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Lara Somogyi: Finding Her Muse in the Desert
When one is making a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree in Arizona--even by Zoom call--you must be careful about protecting your eyes from the blinding sunlight and keep your cap on to cover your brain. Listening to the music of Lara Somogji from her album Désert (Mercury KX 2025), one's brain is constantly heated by thoughts of striking it rich musically, thoughts that do not fade much with the late afternoon sun going down over the horizon. You may need some ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Mike Jurkovic's Best Jazz Albums Of 2025
Many things besides the demise of democracy got in the way of listening to everything, but these are the discs still in heavy rotation. Vijay Iyer Thereupon Pi Recordings Gonzalo RubalcabaFirst Meeting: Live at Dizzy's Club 5Passion Records Sylvie CourvoisierBone Bells Pyroclastic Records ...
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Orlando Molina At Scott's Jazz Club
Orlando Molina Scott's Jazz Club Belfast, N. Ireland October 28, 2025 One of the great things about Scott's Jazz Club is that musicians are often invited back. You get to see the first steps and evolution of a band or a leader new to the scene. You experience the growth and development of established acts, and you witness the different skins that many hard-gigging musicians inhabit. Venezuelan Chilean guitarist Orlando Molina first played the Ballyhackamore venue ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Best of the Best: Jazz From Detroit
Best of the Best: Jazz From DetroitMagic Circle Productions LLC2025 The history of jazz music is told in hundreds of cities from coast to coast in America. From the cradle in New Orleans and the Mississippi River delta, the great migration of Black Americans northward spread the sounds that we know as the blues and jazz across the country. Millions headed to northern urban centers to escape the ravages of segregation and racial discrimination experienced ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Introducing Trombonist/Vocalist Hailey Brinnel
After being discharged from the Army in 1945, Pete Rugolo became the primary arranger for the Stan Kenton Band and is credited with keeping that band alive in an era when big band music was beginning to fade. In 1955, Rugolo created an album combining the vocal group, The Four Freshmen, with an all-star trombone quintet selected from various Kenton ensembles. Four Freshmen and Five Trombones (Capitol Records) was “the first trombone record I remember really loving," said ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
C. Michael Bailey's Holiday Bundle 2025
Holiday music in the twenty-first century embraces both the old and new with equal creative consideration. Without a new recording of Handel's Messiah, we must rely on the inevitable evolution of the Christmas Canon. Cincinnati Contemporary Jazz Orchestra The Nutcracker Remix Self Produced 2025 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker has been a holiday staple since 1892. The ballet has a long history of jazz adaptations, beginning with Les Brown and His Band of ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Melbourne Improvising Iconoclasts Unite For Transcendent Free Jazz/Electronic Debut
Voyage, the debut collaboration between vocalist Tom Barton, guitarist Diego Villalta and pianist Nathan Liow, is a completely improvised odyssey transmuting real-time performance into sonic sculpture – a spellbinding journey through mystical darkness erupting into moments of transcendent awe. Across evolving orbits of looped and layered vocals, fractals of effected electric guitar, and ethereal pulsating synth drones, Voyage captures what happens when three trailblazers abandon the map entirely. Each track is a microcosm of human experience, delving fearlessly into the ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Jack Kenny's Best Jazz Albums Of 2025
A year is an arbitrary time. The list is chronological by how they came to me. The albums that still stand out are Bone Bells (Pyroclastic Records) by Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson and the sheer professional expertise of Jed Levy Faces and Places (Self Produced) Both albums, in their different ways, exude creativity and joy. The vintage albums from Gerry Mulligan, Paul Bley and Art Pepper are unalloyed pleasure The special releases from Zev Feldman are an ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
P&M Records Announces Chroma Nova's 'Elephant Crush'—To Be Released December 15, 2025
P&M Records Announces “Elephant Crush" — To Be Released December 15 2025. The Second Single from Michael Blake’s New Recording Sessions P&M Records is proud to present Elephant Crush, the second single from saxophonist Michael Blake’s newest body of work. He is once again joined by Chroma Nova, his Brazilian fueled ensemble that created the critically acclaimed 2023 release Dance of the Mystic Bliss. With Elephant Crush, Michael offers a searching, impassioned tenor saxophone performance that imbues contemporary jazz aesthetics ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Mavis Staples at The Carver
Mavis StaplesThe Carver Community Cultural CenterJo Long Theatre San Antonio, Texas November 21, 2025 As liner notes to her 2025 album, Sad and Beautiful World (Epitaph Records) rightly maintain, “Few people wield the combination of moral authority and musical artistry that Mavis possesses." The sounds that come out of her mouth seem to emanate directly from her soul. At age 86, Mavis Staples is still in command of the sublime and earthy voice that ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Tom Waits and Anton Corbijn: Waits/Corbyn
Waits/Corbijn Tom Waits and Anton Corbijn 272 pages 978-3791393254 Prestel Publishing2013/2025 Anton Corbijn and Tom Waits are creative forces whose respective crafts have redefined their fields. Corbijn, a Dutch photographer and filmmaker, is celebrated for his stark, atmospheric images that have captured the essence of artists such as Joy Division, U2, and Depeche Mode, among others. Beginning his work photographing musicians in the late 1970s, he would eventually progress to directing music ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Robert Plant at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House
Robert Plant and Saving Grace Ellie Caulkins Opera House Denver, Colorado November 15, 2025 Robert Plant enjoys digging up obscure songs to present to his fans. Maybe it is a response to the hyper-popularity of songs from his Led Zeppelin legacy. Or perhaps it is simply an enjoyable musical hobby. In the jazz world, Cecile McLorin Salvant does the same, and she does not have the heavy legacy of her past hanging over her like ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Maria Schneider & UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra at Savoy Theater, Helsinki
Maria Schneider & UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra Savoy-teatteri Helsinki, Finland November 13, 2025 The Finnish jazz community is celebrating--and by extension, so are those of Europe and, truth be told, the entire world. The reason is no small matter: the UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra marks its 50th anniversary, remaining faithful to the principles that have made it one of the most compelling European ensembles active today. Arguably the most creative, versatile and experimental--within the boundaries ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Flirtbird and the Black Thong
The Taquito Tuesday thing took off like a rocket down at the Oceanic Brew Pub. It was, from the perspective of the kitchen, an ass buster, one sheet pan of those little rolled tacos after another going into the oven. Fortunately--for the owners, Roy and Rafaela--they had hired Hobgood, a guy who had spent 40 years of his 57 years on Earth working in kitchens. The orders kept coming in, and Hobgood, working like a devil, kept putting them out. ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Giving Thanks & Spreading the Jazz Joy
As always, we're celebrating Thanksgiving by recognizing two special groups of people: our benefactors, who helped make much of the 2025 website improvements possible, and our staff, who contribute and edit articles throughout the year. Both contributions are immeasurable, and we thank you all for your generosity, passion, creativity, and friendship. The good people who support this website are as cool--and as essential--as the music itself. With deep appreciation, thank you again! A daily commitment since 1995 At ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Persephone's Dark Perspective Brings Hope: New Ep 'Harvest Moon'
Emerging from a deeply textured, analogue soundscape, the new EP Harvest Moon arrives as a haunting song cycle that re-tells the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. The project crafts a dark and rich auditory world, providing the backdrop for a narrative that mirrors the four seasons through four interconnected songs. This is not a just retelling, but a re-contextualization. Harvest Moon uses the timeless story of love, loss, and life's cyclical nature as a powerful allegory of the ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Three Visitors At Joe Henderson Lab
Three Visitors Joe Henderson Lab San Francisco, CA November 22, 2025 The first notes of Edward Simon 's “What If" emerged out of the dark at the Joe Henderson Lab, cutting through the reflections of car lights sliding across the room's glass walls. Inside the 100-seat club, the city was a flickering backdrop rather than a distraction; the real weather was being made onstage by Three Visitors, the long-standing trio of Simon, bassist Scott Colley, and ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
Rin Nagaya ('123'): A Global Voice At The Edge Of Electronic, Pop, And Jazz
In January 2025, at The NAMM Show in Anaheim, a crowd pressed toward AlphaTheta’s booth as a compact instrument called ChordCat purred to life. At the center was Rin Nagaya, who performs with the stage name “123." She is a Japan-born vocalist, composer, producer, and DJ and at AlphaTheta's booth, she was stringing harmony into motion, slipping from global grooves to jazz-inflected phrasing and back to beat-driven electronics without breaking a sweat. It was a perfect snapshot of her career ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
John Hadfield: An Open Concept
John Hadfield's sound is instantly recognizable, due in part to his unique drum kit, which reflects the musics he has studied and with which he continues to engage. Hadfield's formal degrees are in jazz (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and Western classical music (University of Missouri, Kansas City), but he also studied frame drumming and world percussion extensively with Jamey Haddad at The New School in New York. He trained in South Asian classical percussion with Ganesh Kumar and Subash ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz
The Beatles Anthology (25th Anniversary Reissue)
The Beatles Anthology 25th Anniversary Reissue The Beatles 368 Pages ISBN: # 978-1797241487 Chronicle Books 2025 Reprinted to commemorate the quarter-century since its first publication, the 2025 edition of The Beatles Anthology (25th Anniversary Reissue) book is little different from its now hard-to-find predecessor, except in the most cosmetic sense(s). Without any notation of its distinction, this milestone edition has an outer graphic design matching that of the audio companion piece ......
SOURCE: All About Jazz