by Mike Telin
While earning his bachelor’s degree in music performance from the School of Jazz at The New School in New York City, percussionist Anthony Taddeo was tasked with writing a paper, and his search for a topic led him to the New York Public Library. There he stumbled across a little-known archive of field recordings made by the folklorist Alan Lomax during a sojourn in Italy.
“My dad being from Italy, I thought that writing about Italian folk music would be a cool way to kind of dig into my roots,” the Cleveland native said during a recent conversation. “I was absolutely dumbfounded by how beautiful and diverse the music was. I was so impacted by that — it was the first time I felt like my heritage and my profession collided. So I made a mental note to figure out some way to bring recognition to this beautiful art form.”
After completing a master’s in composition at Youngstown State University, touring North America and Europe, and being featured on over 30 albums, Taddeo decided to turn to the Italian folk music he had fallen in love with as an undergraduate.
The pantheon of jazz saxophone gods surely must look down with approval whenever Joshua Redman performs. With a formidable technique and a saxophone voice that glows with innate lyricism, Redman appeals to listeners of every stripe — those with the flame of tradition in mind and those who couldn’t care less about that.
Accent’s holiday concert at the Cleveland Museum of Art on December 8 was a hometown affair, even if the six members of this all-male a cappella ensemble had collectively traveled thousands of miles to be there.
If you had stopped by the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, Oct. 25, you would have experienced an evening fit for a king. Members of Le Poème Harmonique, the French early music ensemble led by Vincent Dumestre, presented a sophisticated concert in Gartner Auditorium that centered around the tastes and decrees of Louis XIV.
If you had to pick one thing that symbolizes Mahani Teave — pianist, cultural ambassador, and environmental activist — an easy choice would be the Rapa Nui School of Music and the Arts, the first music school on that remote island 2,000 miles off the coast of mainland Chile, with a population of 8,000.
Really good concerts will allow you to enjoy the music on show; the best ones will allow you to live inside of it. Tuareg musician Bombino’s performance at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, October 11 was certainly an example of the latter. The concert was magical from start to finish.
It’s certainly not something you hear every day: a concert-lecture of Korean traditional music played on the modern violin. Can this kind of thing work? Should it?
“When we see an idea expressed in the language of art, our sensory reactions often open the heart and mind to interaction in ways that mere facts may not,” writes Yolanda Kondonassis, who is not only a celebrated harpist but also the founder and director of the