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

Sean Imboden Large Ensemble: Communal Heart

Read "Communal Heart" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 17, 2026

Communal Heart is the first album by saxophonist and composer Sean Imboden's superb Indiana-based Large Ensemble, recorded about a year before his second recording, Uncharted Realms (Self Produced, 2026). As before, all the compositions and arrangements are Imboden's, while the personnel in the eighteen-member orchestra remains virtually intact. If there is a difference between the two, it is that Imboden's themes are even more intriguing and intense the first time around, which is saying a lot, as Uncharted ...

Radio & Podcasts

Stephen Emmer: Composing At The Edge Of Silence

by Lawrence Peryer
June 17, 2026

Today, The Tonearm's needle lands on Dutch composer and musician Stephen Emmer. Stephen Emmer came up in the late '70s post-punk underground in Amsterdam. His band Minny Pops was the first international act signed to Factory Records. Since then he's been a curious genre-explorer, working with Lou Reed, Chaka Khan, Tony Visconti, Trevor Horn, Flood, and many others. His latest album, Asymmetrical Dot (Electric Fairytale Recordings, 2025), is a chamber work rooted in his Dutch-Indonesian heritage, ...

Album Review

Amalie Dahl's Dafnie EXTENDED: Live at Moldejazz

Read "Live at Moldejazz" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
June 17, 2026

Over the course of a mere five years, Danish saxophonist Amalie Dahl has garnered well-deserved praise as a bandleader, improviser, and composer. A year after releasing the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Står Op Med Solen (Sonic Transmissions, 2024), Dahl expanded her quintet Dafnie to a 12- member combo. They appeared live at the Norwegian Moldejazz Festival. The resulting recording is at once earthy and sophisticated, with a sublime balance of stimulating dissonance and captivating mellifluence. The seven tracks are ...

Play This!

T. Lavitz: No Time Flat

by Mike Jacobs
June 17, 2026

Though technically the name of the group and the album, School of the Arts (Magnatude, 2007) is a T. Lavitz's project, by any other name. It stands unique in the late keyboardist's catalog for it's enlisting of Chick Corea Elektric Band cohorts Dave Weckl, Frank Gambale and John Patitucci, in combination with Lavitz's Dixie Dregs bandmates, Steve Morse and Jerry Goodman. And, as the burning “No Time Flat" shows, the resulting sonic marriage feels akin to what might be termed ...

Radio & Podcasts

Dave Jemilo: The Green Mill

by Mike Jones
June 17, 2026

This week, Mike talks with Dave Jemilo! Dave owns the fabulous Green Mill in Chicago--the oldest jazz club in the United States. Dave is not known as a musician but he got his start with his friends in elementary school in their band Dave Jemilo and the Gems! They never played a gig and in Dave's words, they sucked! But it was the beginning of what would lead Dave to own and run one of the foremost jazz clubs in ...

Interview

Rafael Enciso: Bassist Intends To Search, Remember And Evolve

by Dean Nardi
June 16, 2026

Turn your ears on jazz heads, and you'll hear Rafael Enciso and his quartet playing around New York City's five boroughs. And somewhere nearby, someone will surely be listening to his cooling and coiling debut record Crossfades (2025) on Dayna Stephens' Contagious Music label. It slithers down bowling alley lanes and soda pop convenience store aisles and crawls up the back of the neck. The bass notes are sopping with Northeast nightshade. And trailing them are Nicola Caminiti's alto saxophone, ...

Album Review

Daniel García: The Hero's Journey

Read "The Hero's Journey" reviewed by Neil Duggan

by Neil Duggan
June 16, 2026

Normally found fronting his trio, leading Spanish pianist Daniel Garcia moves to a solo format for The Hero's Journey. Composed during a period of family illness and bereavement, it is perhaps surprising that the album is not dark in any way. Instead Garcia maintains focus on the concept of the hero, as he explains: “For a long time I have been attracted by the hero figure--I'm not thinking at all about some invincible movie superhero, but rather the idea of ...

African Jazz

The Life and Times of South African Jazz

by Philip Songa
June 16, 2026

This article was first published on All About Jazz in January 2004. South Africa has always been a little different from other countries on the African continent. That uniqueness has extended in many directions, but South Africa (SA) is uniquely remembered in the world as the only country to have suffered from apartheid. Despite, and some might say because of, those hard times the country's music industry flourished like no other in Africa. During the dark days, oftentimes ...

Album Review

Peggy Lee, Julien Wilson, Theo Carbo, Dylan van der Schyff: Waiting Music

Read "Waiting Music" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
June 16, 2026

Improvised music operates through a productive tension: collective intuition on one side, and the constant risk of collapse into formlessness on the other. When a group sustains that balance without resolving it into comfort, the results tend to resist easy classification. Waiting Music, the second release by the Australo-Canadian quartet Open Thread, belongs firmly in that space--an album shaped by real-time decision-making, where continuity is always provisional. Open Thread brings together cellist Peggy Lee, saxophonist Julien Wilson, guitarist Theo Carbo, and ...

Album Review

Joe Webb: Neath Beat

Read "Neath Beat" reviewed by Kevin Poindexter

by Kevin Poindexter
June 16, 2026

Joe Webb's Neath Beat is the work of a fascinating artist. Obsessed with both football and Britpop, Webb fuses those passions with his love for South Wales, filtering it all through the musical vocabulary of legendary piano titans like Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson and Count Basie. The result is an album that not only pays tribute to those influences but also stands as a compelling and unique artistic statement on its own. You could easily describe Webb's piano ...