by Mike Telin
“We feel more at home in a post-industrial setting, and we’re happy to have found Rising Star Coffee Roastery,” Five One Experimental Orchestra executive director Jeremy Allen said during an interview. “We always try to create a unique concert experience in collaboration with a non-traditional venue that benefits all parties — there are Rising Star patrons that are yet unfamiliar with what 51XO is all about, and I’m sure some of our fans will be newly introduced to this fabulous coffee roastery that’s right here in our great city of Cleveland.”
On Saturday March 5 at 8:00 pm, 51XO will perform works by Nico Muhly, Greg Pattillo, John HC Thompson, Jeremy Allen, Buck McDaniel, and Sarah Kirkland Snider, plus a new “experiment” conceived of and led by 51XO’s Tracy Mortimore at Rising Star Coffee Roastery, 3617 Walton Avenue, Cleveland. The concert is presented as part of the 2016 NEOSonicFest. [Read more…]
Oberlin Conservatory students packed Stull Recital Hall on Thursday, February 5 for a performance by Brooklyn-based chamber music ensemble PROJECT Trio. The group, made up of flutist Greg Pattillo, cellist Eric Stephenson, and bassist Peter Seymour, met while studying at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and now they are performing concerts around the globe. In their return to Northeast Ohio, they brought their distinctive style of music-making and their accompanying message of charting a unique pathway in the world of music. 
“I was trying to play Telemann in the subways, I really was,” said PROJECT Trio flutist Greg Pattillo. “And no one really cared. But you play a funny video game tune with the beatbox, and people did stop, and they did care to listen.”
It’s not easy to be unique. In music especially, it seems like every good band name has already been taken, every genre tried (witch house anyone?), and every ensemble “sound” already stamped by someone else. Even so, I don’t know of another group like PROJECT Trio, which consists of a cellist, double bassist, and beat-boxing flutist, all classically trained, who play jazz, classical, Latin, and a combination of those and other genres.