by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Alla Boara (pictured) presents its first Christmas program featuring Italian folk songs collected in 1954 by Alan Lomax (7 pm at Trinity Cathedral), the Baldwin Wallace Symphony Orchestra plays Brahms’ first symphony (7 pm in Gamble Auditorium), Cleveland Jazz Orchestra presents A Kate Reid Christmas (7:30 at the Maltz), The Cleveland Orchestra hosts Emanuel Ax in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 (7:30 at Severance Music Center), and Oberlin presents a concert performance of Rhiannon Giddens’opera Omar (7:30 in Finney Chapel — but it’s now sold out and available only as a live stream).
For details of these and other upcoming events, visit our Concert Listings.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Akron’s Tuesday Musical has announced that its 2025 Annual Scholarship Competition will be held on Saturday, March 23 (organists will compete on Saturday, March 15). Applications will be accepted beginning on January 1. Click here for more information.
The Cleveland Orchestra announces the continuation of its Arts Administration BIPOC Internship Program, “aimed at increasing diversity within the field and providing valuable opportunities for young professionals of color.” Read the press release here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
by Jarrett Hoffman
American composer and jazz pianist Dave Brubeck entered the scene on this date in 1920. Perhaps the most fitting way for us to honor him is by listening to Jazz at Oberlin, a live album by the Dave Brubeck Quartet recorded in Oberlin’s Finney Chapel in 1953. (Click here to listen to five tracks from the album on YouTube.)
Not only considered among the best of Brubeck and among the best albums of the decade, it was also highly influential on the presentation of jazz — and on the prospect of official jazz studies at Oberlin, something that wasn’t at all in the picture in the ‘50s. Wendell Logan, who in 1973 launched the College’s jazz department, described that Finney Chapel concert as “the watershed event that signaled the change of performance space for jazz from the nightclub to the concert hall.” (Read more about the history of the school’s jazz department here.)
Tracing backwards from jazz to blues, we come to American singer, songwriter, and twelve-string guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter, best known by the stage name Lead Belly, who died on this date in 1949. Both his own songs and his recordings of folk standards have been highly influential, and his 1940 sessions with RCA Victor resulted in the album The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs, considered a milestone in African American folk music. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.
Enjoy his vibrant, expressive tenor and his improvisational bits of speech here in one of his most popular recordings: the folk song Where Did You Sleep Last Night.
