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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Katie Bull: The Story, So Far
by Jim Santella
A genuine jazz singer, Katie Bull pulls no punches when it comes to interpreting original material. She tosses in a few classic songs on The Story, So Far while portraying lyrics convincingly, scat singing with natural ease, adding a sincere blues texture to each selection, all of it coming from the bottom of her heart. Her voice remains strong and accurate as she relates memorable stories in the pure jazz idiom. She and bassist Joe Fonda describe ...
Continue ReadingBull/Fonda Duo: Cup of Joe, No Bull
by Terrell Kent Holmes
On the heels of her release Love Spook, vocalist Katie Bull has hooked up again with bassist Joe Fonda on Cup of Joe, No Bull, a selection of standards and originals that the duo reduces to their bare essentials. Bull delivers a kind of relaxed, languid, yet lively kind of singing where the lyrics aren't sung so much as they burst from inside her. She sometimes wavers on the vocal high wire, but her verve is infectious.Bull takes ...
Continue ReadingBull Fonda Duo: Cup of Joe, No Bull
by Michael P. Gladstone
This is the third Katie Bull album that I've heard, and her work is very consistent. The New York-based singer divides her time between traditional jazz vocals and outside vocal excursions. This is the sparest of the sessions in that it is a duo recording of just voice and acoustic bass, without the added cushion of piano and drums. According to the liner notes, Katie Bull's partner, bassist Joe Fonda, is a like-minded soulmate who shares the same sense of ...
Continue ReadingBull Fonda Duo: Cup of Joe, No Bull
by C. Michael Bailey
In a very effective jazz arranging technique for introductions, the vocalist starts a capella and the bass enters immediately. The two duet with one another for a chorus, at which time the whole ensemble joins the fray. This is a nice touch, adding a bit of tension and expectation to the natural swing of a piece. Cup of Joe, No Bull is an entire recording of this sort of bass-voice tension. It works, for the most part. The straight-ahead pieces ...
Continue ReadingKatie Bull: Love Spook
by Donald Elfman
There seem to be more singers today than ever before, but along with that development come a few who are turning around the notion of just what a singer does and can do. Katie Bull is called a multimedia artist, and that notion informs her every note here. She knows the repertoire and she knows the vocabulary but she also has the sense of drama and choreography that speak to the expansion of the whole field of singing.
Continue ReadingKatie Bull: Love Spook
by Michael P. Gladstone
This is my second experience in hearing jazz singer Katie Bull. Her debut album, Conversations With The Jokers, fully established her as both a mainstream interpreter of the Great American Songbook and a downtown New York City cutting-edge vocalist exploring the more abstract styles of Jay Clayton or Sheila Jordan. The twelve tracks of this new album (the final track is hidden) present a singer who is poised at the threshold of dissonance and deconstruction of established melodies. It leaves ...
Continue ReadingKatie Bull: Conversations with the Jokers
by AAJ Staff
Female jazz vocalists are spoon-fed to the masses these days, made as accessible as possible with their approach and repertoire by, more often than not, big labels and mass marketing machines. If you ask most fans of jazz vocals, however, you'll gather there's a shortage of any memorable, or listenable, vocalists out there. Vocalists such as Sheila Jordan and Jeanne Lee brought interpretive and adventurous jazz vocals to the next level. Such flexible instruments are sorely lacking in our regurgitated ...
Continue ReadingKatie Bull: Conversations with the Jokers
by Trevor MacLaren
With the recent resurgence in female vocal jazz, a lot of competition has arisen. Katie Bull may not yet have the strongest of vocal chops, but she certainly makes up for that in the original and eclectic use of varying styles that piece together her debut, Conversations with the Jokers. Opening up with the Schertzinger/Mercer track 'I Remember You', Bull is haunted by the phrasing of post-Chick Webb Ella Fitzgerald, before taking on the groove of bossa-nova. But it's when ...
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