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

Rich Pellegrin: Topography (featuring Neil Welch)

Read "Topography (featuring Neil Welch)" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 8, 2024

Whidbey Island, nestled in the nook of Puget Sound, must be an inspiring place. Pianist Rich Pellegrin finds it so. He has recorded two solo works here, Solitude (OA2 Records, 2021), (review here) and Passage (OA2 Records, 2022), (review here). Both of these works--recorded in the same session--have a feeling of serenity, of an escape from the mind-numbing necessities of modern life; they elicit a cool, pastoral frame of mind, inspired by the isolation, climate, topography, and the verdant flora ...

Album Review

Ian Carey: Strange Arts

Read "Strange Arts" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 29, 2024

Wood Metal Plastic is a septet that consists of a jazz quartet (trumpet, alto saxophone, bass, drums) and three-member string section presided over by San Francisco Bay area-based trumpeter Ian Carey, who wrote and arranged the material on his seventh album as leader, Strange Arts. It was recorded as a tribute to Carey's father, the innovative visual artist Philip Carey, who died in 2022. Aside from Carey, those in the quartet are alto Kasey Knudsen, bassist Lisa ...

Album Review

SLUGish Ensemble: In Solitude

Read "In Solitude" reviewed by Robert Middleton

by Robert Middleton
October 14, 2023

This is an extremely satisfying and enjoyable album on so many levels. First of all, it is infused with lovely, dancing grooves. The opener, “Del Sur," sets the pace with a provocative, snakelike bass clarinet solo. It all falls into place like a song one has known forever. Most of the songs name-check the streets of the Miraloma neighborhood in San Francisco, where Steven Lugerner lived during the pandemic and where he came to embrace solitude. In the ...