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.
Sign in to customize your My Articles page —or— Filter Article Results
Sean Ali: Quartets For Plucked Strings
by Mark Corroto
Listening to Quartets for Plucked Strings without knowing its backstory poses no obstacle. The music invites you to follow your imagination. Sean Ali, best known as a bassist, composer, and improviser, shifts focus on this release, trading his acoustic bass for three mandolins and a steel-string acoustic guitar. While his previous solo effort, A Blink in the Sun (Neither/Nor Records, 2021), highlighted the bass in exploratory detail, this new project adopts a multitracked ensemble approach--Ali becoming his own quartet. Composition ...
Continue ReadingDiaphane: München
by Mark Corroto
The quartet Diaphane lives up to its name, creating music marked by an exquisite delicacy of form. Yet, their sound is as dynamic as it is subtle --quiet and loud, minimal and intense, ethereal and robust. Longtime collaborators in ensembles such as Natura Morta and the Frantz Loriot Systematic Distortion Orchestra, Italian percussionist Carlo Costa and French-Japanese violist Frantz Loriot founded this free improvisation group with Swiss pianist Raphael Loher and German tubist Carl Ludwig Hübsch. Together, they have toured ...
Continue ReadingJonathan Mortiz & Mike Pride: Summertime
by Mark Corroto
Sumertime by the duo of Jonathan Moritz and Mike Pride highlights the distinction between paying attention and attention paid. The former deals with concentration, while the latter concerns awareness or consciousness. With this release or any free improvisation experience, immersion prevails over comprehension. In other words, dig the view instead of building a camp here. Mortiz's saxophone has been paired with Pride's drums in several groups, with Ken Filiano and Nate Wooley, the Jonathan Moritz Trio, and the ...
Continue ReadingHans Koch / Frantz Loriot / Jonas Kocher: Stranger Becoming
by Mark Corroto
The title says it all, Stranger Becoming. Not “becoming stranger," but Stranger Becoming as in unusual yet attractive or tasteful. That certainly is a perfect descriptor for the music generated by the trio of Hans Koch(clarinet), Frantz Loriot (viola), and Jonas Kocher (accordion). All three have a background in classical music which serves as the foundation for the sound of this session. From that cornerstone the trio delves into free improvisations on these six tracks. Their music is ...
Continue ReadingFlin van Hemmen: You Can Know Where The Bombs Fell
by Mark Corroto
The Dutch-born guitarist turned drummer turned pianist turned studio sound engineer Flin van Hemmen follows Casting Spells & The Coves (Neither/nor Records, 2019) with You Can Know Where The Bombs Fell, another artifact of his post production and processing of recorded sound. He makes use of samples from the Casting Spells sessions, but unlike that release, the individual voices of Todd Neufeld and Eivind Opsvik are only barely recognizable. This outing is more field recording, best described as the the ...
Continue ReadingFlin van Hemmen: Casting Spells & The Coves
by Mark Corroto
If you live in the US you might have seen a television commercial for a mortgage company that utilizes Bob Dylan's composition “The Man In Me." Did the advertising firm choose this song because music gives us a sense of a shared experience? Certainly. Was the experience from the original Dylan recording New Morning (Columbia, 1977), or more likely, the shared occurrence come from the the soundtrack to the cult film The Big Lebowski. Does this use make mortgages cool? ...
Continue ReadingHåvard Volden / Carlo Costa: In the Wake
by Jakob Baekgaard
How would it sound if the American primitive guitar of John Fahey met the avant-garde of abstract jazz improvisation in the wilderness? Guitarist Håvard Volden and drummer Carlo Costa give the answer on their album In the Wake. The cover by Brooke Herr is an image of an abstract seascape that resides somewhere between the referential image and a manipulation that goes beyond the image. The same thing goes for the music that uses the recognizable sounds ...
Continue ReadingWhile We Still Have Bodies: While We Still Have Bodies
by Tyran Grillo
While We Still Have Bodies names the collaboration of trombonist Ben Gerstein, bassist Sean Ali, saxophonist Michael Foster, and percussionist Flin van Hemmen. The more one listens to their spontaneous creations, however, the less important such roster division becomes, receding in deference to forces without proper name. To achieve such effect is no small task, for it requires a selflessness that can only come from musicians who understand themselves.In this hour-long free improvisation consisting of tape collages, lo-fi ...
Continue ReadingWhile We Still Have Bodies: While We Still Have Bodies
by Mark Corroto
Has music always been about making something from nothing? Before the invention of instruments, birds sang and nature kept time. Jimi reminded us, “and the wind cried Mary." Before notes on a page, there was just blank paper, after notes, came improvisation and things got interesting. Class dismissed.I'm betting the quartet While We Still Have Bodies follows the lesson above, applying the concept of devolution. Not the classical definition of transfer of rights, powers, property to another, but ...
Continue ReadingSean Ali: My Tongue Crumbles After
by Karl Ackermann
Improvisational bassist Sean Ali began his musical life as a guitarist, studying sitar and oud along the way. The Ohio native has been in New York City for more than a decade now and performs as a solo bassist, an ensemble player, and a spoken-word artist. He is the founder of The Mudbath Orchestra, a large ensemble that has been performing in and around NYC since 2011. My Tongue Crumbles After is Ali's solo bass debut album and features eight ...
Continue Reading
