Fri 5/5 @ 7:30PM
Sat 5/6 @ 4PM
Sat 5/6 @ 7PM
Tenor sax player Joe Lovano is one of the most successful jazz musicians to come out of Cleveland. He left Cleveland in 1971 after graduating from Euclid High School to attend Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music in Boston (where he eventually joined the faculty), then headed to New York and never looked back.
In New York he launched a successful international career that’s included playing with the Woody Herman Thundering Herd and Mel Lewis’ Big Band, collaborating with guitarist John Scofield and drummer Paul Motian, leading his own ensembles and releasing some two dozen albums as a band leader while playing on a hundred more and recently forming an ensemble called Us Five with younger musicians: bassist Esperanza Spalding, pianist James Weidman, and drummers Otis Brown III and Francisco Mela.
OK, it’s not quite accurate to say “he never looked back.” He’s a frequent performer in this area and he’s often collaborated with some of the area’s many outstanding jazz players. And he’ll do so this week when he joins the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra for two performances of a program called “Coltrane, Sinatra, and the Surprise of Being.”
“We’ve created an extraordinary program that covers Coltrane, Sinatra, and excerpts from The Surprise of Being, which featured Joe in an historic collaboration with the CJO at Birdland in NYC, 2006,” enthuses the CJO press release.
CJO’s artistic director Paul Ferguson says, “We take great pride in presenting concerts featuring material that you’ll hear nowhere else, featuring the best composers and arrangers of Northeast Ohio. At our upcoming show we will offer new arrangements by myself and Brad Wagner, music by Dave Morgan from our Surprise of Being recording, as well as new compositions by Chas Baker. The only piece outside of our neighborhood is Jim McNeely’s masterful treatment of “Resolution,” a movement from Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.”
They’ll also be joined by Lovano’s vocalist wife Judi Sivano who has her own stellar musical resume.
On Friday they’ll perform at the Maltz Performing Arts Center in University Circle. Then on Saturday they’ll be a a new venue in Akron, HÜG – Highland Square Universal Gathering Place at 133 Merriman Road, location of the Creative Arts Collaborative Center. There Lovano will as do a free master class at 4pm, open to all ages and featuring a discussion and live performance.
Get tickets for the Maltz PAC show here and for the Creative Arts Collaborative Center performance here.