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
Kjetil Mulelid: Agoja
by Chris May
Over the course of three albums with his trio between 2019 and 2022, and the exquisitely pretty solo set Piano (Rune Grammofon, 2021), keyboardist Kjetil Mulelid has emerged as a bright new star in Norwegian jazz. His playing is vivacious, his composing melodic and his overall sound consonant but full of unexpected twists and turns. Mulelid has been mentioned in the same breath as Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, and the comparisons, though excitable, have some merit.
read moreEspen Berg: Water Fabric
by Chris May
The Norwegian pianist and composer Espen Berg has already carved out a formidable reputation with his trio. Earlier in 2023 he began a parallel strand with The Trondheim Concert (NXN), the recording of a wholly in-the-moment improvised solo concert, in the Keith Jarrett tradition, which he gave in 2019. Berg has since released two more albums in the same vein: The Nidaros Concert and The Hamar Concert (both NXN, 2023). Berg is also heard to advantage in ...
read moreAndre Roligheten: Marbles
by Chris May
Tenor saxophonist André Roligheten is best known outside his native Norway, and wider Scandinavia, as a member of drummer Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity and as a composer/arranger in the berserker big band, Supersonic Orchestra. Nilssen returns the favour on Marbles, one of Roligheten's infrequent own-name releases. The album has grown out of a band Roligheten put together in spring 2021 for the Trondheim Jazz Festival, which had commissioned a new piece from him. The band was called ...
read moreHanna Paulsberg Concept: Daughter Of The Sun
by Chris May
Ever since Jan Garbarek put Norwegian jazz on the map in the late 1980s, and even more so after the international success of his singularly ascetic Officium (ECM) in 1994, the music has acquired a reputation for being, if not entirely lacking in passion, then at least emotionally detached. Since the millennium, with the emergence of a new generation of musicians at the forefront of the electronica movement, showcased annually at Norway's influential Punkt festival, the country's jazz has, justly ...
read moreGard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: To Whom Who Buys A Record
by Chris May
In July 2019, Gard Nilssen will be Artist-in-Residence at the prestigious, future-facing Molde Jazz Festival. It will be a busy week for the Norwegian drummer, composer and sonic adventurer. As well as guest appearances, he will perform with several of his bands--SpaceMonkey, an electronica/dance music mash-up he co-founded five years ago; Bushman's Revenge, which may be the missing link between Albert Ayler and Black Sabbath and which he co-founded in 2003; the more recently formed Amgala Temple, which draws comparisons ...
read moreEspen Berg Trio: Free To Play
by Chris May
If you ask a jazz fan to name the greatest piano-trio albums ever made, the probability is that their top twenty choices will include most, if not all, of the following: Erroll Garner's Concert By The Sea (Columbia, 1955), Ahmad Jamal's But Not For Me (Argo, 1958), Bill Evans's Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), Keith Jarrett's Standards Volume 2 (ECM, 1983) and Brad Mehldau's The Art Of The Trio Vol. 1 (Warner Bros., 1996), or in the cases ...
read moreGard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra: If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours
by Chris May
Fasten your seat belt, please. Get ready for the full tilt, barely tamed, beautiful monster that is Gard Nilssen's sixteen-piece Supersonic Orchestra. Audacious and experimentalist, like everything the Norwegian drummer and composer touches, Supersonic flouts convention and, in particular, realigns the longstanding relationship between pre-composition and improvisation in orchestral jazz. If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours, its debut, was recorded live at the adventurous Molde International Jazz Festival in 2019, where Nilssen was Artist in Residence. The band's ...
read moreFlukten: Velkommen Håp
by Chris May
The first thing that may strike you about Norwegian quartet Flukten's debut album is the sleeve art. This shows a naked man with his back to the camera, limbs spread wide and with something dangling between his legs. It looks like a penis, but smaller. Flukten (in English the name means The Escape and the album title means Welcome Hope) comprises four of Norway's most distinctive musicians: tenor saxophonist Hanna Paulsberg (Hanna Paulsberg Concept, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra), ...
read moreGard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra: If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours
by John Eyles
Before getting onto the music on If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours, the debut album by the appropriately named Gard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra, it is well worth taking a look at the instrumentation of this sixteen-member ensemble. Firstly, every member is credited with playing percussion, in addition to three of the sixteen being drummers, including Gard Nilssen himself. And with three double bassists, this orchestra has a rhythm section which packs quite a punch. The remaining ten members ...
read moreAtomic: Pet Variations
by John Eyles
Formed in the spring of 2000, Scandinavian “supergroup" Atomic recorded and released their first album Feet Music (Jazzland) in 2001. The years since have been remarkably stable for the quintet; they have produced albums at an impressive rate of about a disc a year, including two collaborations with Ken Vandermark's School Days group. The only change of Atomic personnel occurred in 2014 when drummer Paal Nilssen-Love left to be replaced by Hans Hulbækmo, with no cataclysmic effect on the music, ...
read more
Giveaway
Days remaining: 10
