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 future articles page. Read our daily album reviews.
Sign in to customize your My Articles page —or— Filter Article Results
Mary Halvorson: Cloudward
by Doug Collette
The title of guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson's Cloudward alludes to the sense of optimism she has stated she felt when writing the bulk of the material in fall of 2022. And while this palpable sense of faith in the future is in marked contrast to the tangible air of eerie foreboding that surfaced so often on this LP's predecessors, the presence of largely the same personnel lineup--the Amaryllis Sextet-- provides a stable link of continuity. The reappearance of prior collaborators recording ...
read moreDarcy James Argue's Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension
by Katchie Cartwright
Darcy James Argue's superb double-album Nonesuch debut offers compositions written throughout his career. He turns to twentieth-century thinkers for “ideas that can help us in the present, that we can reexamine and reconfigure for our own purposes." These include futurist designer Buckminster Fuller, cryptanalyst-computer scientist Alan Turing, composer-arranger Bob Brookmeyer, actress-screenwriter Mae West, trumpeter-mentor Laurie Frink, and musician-beyond-category Duke Ellington, among others. Like West, Argue seems to control his own path. He may not yet be the tycoon she was, ...
read moreRhiannon Giddens: You're The One
by Katchie Cartwright
Rhiannon Giddens has a voracious musical appetite and a big talent that uses everything to fuel her many creative activities. With a MacArthur, a Pulitzer, and multiple Grammys on her shelf, this has not gone unnoticed. In a body of work that includes musicological projects along with different types of art, You're The One focuses on Giddens as a songwriter, in a variety of idioms. “I hope that people just hear American music," she says. “Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, ...
read moreSam Gendel: Cookup
by Scott Gudell
Saxophonist Sam Gendel has sent out an invitation to an unusual sonic Cookup. So what is he serving? Who will be there? Will beat poets merge with experimental musicians in a smoky jazz grotto? Will it be a cryptic musical labyrinth or a collection of meandering songs? Is it a transcription of ancient African organic rhythms or something more modern? The answer is elusive and, by design, a moving target. There are bits and pieces of all the ...
read moreBrad Mehldau: Your Mother Should Know
by Brad Mehldau
In his book, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, the scholar Harold Bloom confronted the question of what makes particular books endure through the ages, long surpassing the time and place in which they were written: The answer, more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange. If we look ...
read moreCecile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine
by Katchie Cartwright
Wynton Marsalis was right, Cécile McLorin Salvant is the sort of singer who comes along only “once in a generation or two." A MacArthur Fellow, multiple Grammy winner, and self-described eclectic, Salvant creates projects that encompass an astonishing array of idioms and historical periods, which she interrelates inventively and interweaves with original compositions. Here, she plumbs the francophone side of her repertoire. French songs have cropped up regularly in her live shows, but less on disk. Mélusine fills the gap ...
read moreRedman / Mehldau / McBride / Blade: Long Gone
by Scott Gudell
The mid-1990s saw the first recorded and officially preserved union of four up-and-coming jazz newcomers--Joshua Redman (saxophone,) Christian McBride (bass,) Brad Mehldau (piano) and Brian Blade (drums.) All four were dedicated followers of classic jazz and came together, but soon scattered and began charting their own individual courses. There was a long delay before they reunited for a second quartet recording in 2020. By then, each and every one of them had earned the respect of their peers and risen ...
read moreBrad Mehldau: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles
by Mike Jurkovic
In the press release and liner notes, Brad Mehldau, a spiritual man who delves deeply into subjects that matter to him, talks a lot about the Fab Four's continued universality and to the strangeness of their originality and our assimilation of it. But he never really gets to the point as clearly, personally and succinctly as he does when he plays the music. Because at the end of the day, despite and including the dotted eighth notes, snipped rhythms, big ...
read moreTigran Hamasyan: Stand Art
by Jerome Wilson
Many jazz pianists start out by playing tunes from the standard pop and jazz repertoires before tackling their own compositions. Tigran Hamasyan has gone in the opposite direction. He has been recording original works and traditional Armenian songs since 2005. Now, on his eleventh album, he finally gets around to playing American standards. Hamasyan leads a trio here with Matt Brewer on bass and Justin Brown on drums, occasionally helped out by tenor saxophonists Mark Turner and Joshua ...
read moreRy Cooder and Taj Mahal: Get on Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
by Nenad Georgievski
There is an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." The intimacy and the dynamics of the duet setting have long appealed to virtuoso guitarist Ry Cooder. During his expansive six decade career, he has released several adventurous duets and collaborative albums with luminaries such as guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt or Manuel Galban, to name but a few. Get on Board is ...
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 6
