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

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik: Kompress

Read "Kompress" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
October 11, 2026

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik has spent nearly a decade demonstrating that the piano trio need not behave like a piano trio. Pianist Kaja Draksler, bassist Petter Eldh and drummer Christian Lillinger established their peculiar chemistry on the excellent Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (Intakt, 2018), pushed it into more intricately constructed territory with Somit (Intakt, 2021) and documented its live potency on Zurich Concert (Intakt, 2022). Kompress continues the group's unconventional methods while tightening them into relatively concise pieces. Calling this outside jazz only gets ...

Album Review

Co Streiff - Russ Johnson Quartet: Oracle

Read "Oracle" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
October 7, 2026

"In Circles--Yellow Crane" joins two pieces, Co Streiff's “In Circles," which also gave the quartet's 2012 debut its title, and Russ Johnson's “Yellow Crane." At 16 minutes, 27 seconds it is the longest track on Oracle, taken from the group's 2023 European tour. The band has been together on and off since the early 2010s, with Gerry Hemingway on drums since 2019 and Christian Weber on bass. Sixteen minutes is a lot of room for a quartet with ...

Album Review

Nite Bjuti: Minwi

Read "Minwi" reviewed by Kevin Poindexter

by Kevin Poindexter
October 3, 2026

When Nite Bjuti (pronounced Night Beauty), Candice Hoyes, Mimi Jones, and Val Jeanty take to the stage, the surrounding air is charged with energy and anticipation. The trio conjures voices that invoke their ancestral past, and those voices guide them and help to shape and change the future. On Minwi, (Haitian Creole for midnight), Nite Bjuti channels that raw kinetic energy into a highly charged musical experience, an experience that reveals something different to the listener each time they hit play.

Album Review

Alexis Marcelo: Solo Piano

Read "Solo Piano" reviewed by Carl Medsker

by Carl Medsker
September 5, 2026

"Boogieminish Bop" effusively kicks off Alexis Marcelo's first release under his own name, organically combining stride, boogie-woogie and bop into a contemporary melange. For over two decades, Marcelo has honed his chops and developed his personal language, drawing on the full history of jazz piano, his Hispanic roots, early classical training and experiences with hip hop, progressive rock and exploratory improv. He boldly chose to perform solo in his debut, something most pianists defer to later in their ...

Album Review

OM: Sudpol

Read "Sudpol" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
August 8, 2026

Formed in Lucerne in 1972 by saxophonist Urs Leimgruber, guitarist Christy Doran, bassist Bobby Burri, and drummer Fredy Studer, the original quartet fused the raw voltage of rock with the open architecture of free improvisation, arriving at a sound they eventually dubbed “ElectroAcoustiCore." Studer's death in 2022, weeks ahead of the release of the anniversary album 50 (Intakt), 2022), might reasonably have closed the book. Instead, the three surviving founders did something a lesser band would not have attempted: they ...

Album Review

James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Omni

Read "Omni" reviewed by Kevin Poindexter

by Kevin Poindexter
June 26, 2026

James Brandon Lewis is on a remarkable run. Deface the Currency (Impulse!, 2026), his second collaborative album with the Messthetics, placed him at the cutting edge of the fiery fusion of punk and jazz. While that record proved he could invoke the power and fury of 60s Detroit band MC5's rock-and-roll testimonial Are You Ready to TESTIFY! (Sanctuary Records, 2007), on Omni, he is invoking a different kind of testimonial, one grounded in his upbringing as the son of a ...

Album Review

Alexander Hawkins: No Nation but Imagination

Read "No Nation but Imagination" reviewed by Kevin Poindexter

by Kevin Poindexter
June 12, 2026

Pianist and composer Alexander Hawkins has spent years at the forefront of the European jazz avant- garde scene, leading various mutations of the standard group format, from solo piano to large ensembles and everything in between. Experimenting with different dynamics, instruments, and musicians, and adapting them to fulfill the needs of the music has been his calling card for nearly two decades now. On No Nation But Imagination, Hawkins once again mixes things up, putting together a unique lineup featuring ...

Album Review

Michael Formanek: New Digs

Read "New Digs" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
May 6, 2026

Michael Formanek has never been content to anchor a bandstand and call it a career. Over decades of work--from sideman stints with Stan Getz and Joe Henderson to the long-running Thumbscrew trio with Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara--he has operated as a composer and architect, building rooms rather than merely inhabiting them. New Digs recorded over two days in Torres Vedras, Portugal, stands as an ambitious project via this seven-piece trans-Atlantic ensemble shaped by a precise sonic design.

Album Review

Sylvie Courvoisier: Eclats - Live in Europe

Read "Eclats - Live in Europe" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
April 19, 2026

Sylvie Courvoisier has never been easy to pin down, which is exactly the point. The Lausanne-born pianist moved to New York City in 1998 and spent the next two-plus decades making herself indispensable to the downtown avant-garde, working alongside John Zorn, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mark Feldman, among others. She received the Swiss Grand Prix Music and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, recognition that felt overdue rather than surprising. Her long-running piano ...

Album Review

Angelika Niescier: Chicago Tapes

Read "Chicago Tapes" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 9, 2026

When German alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier first explored Chicago jazz a few years ago--teaming with cellist Tomeka Reid on the striking Beyond Dragons (Intakt, 2023)--the collaboration sparked something unmistakably electric. Now comes Chicago Tapes,, recorded live at Transient Sound Studio. Here, Niescier dives headlong into the improvisational deep end of the city, enlisting an all-star lineup drawn from the restless creative core of Chicago's boundary-pushers. Niescier wields her alto alongside Dave Rempis, who toggles between alto and tenor ...