Wed 1/24 @ 7:30PM
It’s become a cliché for bands to say “We can’t describe own music. It’s different from anything else.” This rarely turns out to be true. But in the case of northeast Ohio newcomers Alla Boara, who burst onto the local music scene post-pandemic, it’s very close to being true.
It was founded in 2020 by busy local jazz drummer and sideman Anthony Taddeo, who found himself transfixed by field recordings of regional Italian folk music and decided to use them to fuel a new ensemble, blending jazz influences with the old traditional folk sounds.
Despite a slow start in 2020 and 2021, when the pandemic prevented the group from playing very much (their first show in October 2020 was in the outdoor space behind the BOP STOP), they’ve really taken off in the last two years, playing more than 50 shows and expanding their reach beyond NE Ohio to New York, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania. They released their first album, Le Tre Sorelle, in late 2022, and will be dropping their second, a live album recorded over two nights at the BOP STOP last July, this week with a show at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium.
Taddeo, a versatile musician who grew up playing funk and rock before discovering jazz in college, studied in Tri-C’s noted jazz program before heading to New York to study at the New School.
“When I was in New York,” he relates, “I started doing research and I found the folk music. I stumbled on this folk research by [folklorist] Alan Lomax]. He spent six months in Italy and recorded the most beautiful renditions of this folk music in rural areas where traditions had been kept over the years. When I heard those recordings for the first time I was taken aback. As the son of an Italian American and an Italian immigrant, I had never heard anything like it before. I felt like my work as a jazz musician and my heritage were colliding.”
Taddeo put that music on the backburner for years — until he was working on his master’s degree in composition at Youngstown State University in 2018. The Lomax recordings featured a wide range of nearly extinct tunes, including lullabies, laments, hymns, and festival songs, and he began working with them, arranging them with different grooves, harmonies and instruments, bringing in jazz, rock and world music influences.
At first he thought it was just a “passion project,” but encouraged by Professor Dave Morgan “an incredibly insightful and wonderful person,” he started to explore what more he could do with this music.
“As a sideman I saw how much work it was to be a leader and I wasn’t really interested in that,” he says. “But the more compositions I arranged, I started feeling such a connection to my music and heritage. And finally I was like, OK I give.”
The most important piece, he discerned, was finding the right vocalist. He knew the versatile Amanda Powell through some work he had done with Apollo’s Fire, which she’s performed with extensively. She said she’d be into it. “When that domino fell we were off to the races,” he says. He assembled the rest of the core band — accordionist/pianist Clay Coley, guitarist Dan Bruce, trumpet player Tommy Lehman and bassist Ian Kinnaman — from the extensive network of contacts he’d developed during his time as a sideman.
The new album showcases Alla Boara’s growth as a live band.
“This new album was an incredible undertaking and so much fun,” says Taddeo. “I had this idea, what if the band was in the middle of the room and the audience was seated all around us? In this time where music is so accessible, I think as artists we have to figure out how to make a live show something exciting, interesting and fun, that people want to go to. Our first album was recorded only a few months after we got together and our sound has grown so much in a live setting and we wanted to show that. The energy was remarkable.”
The band was joined for those two evenings by percussionists Jamey Haddad and Patrick Graney, and sax player Chris Coles. Engineer
Tuck Mindrun brought his mobile unit and Derek Snyder did a six camera video shoot of the entire two days. They’vec already released videos and singles from those evenings; the physical recording will be available this week.
Alla Boara isn’t standing still. They had some of their music orchestrated and played their first gig with an orchestra, the Ashland Symphony, last week. (“That was transcendent,” says Taddaeo.) They’ve signed with a booking agency, looking to do world music series at performing arts centers. And they’ll be making their debut in Boston and in Toronto this year.
And it’s in Toronto where they located the one band that’s even similar to theirs, the Sicilian Jazz Project. “But theirs is strictly music from Sicily. We take folk music from all the different regions of Italy.”
For Taddaeo, the music of Alla Board is a homecoming of sorts. He sees a “100%” connection his heritage, saying that even when he was young, his ear was drawn to certain types of sounds and compositions.
“To find those things are in this music is amazing,” he says. “I spent months in Italy in 2014 reconnecting with my culture and learning Italian. It was a revelation, finding a place where I belong. I feel that same way musically when I’m performing or composing or arranging with this band. It’s just natural.”
Tickets for show at Cleveland Museum of Art can be purchased here or by calling 216-421-7350. Learn more about Alla Boara here.
Cleveland, OH 44106