomas Mulready

Subscribe to CoolCleveland here
Download our free mobile apps for Apple and Android
Get help receiving the CoolCleveland e-blast here
Photo by Anastasia Pantsios
CoolCleveland is dedicated to George Nemeth

Working on your online advertising budgets? Consider CoolCleveland Sponsored Links, Sponsored Features and Sponsored Videos. Info@CoolCleveland.com

Making Six Strings Sing

It might not be as flashy and forward as rock and roll’s blazing electric guitars. But Cleveland is a classical guitar town too. It’s got an organization that brings world-class players in for concerts, a classical guitar department at Cleveland Institute of Music headed by Grammy-winning Jason Vieaux (pictured, at right) and the annual Cleveland Classical Guitar Festival, now in its 18th year.

CIM is the site of a weekend’s worth of concerts by international artists, workshops, master classes and informal performances. Festival artistic director Armin Kelly says, “This is not just a specialized convention for classical guitars. Most of our audience are not classical guitarists, they just love the artists, love the sound.” Fri 6/8-Sun 6/10.

SPONSORED: Cookies For Kids On June 7th, help feed the children of Northeast Ohio as members of Cleveland Independents sell cookies for $2.50 as part of its annual Cookies for Kids campaign. Not in the mood for a cookie? Donate to the Cookies for Kids Campaign at ClevelandIndependents.com.

Living Legacy

Cleveland’s Roberto Ocasio was passionate about two things: music and education. So when he died tragically in a car accident in 2004, his family and friends knew what to do to keep his spirit alive: they launched the annual Roberto Ocasio Latin Jazz Camp.

Each summer it brings together middle-school and high-school musicians to learn, jam, rehearse and immerse themselves in Latin music, culture and food for five days, with percussionist Bobby Sanabria, a classmate of Ocasio’s at Berklee College of Music, directing things. It culminates with a public performance at the Cleveland Museum of Art Fri 6/15. Sun 6/10-Fri 6/15.

A Summer Jammed With Music

A northeast Ohio summer seems too short for all the activities packed into the calendar. Mostly free outdoor concert series have sprung up in parks, shopping centers, plazas, libraries, art museums and even cemeteries. And surprisingly, most of them DON’T feature just tribute and cover bands. You can hear jazz, Latin, folk, bluegrass, blues, classical, R&B, world music, Americana and more – much of it original.

And you can hear Carlos Jones & the P.L.U.S. Band play their perfect summertime roots reggae almost everywhere, starting this Wednesday 6/6 at Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Howe Meadow. We have a guide to some of the best of these concert series.

Experience Ingenuity’s Time Traveler’s Bal

Calling all who are brave enough to venture beyond time and through space: The Time Traveler’s Bal on Sat 6/16 is a not-so-fancy and slightly off-kilter evening – an unforgettable opportunity to celebrate our past and sustain our future in support of our year-round programming and IngenuityFest 2018: FuturePast, September 28-30.

Pick your way through the frozen remnants of the last ice age, duck around mega flora and fauna of the late Carboniferous, and the steaming remnants of Earth’s volcanic beginning. Wear goggles and boots, spacesuits, corset and gloves, or whatever finery and accoutrements best prepare you for a journey through the ages.

Rockets Ahoy!

Rocket Day at Burke Lakefront Airport is a chance for boys and girls to learn about the history and science behind rockets, watch rocket races and maybe even set off some mini-rockets themselves – to prepare for their own possible futures in space. Wed 6/13.

* Tailspinner Children’s Theatre takes its audiences to Thailand for its next show in which 11 sisters convince the 12th to keep a lovely bird caged to protect it from cats in The Princess and the Nightingale. Si and Am must be lurking! Sat 6/9-Sun 7/1.

Click here for more CoolCleveland Kids events

June 2018 at Melt Bar and Grilled

Sandwich Special: Old Skool Burger Season Continues! Melt’s 8 famous signature burgers are here for another month! Summertime Classic Sides: Melt Potato Salad Homemade & Kung Pow Broccoli. Bread Pudding: Strawberry Shortcake Bread Pudding. Beer Feature: Jackie O’s Razz Wheat. Cocktail Feature: Cactus Flower Mojito.

Melt News: Melt Lakewood has re-opened after an amazing remodel. Join us! Tons of amazing upgrades and changes happened to bring this beloved location up to our standards of excellence! Melt Bar and Grilled at Cedar Point is BACK for another season! Join our Skip the Straws Campaign at Melt Bar and Grilled. Our servers will happily supply a straw by request.

Cookies may not be very nutritious. But just for today, treat yourself anyway to help local kids get the nutritious meals they need. Eighteen area restaurants offer cookies for sale for just one day as part of the Cookies for Kids promotion, where all money raised goes to the Greater Cleveland Food Bank’s Children’s Nutrition Initiative Thu 6/7.

Read more of CoolCleveland’s picks for Eats and Drinks.

Ohio Light Opera Lights Up The Summer

See the best of the musical theater tradition at Ohio Light Opera’s 40th festival season, 6/16 thru 8/11 at the College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. Adler and Ross’s The Pajama Game opens the season on 6/16 followed by Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms on 6/21. Cole Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchmen is next on 6/28 and Bernstein’s Candide on 7/5. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe opens 7/12, Offenbach’s La Perichole 7/18, and Lehar’s Cloclo 7/25.

All 7 musicals are performed in English with full orchestra and run in rotating rep thru August 11. Order your tickets today! Call 330-263-2345 or visit OhioLightOpera.org for a complete schedule, season brochure, and secure online ticketing here.

Apollo’s Fire opens a summer packed with concerts (including a UK/Ireland tour) with “Tarantella! Rhythms of the Old Mediterranean” at the Baroque Barn and other local venues this week. Fri 6/8-Sun 6/10, Tue 6/12

* The family-friendly Put-in-Bay Music Festival returns for its second year. Sat 6/9.

* Head out to Chagrin Falls to hear free music during the Chagrin Music Crawl. Sat 6/9.

* Cleveland’s Venus Flytraps celebrate their new album with drag queens, a vinyl dance party and more at the Happy Dog. Fri 6/8.

* The Canton Blues Festival is back for year 17 with two free days of local and national acts. Sat 6/9 & Sun 6/10.

Read more of CoolCleveland’s picks for Cool Events.

WED 6/6
Prominent artists and writers shared their ideas about a “fair, free and compassionate democracy” in the new anthology It Occurs to Me That I Am America. Editor Jonathan Santlofer and a couple of the contributors will be at MOCA today to talk about the book and sign copies.

* Observe and talk to artists as they work at 78th Street Studios’ Watch It Wednesdays.

* Watchers of the Sky, a film exploring the issue of genocide, screens at the Maltz Museum.

Click here for more events on Wed 6/6

THU 6/7
When asked to name baseball greats, Babe Ruth quickly comes to most people’s minds. Today the Baseball Heritage Museum at League Park opens an exhibit devoted the legendary star, featuring a homer ball he hit at League Park.

* The Re:Sound Music Festival features four days of cutting-edge bands in Tremont, Ohio City & Slavic Village. Through Sun 6/10.

* Tremont’s Prosperity Social Club hosts a Two-Wheel Roundup for motorcycles and scooters.

* Playhouse Square/CSU Arts and Humanities Alive! Festival returns for the second year. Through Sat 6/9.

* Two companies explore contemporary issues at Cleveland Public Theatre’s DanceWorks.

* The Maltz Museum’s Coffee Talk program looks at Jewish themes in the Superman saga, which was created to two Jewish teenagers.

* Harris Stanton Gallery in Akron shows work of artist who uses Akron landscapes as raw material.

Click here for more events on Thu 6/7

FRI 6/8
Paper garments surfaced in the fast-fashion ’60s and artist Julie McLaughlin had one. That eventually led to her creation of kimonos from Kozo fiber paper, which go on display at Praxis Fiber Workshop tonight.

* Cleveland Print Room’s annual juried Peer Show spotlights local photography talents.

* Walkabout Tremont comes out on the street for the summer.

* MOCA Cleveland closes its season with special premiere sound and visual performance in the gallery.

* Women musicians and whiskey come together for summer evenings at Tremont’s Prosperity Social Club.

* Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk’s Super Summit is a fantasy land for car & truck lovers. Also tomorrow.

Click here for more events on Fri 6/8

SAT 6/9
It’s year 29 for that lavish pageant known as Parade the Circle, where groups and organizations of all sorts concoct costumes, masks, puppets, floats and more for the grand promenade around Wade Oval. This year’s theme is “Cadenza,” which they describe, slightly inaccurately, as a “flourish of individual creativity.” It’s really about community creativity.

* Photographer Anastasia Pantsios talks about her book on rock & roll women at Tremont’s Visible Voice Books.

* Come buy art and watch artists create at the 35th annual Art by the Falls in Chagrin Falls. Also tomorrow.

* The LaureLive music festival is back at Laurel School’s Geauga County campus today and tomorrow with more than 30 bands.

* Check out more than 70 private and community gardens and pocket parks at the South Euclid Garden Walk. Also tomorrow.

* The Sow & Grow Festival at Hale Farm & Village introduces visitors to 19th-century farming techniques today and tomorrow.

* Purple Stride invites people to run/walk against pancreatic cancer at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.

Click here for more events on Sat 6/9

SUN 6/10
Lakewood is one of northeast Ohio’s foodiest cities with a dizzying array of restaurants reflecting the city’s diverse population. Sample that diversity at the 15h annual Taste of Lakewood in Madison Park.

* Slavic Village’s Pierogi Run celebrates the neighborhood and its traditional foods.

* Double bill at Riverdog Barn features two Michigan Americana bands.

* Salt-of-the-earth folksinger Joe Purdy will sing his truths at Peninsula’s G.A.R. Hall.

* Damnation of Adam Blessing bassist puts together players to do the old songs at the Music Box.

Click here for more events on Sun 6/10

MON 6/11
Food truck events aren’t the novelty they were a few years ago. But these gatherings of mobile restaurants with specialty menus featuring a variety of cuisines provide office workers with a chance to get outside and have some food choices. Memorial Mondays in the Warehouse District by the Justice Center brings in different trucks each week.

Click here for more events on Mon 6/11

TUE 6/12
The Chautauqua-in-Chagrin summer series of lectures and discussions kicks off this week with an exploration of racial inequity and a look at its structural roots, at Chagrin Falls’ United Methodist Church. It’s the first of four such programs, running through 7/17.

* Resonanz Opera brings together pros and students for summer season in Lake County. Also Fri 6/15.

* Anti-war activists come together to hash over current affairs at Cleveland Peace Action’s Peace @ the Pub at Market Garden Brewery.

* Pride film series at the Capitol Theatre shows transgressive film The Misandrists.

* Nature photographer Judy Semrock shares some tips at the Lakewood Library.

Click here for more events on Tue 6/12

WED 6/13
Skating Polly was formed by two young Oklahoma sisters, ages 9 and 14, in 2009. ShiSho, from the Akron area, started playing, at least at home, in 2004, when the two sisters who comprise the group, were just 4 and 7. Both bands have a whip-smart, punk-based sensibility and they’ll be playing together at the Grog Shop.

* Rockin’ quartet the Jack Fords are the next band to play the oWow Happy Hour concert at the Music Box.

Click here for more events on Wed 6/13

Send your cool events to: Events@CoolCleveland.com

Time for a Cultural Shift

Every credible study proves that if we want policing in America to be fairer, to have fewer incidents of brutality, to sharply decrease the number of officer-involved killings, we must have police forces that are reflective in racial and gender makeup of the communities being patrolled….

Read other stories from Mansfield Frazier here