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Daily articles including interviews, profiles, live reviews, film reviews and more... all carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. You can find more articles by searching our website, see what's trending on our popular articles page or read articles ahead of their published dates on our future articles page.
C. Michael Bailey's Best Releases of 2020
by C. Michael Bailey
We are experiencing an existential fold in history, one where we do not even realize its gravity because it has been so cheapened by ourselves. The only thing that rises above all of this is art, and in particular, music. It is but grace that these artists provided us a gift we could never possibly warrant. Michelle Lordi Breaking Up With The Sound Cabinet of Wonder Productions Gemma Sherry
read moreMichelle Lordi: Career Evolution
by R.J. DeLuke
Some artists are blessed to be born into situations where opportunities are at the ready. Education and training are easily obtainable. Maybe they have connections to the professional world, via their lineage or other friends. Even so, it's still up to them to produce and deal with the inevitable vagaries of their choice to pursue music as a career. For others, the process can be more gradual. The germ of being an artist is there, but it simmers and comes ...
read moreMichelle Lordi: Break Up With the Sound
by C. Michael Bailey
Vocalist Michelle Lordi's house burned down at the end of 2017. That is a bracing life event from which one may find oneself at a brutally curious fork in the road. Lordi's Break Up With the Sound makes it seem that she blazed through Kubler Ross's five stages of loss and got to work on something so new, it smelled of white-hot creation. Lordi's modus operandi has been addressing the Great American Songbook, as evidenced by her densely competent Dream ...
read moreMichelle Lordi at Philadelphia Museum of Art
by Victor L. Schermer
Michelle Lordi Trio Friday Nights Philadelphia Museum of Art June 8, 2018 I've always appreciated Michelle Lordi's singing through her fine recordings, but I'd never heard her in person, so I seized this opportunity to hop over to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to catch her show, especially because her trio included two of the finest musicians on the scene today: Jim Ridl on piano and Matthew Parrish on bass. Ridl ...
read moreMichelle Lordi: Dream a Little Dream
by Victor L. Schermer
Michelle Lordi graces the Philadelphia area with her singing, and her album releases and club dates in New York and elsewhere are gaining her wider recognition as she continues her regular local gigs. She sings clearly, straight ahead, and with panache. In this album, she brings together a septet of outstanding instrumentalists for a nostalgic set of standards from the American Songbook with “small big band" arrangements by saxophonist Larry McKenna reminiscent of those which Bill Holman did during his ...
read moreMichelle Lordi: Drive
by Victor L. Schermer
It's difficult to conceive how this wonderful album of restrained and subtly rendered ballads came to be called Drive, a term which leads the listener to expect a package of revved up swing or rock. However, you don't have to be a cryptologist to realize that it comes from the last track, “Drive," which contains the line “Who's gonna drive you home?" This sense of melancholy and hoped for love, like so much of the American Songbook, is the essence ...
read moreMichelle Lordi: Michelle Lordi Sings
by Victor L. Schermer
Michelle Lordi sings in a way that is uncommon today: simple, straightforward, direct, and conveying the emotions in the way we all do: in our voice inflections. No gimmicks. This is a style that emerged in the swing and cool jazz eras, a strict adherence to the tune that virtually vanished as singers began to add embellishments, scat, and too often a hysterical emotionality where personality crowded out the melody. In particular, Lordi owes something special to Chet Baker and ...
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