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
Adam Fairhall / Johnny Hunter: Winifred Atwell Revisited
by Chris May
Winifred Atwell was a gifted pianist, born in Trinidad, who came to Britain to study classical music at the Royal Academy of Music in 1946. By the early 1950s, a combination of talent and a husband who knew his way around British popular entertainment had established Atwell as a bill-topping theatrical and recording star. Atwell's happy-go-lucky “honky tonk" style was a combination of American boogie woogie, which she had picked up from US servicemen in Trinidad, and ...
read moreLet Spin: Steal The Light
by Chris May
Formed in 2014, London's Let Spin is an electric quartet peopled by musicians who emerged around a decade earlier as part of a scene which was rather lazily dubbed “punk jazz" by British music journalists. The music was certainly loud, irreverent and in-your-face, but it was played by musicians who were conservatoire graduates, a demographic not associated with punk in its original knuckle- scraping manifestation. Let Spin's Ruth Goller and Chris Williams were members of two of ...
read moreBeats and Pieces Big Band: Ten
by Ian Patterson
You'd be hard pressed to find a similarly sized big-band with the energy and spark exhibited by Manchester outfit Beats and Pieces Big Band. The fourteen-piece ensemble began life in the Royal Northern College of Music in 2008, when Ben Cottrell gathered thirteen of his fellow musicians to give life to his compositions. Ten years on, and in the same rehearsal room where it all started, Cottrell leads the band through ten tunes—played entirely from memory—that are a celebration of ...
read moreAnton Hunter: Article XI
by Ian Patterson
If Frank Zappa had been co-musical director of Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra then the results might have sounded something like Article XI. Think Carla Bley's charts, Haden's missionary passion and Zappa's sudden shifts in direction and you may begin to get an idea of the terrain Anton Hunter's eleven-piece band explore on this live performance--the band's debut. Commissioned by the Manchester Jazz Festival in 2014, the title refers to Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which ...
read moreAdam Fairhall: Friendly Ghosts
by Roger Farbey
Following undergraduate studies, virtuoso pianist Adam Fairhall took a Master's degree at Leeds College of Music, receiving a MMus in Jazz Studies (Performance) in 2005. Whilst at Leeds he studied with pianist Mark Donlon and took lessons with British jazz composer Matthew Bourne. The title of his album Friendly Ghosts, Fairhall's debut recording as a soloist, gives a strong clue as to its contents, revisiting as it does the earliest sounds of jazz to the most avant-garde. Stylistically, ...
read moreBeats & Pieces Big Band: All In
by Bruce Lindsay
While almost every sensible thought screams “Don't Do It!" for good economic and logistical reasons, there are still plenty of jazz musicians for whom the big band is an ideal--and an attainable one at that. Manchester's Beats & Pieces Big Band is a fine example--the name may or may not be a nod to Manchester's '60s popsters the Dave Clark Five, but the music is firmly descended from the big bands that came before. A large ensemble that's been together ...
read moreQuadraceratops: Quadraceratops
by Bruce Lindsay
It's a question that's puzzled and divided jazz fans and critics alike, since before Louis Armstrong left New Orleans. There's been no sign of resolution and the dissent continues as the jazz world wrestles with this thorniest of debates. Just what is the best-est dinosaur ever? The music on this self-titled debut provides the answer--it's the Quadraceratops. This particular Quadraceratops is a London-based septet led by alto saxophonist and composer Cath Roberts, who brought the band together in ...
read moreLet Spin: Let Spin
by Roger Farbey
This eponymously titled album emanates from a new and exciting British band, which although the brainchild of its guitarist Moss Freed, is not actually his band as such, in that there is no formal leader and each of the quartet share equal composing duties. Freed has already made two fine albums under his own name (under the aegis of The Moss Project), whilst bassist Ruth Goller latterly played with the well-established UK band Acoustic Ladyland. Chris Williams is alto saxophonist ...
read moreBeats And Pieces Big Band: Big Ideas
by Bruce Lindsay
Beats And Pieces Big Band: a great name, for this is a band that knows how to emphasize the beat. Big Ideas, the debut album from this Manchester-based ensemble (a four-track EP was released in 2009 but is now deleted), is filled with danceable grooves and rhythms, mixed in with some more reflective melodies to create an absorbing and stimulating set.The band--the brainchild of Ben Cottrell, who's the director and the composer of all of the tunes except ...
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 3
