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

Philippe Duchemin Trio: Swing & Strings

Read "Swing & Strings" reviewed by Patricia Myers

by Patricia Myers
August 14, 2013

French pianist Philippe Duchemin's entry into the jazz-with-strings repertoire merges his classical roots with a love of modern jazz, blues and soul. His dual talents of composing and playing make this a strongly swinging album, with the string quartet adding a lovely luster.Duchemin's crisp keyboard progressions contrast with the soaring and sizzling strings of the Atlantic String Quartet (Le Quatuor Atlantique, musicians from the Monte Carlo Orchestra). His longtime colleagues, twin brothers Christophe Le Van on bass and ...

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Album Review

Philippe LeJeune: Blues Inspiration

by C. Michael Bailey
October 3, 2003

Philippe LeJeune is positioning himself to accept the blues piano mantle from the Late Gene Harris. Both pianists have much in common. Both are two-fisted players with potent left hands and nuclear fast right hands. Both season their respective repertoires with shirt-tail blues pieces that do not fit exactly into the traditional 12-bar format.But mostly, these pianists are not afraid to get down and dirty. LeJeune, a French native, gets in the gutbucket with the best of them. ...

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Album Review

The Big Band Brass Featuring Rob McConnell: Live with the Boss

by Jack Bowers
October 1, 2001

Have you ever been to a concert where the band was blowin’ up a storm but the cavernously richocheting acoustics were enough to drive you crazy? If so, you’ll readily identify with this album, a marvelous collaboration between Rob McConnell and the Toulouse–based Big Band Brass that cooks from the word go but is repeatedly sabotaged (a suitably French word) by its disconcerting (no pun intended) concert–hall ambiance. As a longtime admirer of McConnell’s, and with his peerless Canadian ensemble, ...