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

Mike Clark: Kuon Ganjo

Read "Kuon Ganjo" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 8, 2026

Not much is really new on veteran drummer Mike Clark's 2026 album, Kuon Ganjo (Time Without Beginning), which encompasses a series of nine hard-bop themes performed by Clark's able quintet. Having said that, the most reasonable question is, do they do it well? And the answer to that is an unequivocal yes. Clark, who has been around the block more than a few times during his decades-long career as a jazz/funk timekeeper and is perhaps best known for ...

Album Review

Daggerboard: The Skipper and Mike Clark

Read "The Skipper and Mike Clark" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 31, 2026

The rhythm section--more specifically, bassist Henry “The Skipper" Franklin and drummer Mike Clark--is front and center on the fourth recording by San Francisco Bay-area Daggerboard, the brainchild of trumpeter Erik Jekabson and percussionist Gregory Howe, who have enlisted a large array of supporting actors to help refine and sharpen their unique musical vision. That includes a four-member string section on three of the album's ten numbers, two of which ("Tanzanian Skies," the closing “Ruaha Daybreak") were written by ...

Album Review

Mike Clark: Itai Doshin

Read "Itai Doshin" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 14, 2025

Itai Doshin is a Buddhist term that, translated from Japanese, refers to a state of harmony wherein individuals share a common goal and purpose, or “many in body, one in mind." That is the level California-based drum legend Mike Clark's quintet strives for on Clark's second album on Gregory Howe's Wide Hive label. Is the mission accomplished? That is for the listener to decide. What can be said is that everyone gives it his (or her) best ...

Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell: One Head Four People

Read "One Head Four People" reviewed by Fran Kursztejn

by Fran Kursztejn
February 7, 2025

"I'm always trying to take what's there and, in the end, make it sound like nothing's missing from it," Roscoe Mitchell relates in a 2016 interview, in relation to his string of European solo concerts, yet the statement is just as relevant to the jazz giant's newest studio release, One Head Four People, as any other. The recording comes just as Mitchell's 2014 performance (released on ugEXPLODE, 2021) A Railroad Spike Forms the Voice celebrates its ten year anniversary, and ...

Album Review

Daggerboard & The Skipper: Daggerboard And the Skipper

Read "Daggerboard And the Skipper" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 16, 2022

For those who think they can tell an album's sound by its cover, think again in the case of Daggerboard and The Skipper. That cover art seems to have come from the walls of an inner sanctum of a Pre-Columbian pyramid. So what kind of music will that be? It is hard to find information on this release. Daggerboard seems to consist of the workings of percussionist/songwriter Gregory Howe and trumpeter/flugelhornist/songwriter Erik Jekabson, of Throttle Elevator Music fame, ...

Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell: Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds

Read "Dots - Pieces For Percussion And Woodwinds" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
October 31, 2021

While Dots, a solo recording by Roscoe Mitchell, is divided into nineteen separate tracks, this entire hour plus recording might be best consumed as a single unit. Mitchell's use of silence here is as essential as the woodwind notes blown and the percussive objects struck. One track leading into the next might be marked by silence, but that soundlessness communicates the recurring themes of this outing. Mitchell, active since the 1960s, has performed solo both alone and as ...

Album Review

Throttle Elevator Music: Final Floor

Read "Final Floor" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
June 30, 2021

Final Floor marks the last stop of a band that one might say never really was. Throttle Elevator Music was the name given to a jazz-punk studio cooperative project organized and operating from 2011 through 2017 around saxophonist Kamasi Washington, drummer Mike Hughes (aka “Lumpy") and composer and guitarist Gregory Howe. Howe also founded and serves as producer and engineer for Wide Hive Records, the label that recorded and distributed their music. He notes on the back jacket ...

Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda: Distant Radio Transmission

Read "Distant Radio Transmission" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 10, 2020

Sometimes music makes you want to become a better dancer, or maybe even a better lover. With Roscoe Mitchell's music, you can't help but aspire to be a better listener. The co-founder of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians creates sounds that transcend jazz, new classical, and avant-garde musics. With Distant Radio Transmission he presents music that he previously recorded (solo or in small improvising groups) and reworked for a 33-piece orchestra, ...

Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell with Ostravska Banda: Distant Radio Transmission

Read "Distant Radio Transmission" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
April 15, 2020

Roscoe Mitchell, a co-founder of the AACM and Art Ensemble of Chicago, continues to discover new intersections of jazz, classical and avant-garde music with Distant Radio Transmission. As he approaches eighty years of age Mitchell has waved off time and tradition, reinventing the AEoC brand with the orchestrated--sometimes operatic--We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (Pi Recordings, 2019), a project that bore little resemblance to the group's historical discography. On this album, he draws on past compositions to ...

Album Review

Erik Jekabson Sextet III: One Note At A Time

Read "One Note At A Time" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 13, 2020

By the time One Note At A Time's first two songs have finished, it's been made abundantly clear that trumpeter Erik Jekabson appreciates a groove as much as he values space. The opener—"Days of Haze"—provides an introductory shot of adrenaline in the form of a tight, funk-framed blues, and “Dusk," in contrast, looks to open vistas, with longer lines and a less-is-more attitude reflecting the liminal spirit in its name. Foreshadowing what's to come, those early offerings prove complementary through ...