Jazz Articles

Our daily articles are 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 Coming Soon page. Read our daily album reviews.

Album Review

Nick Mazzarella and Tomeka Reid: Signaling

Read "Signaling" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
May 11, 2017

On this captivating, fully-improvised duo recording by alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella and cellist Tomeka Reid, we find a superlative example of two leading-edge musicians who continue to draw vital inspiration from their forbears. Reid, a contributing member of the hugely influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), has previously paid tribute to some of the titans of that organization--figures such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Leroy Jenkins, Roscoe Mitchell, and Fred Anderson--with Artifacts, her superb 2015 trio release with ...

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Extended Analysis

Wadada Leo Smith: Spirit Catcher

by Clifford Allen
May 12, 2010

Wadada Leo Smith Spirit Catcher Nessa Records 2009

Certainly, composition in jazz has gone well beyond head arrangements that bracket solos and group playing--sometimes approaching areas that sound so open as to seem free-form. Multi-instrumentalist, trumpeter and composer Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is one of a number of figures in this music whose work has long sought to explore and expand the blurred lines between composition and improvisation; one of the structural/notational ...

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Extended Analysis

Charles Tyler: Saga of the Outlaws

by Clifford Allen
March 24, 2009

Charles Tyler Saga of the Outlaws Nessa Records 2009

Saga of the Outlaws is just about the most fitting title one could expect for saxophonist Charles Tyler's fifth LP under his own name. Tyler was more than an outlaw (or a gladiator, to paraphrase Stanley Crouch), but unfortunately his name crops up rather rarely in discussions of jazz's historical vanguard. He traversed the Midwest, from Kentucky to Indiana to Cleveland, Ohio where ...

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Extended Analysis

Roscoe Mitchell: Nonaah

by Clifford Allen
September 28, 2008

Roscoe Mitchell Nonaah Nessa Records 2008

One of the significant things that set AACM music apart from its brethren in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s was its use of space, of opening up the music so that things could occur within broad, environmental relationships. That sense of space was very important. In an entirely different take on "energy" music, the challenge of discerning what could be perceived ...