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.
Sign in to customize your My Articles page —or— Filter Article Results
Joe Harriott: The Joe Harriott Story
by Bruce Lindsay
Almost 40 years after his death in 1973 at just 44 years of age, Joe Harriott's talent, imagination and impact on the development of jazz in Britain are gaining greater recognition than ever. Indeed, The Joe Harriott Story, an exceptional 4-disc box set of music from the alto saxophonist, is both a reflection of this belated recognition and, hopefully, another step towards increasing his reputation as a master musician. Harriott spent his formative years in Jamaica's famed ...
Continue ReadingPhil Seamen: Seamen's Mission
by Bruce Lindsay
British jazz has produced many great players whose fame never came close to matching their talent. One such was the mercurial drummer Phil Seamen. Seamen's Mission a splendid 4-CD box set in the Proper Box series, is a great reminder of Seamen's skills across a range of ensembles from big bands to trios, from swing to bop. Seamen began his professional career in 1944, working in the big bands of Nat Gonella and Joe Loss, among others. ...
Continue ReadingVarious Artists: Larkin's Jazz
by Bruce Lindsay
Philip Larkin is one of the best-loved British poets of the twentieth century--the man who claimed in Annus Mirabilis that “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen-sixty-three..." A librarian at the University of Hull in the north-east of England, he was a complex character whose poems were often witty and well-observed but could also appear cynical and contemptuous. He was also a lifelong jazz fan, declaring in the opening line to The Dance: “Drink, sex and jazz--all sweet things, brother..."
Continue ReadingPhilip Larkin: Larkin's Jazz
by Chris May
The author of the immortal opening couplet, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do," the poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) was in 2008 voted “the greatest British writer" of the last half century by the readers of The Times. No longer the newspaper of record it was in the decades prior to its acquisition by the loathsome Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, who between them have done so much to debase British ...
Continue Reading
