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.
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Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes: Expansions
by Chris May
If ever a first wave jazz-funk album deserved a 180gm vinyl reissue in 2020 it is this near masterpiece. It was originally released in 1975 on Flying Dutchman, the label Bob Thiele set up after he left Impulse!. Jazz-funk divided the jazz world in the 1970s as much as free-jazz had done a decade earlier. And with reason. Much of it was crap. Just like a lot of jazz-rock was crap. More or less desperate attempts by ...
Continue ReadingJohn Lee Hooker: John Lee Hooker: Documenting the Sensation Recordings 1949-1952
by Jakob Baekgaard
Sam Phillips of Sun Records fame had an ear for musicians who stood out. He liked artists who were different, and he recognized the earth-shaking potential of John Lee Hooker's “Boogie Chillen,'" an early blueprint, it could be argued, for the rock 'n' roll sound pioneered by Sun. Phillips didn't get the chance to bring Hooker to Sun, but instead he found another unique blues personality to record, Howlin' Wolf, and the rest is history. Blues history ...
Continue ReadingLeon Thomas: Spirits Known And Unknown
by Chris May
Spiritual-jazz fans in London have had a good 2019. The music looms large in several of the most prominent bands on the city's happening woke jazz scene. On top of that, London's Gearbox Records released Mothership, an on-point album by singer Dwight Trible, who also played a memorable one-nighter at Ronnie Scott's club. Trible is a stylistic descendant of spiritual-jazz auteur Leon Thomas, who created the genre's vocal strand while studying and performing with pianist Horace Tapscott's ...
Continue ReadingGary McFarland: The In Sound & Soft Samba
by Rob Caldwell
Arranger, vibraphonist and singer Gary McFarland is regarded as one of the major purveyors of orchestral jazz--a type of jazz which had its heyday in the 1960s, but which is not heard as much anymore. A fine line separates orchestral jazz from the dreaded “easy listening" tag. A line so fine, they're often one and the same. McFarland, thankfully, managed to walk more on the jazz side, recording a series of albums for Verve and Impulse before his untimely death ...
Continue ReadingThe New Don Rendell Quintet: Roarin'
by Chris May
A fascinating snapshot of the British jazz and rhythm & blues interzone of the early '60s, Roarin' --unavailable for decades and here released on CD for the first time--is well titled. It's a raucous, sweaty, at times honking and screaming ruckus of hard bop, laced with jump jive and blues roots--and it's as enjoyable today as it must have been forty something years ago.
Recorded in '61, the album catches Don Rendell, aged 35, returning to the scene ...
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