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

John Dikeman: No Kings

by John Sharpe
January 7, 2026

Recorded live in 2022, No Kings documents a volatile meeting between a formidable European horn partnership and American free jazz royalty. In 2015, expat American saxophonist John Dikeman initiated a trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. Five years later, he invited Portuguese trumpeter Luis Vicente to join them, resulting in the quartet heard here on its second album, following Goes Without Saying, But It's Got To Be Said (JACC Records, 2020). The reedman and brass player share ...

Album Review

Chamber 4: Dawn To Dusk

Read "Dawn To Dusk" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
February 5, 2022

The third album from the French-Portuguese collective Chamber 4 might be the aural equivalent of comfort food. A nourishing feast of spontaneous communal navigation which slips down easily, but leaves you wanting more. Not that there's any attempt to replicate past glories from their eponymous debut (FMR, 2015) or City Of Light (Clean Feed, 2017). Instead the unchanged cast of trumpeter Luis Vicente, guitarist Marcelo dos Reis and the brothers violinist Theo Ceccaldi and cellist Valentin Ceccaldi once ...

Album Review

Fail Better!: The Fall

by John Sharpe
November 14, 2021

For its third album following Zero Sum (JACC, 2014) and Owt (NoBusiness, 2016), adventurous Portuguese improvising outfit Fail Better! presents selections from a 2017 concert in the city of Coimbra. Although the instrumentation remains the same, this time out drummer Marco Franco and Lisbon-based Catalan saxophonist Albert Cirera join core members trumpeter Luis Vicente, guitarist Marcelo dos Reis and bassist Jose Miguel Pereira. Of the newbies, Franco is the more regular collaborator with Vicente, as can be heard on the ...

Album Review

Luís Vicente / John Dikeman / William Parker / Hamid Drake: Goes Without Saying, But It's Got To Be Said

Read "Goes Without Saying, But It's Got To Be Said" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 6, 2021

It has been more than half a century since the oracles Albert Ayler and John Coltrane proclaimed their message of freedom to the people of earth. Please excuse the grandiosity of the above statement, but after those two giants passed, a shift in consciousness began to take hold. In the biography of William Parker Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), Cisco Bradley relates how the passing of Ayler and Coltrane affected the young ...

Album Review

Pedra Contida: Xisto

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 4, 2014

Pedra Contida (contained stone in Portuguese) is a Portuguese quintet assembled by guitarist Marcelo dos Reis to work together for a week in the remote mountain village Cerdeira in Serra da Lousã, in the Coimbra district of Portugal. The five musicians-- dos Reis also on prepared guitar, voice and singing bowls are Angélica V. Salvi on harp, Nuno Torres on alto sax, Miguel Carvalhais computer, and João Pais Filipe who also collaborates with dos Reis in the Fail Better! quintet ...

Album Review

Fail Better!: Zero Sum

Read "Zero Sum" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
May 23, 2014

The name of the Portuguese quintet Fail Better! is inspired by Samuel Beckett who advised: “ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better." This saying, together with the one of Miles Davis who claimed that there are no mistakes in music, capture the very essence of the process of free improvisation. And, obviously its real-time sense of experiment and discovery, a walk on a thin line between magic and the sonic equivalent of psychodrama. ...

Album Review

Rodrigo Amado: Burning Live At Jazz AO Centro

Read "Burning Live At Jazz AO Centro" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 26, 2012

Rodrigo Amado's improvising Motion Trio might be better described as The Confluence Trio or Conflux, because its sound is a meeting of rivers. Like the three rivers of Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to create the Ohio River, or Sangam, India where the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet, the music of the Motion Trio flows together to create a seamless whole, as was quite evident on its self-titled debut, Motion Trio (European Echoes, 2010).The trio ...