Jazz Articles

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.

Album Review

Chance Hayden: Shag Bag

by Geno Thackara
May 6, 2022

Warm springtime, sunshine, good friends—it must be time for a party. Chance Hayden is certainly feeling the joy and ready to kick off something fun. Working around pandemic restrictions left him and his colleagues ready to bounce and blow off some steam, and bagging (sorry) the iconic Ronnie Foster on keys made the perfect funk-fusion topping. The standalone single “Shag Bag" packs a drum-and-conga groove to get the backyard shaking, slathers on a dash of bright horns, then ties it ...

Album Review

Zela Margossian Quintet: The Road

by Barry O'Sullivan
February 14, 2022

The Road is the extremely dexterous pianist Zela Margossian's much anticipated second album. It follows her critically acclaimed and ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) nominated debut album, Transition (Art As Catharsis, 2018), and once again delivers rich instrumental textures, a distinct compositional voice, and the narrative and thematic depth that Margossian is now known for. The Beirut-born pianist draws upon her Armenian heritage and classical music training to create a variety of moods, by blending folk-inspired and jazz-influenced ...

Album Review

The Flowdown: yo-lk

by Phillip Woolever
May 2, 2021

It's not easy to categorize this brief eclectic offering via Infinity Gritty, but that's more than likely a primary point of the five-man collaboration's wide-ranging experimental soundscape. While the EP contains only a minimal amount of actual jazz elements and may not excite traditionalists, it does feature some excellent instrumentation, with a finely tuned mix of assorted chord textures. What may sound a bit scattered at first listen belies the precision of various placements, and there's plenty to ...

Album Review

Nir Felder: II

by Mike Jacobs
January 19, 2021

Six years after the release of his solo debut, Golden Age (Okeh, 2014), Nir Felder's follow-up II brings into sharper focus some of the guitarist's more compelling dichotomies as a player. His instrument of choice is the usually more crystalline-sounding Stratocaster but Felder somehow elicits a fatter-than-a-big-ol'-jazz-box tone from it. His style as a soloist has way more in common with Jim Hall than Jimi Hendrix but he more often favors flailing big ringing open-stringed or power ...

Album Review

Eyot: 557799

by Bruce Lindsay
November 3, 2020

557799 is the fifth album from Serbian jazz fusion quartet EYOT since its debut, Horizon, was released in 2011. It follows on from 2017's Innate (produced by Steve Albini in Chicago) and builds on that album's mix of prog, hard rock and jazz. But this time composer and pianist Dejan Ilijic draws on Balkan myths and traditions, composers such as John Williams and Bruckner, and Sting's album The Soul Cages. The result is another impressive, often beautiful and always intriguing ...

Album Review

Johanna Burnheart: Burnheart

by Chris May
October 16, 2020

The violin has an eventful history in jazz. But it is still a niche instrument, despite a line of singular players stretching back to Stephane Grappelli and Stuff Smith (who deserves some bonus points for composing the immortal “If You're A Viper"). There are no schools of jazz violinists, simply a succession of one-off stylists, with Grappelli, Smith, John Blake, Michael White, Leroy Jenkins, Regina Carter and Billy Bang prominent among them. There is also Ornette Coleman, but let's not ...

Album Review

Eric Binder: Hard Bop

by Phillip Woolever
September 25, 2020

Eric Binder is a drummer based in the Chicago area gaining recognition as a teacher and technician who combines slick sequencing and academic awareness to create modern masterworks with a classic jazz sound. This abbreviated yet consistently inspiring album affirms Binder as a rising force on the US jazz scene. Authenticity is obviously vital to Binder, who earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and teaches at three colleges. He has multiple, academic-based publications to ...