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.

Radio & Podcasts

Gabrielle Cavassa, Joe Lovano, Phillip Golub, Amrita, James Wengrow

by Cheryl K.
May 31, 2026

During this week's two-hour program of jazz and improvised music--vocalists Eartha Kitt, Gabrielle Cavassa and Stella Heath; saxophonist Joe Lovano and his Paramount Quartet; pianists Phillip Golub and Emmet Cohen; the ensemble Tumbao Bravo with bandleader and reedman Paul Vornhagen; the ensemble Ancient Future; the duo Amrita; and guitarists Vladimir Redzic, Tomas Janzon, and James Wengrow with his Crypsis Trio. Playlist Eartha Kitt “Empty House" from Thinking Jazz (ITM) 5:35 Gabrielle Cavassa “Bossy Nova" from Diavola (Blue Note) ...

Album Review

Phillip Golub: Partisan Ship

Read "Partisan Ship" reviewed by Mike Jurkovic

by Mike Jurkovic
May 31, 2026

In a lot off ways, it is a game of catch-up listening to Brooklyn pianist/improvisor/composer Phillip Golub once he kick-starts the oddly titled Partisan Ship into high gear with “Loyalty Oath," a piece of mad musical fiction that holds attention in place with its octopi rhythms and runaway melodies rushing in all at once. Partisan Ship is oddly titled because Golub, an unapologetic polymath far out on the progressive spectrum, and his juiced and jazzed up cohorts--clarinetist and ...

Play This!

Dida Pelled: Blues in the Night

by Ludovico Granvassu
May 31, 2026

Dida Pelled's I Wish You Would (La Reserve) is more than a love letter to the blues, a genre she returns to after the high bar she set with A Missing Shade of Blue (Red Records). It is the definitive statement of an artist whose signature lies in the irresistible contrast between the understated intimacy of her voice--soft, almost delicate, yet impossible to ignore--and a guitar style that is warm, sophisticated and quietly virtuosic, never showy, never a wasted note. ...

Album Review

Pierre Favre: Bird Food

Read "Bird Food" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
May 31, 2026

Captured live at Radio Studio Zurich in 1968, this is the earliest known recording of the Pierre Favre Trio, dormant for more than half a century until Favre and trombonist Samuel Blaser unearthed it while sorting through forgotten tapes. That it survived at all feels faintly miraculous, the jazz equivalent of finding cash in an old winter coat. The lineup now reads like a rough sketch of European free jazz before the paint dried. Pierre Favre anchors the ...

Interview

Miho Hazama: Where Groove Meets Orchestra

by Angelo Leonardi
May 30, 2026

Since making her debut in 2013 at the helm of M_Unit with Journey to Journey, Miho Hazama has built a body of work that has firmly established her among the leading orchestrators of her generation. Over the past decade, the Japanese composer and conductor has collaborated extensively with European orchestras, and since 2020 she has served as one of the three chief conductors of the Metropole Orkest, alongside Vince Mendoza and Jules Buckley. Among the many ...

History of Jazz

In Circuses and Carnivals, Sideshows Brought Black Music To The Heartland

by Arthur R George
May 30, 2026

Black musicians in circus and carnival sideshow bands from the late 1800s well into the Twentieth Century brought ragtime and what would become jazz and rhythm and blues to white audiences deep into Midwest agricultural regions. Trumpeter Lester Bowie, later known for the avant-garde Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Brass Fantasy, joined circus and carnival bands early in his career when he needed any job he could get, ...

Album Review

Daniel Rotem: Solo II - Under Construction At Bluewhale

Read "Solo II - Under Construction At Bluewhale" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
May 30, 2026

This album plays as a story of second comings, both for a beloved West Coast jazz spot and a compelling artist's solitary explorations. Back in the fall of 2024, bluewhale--one of L.A.'s most welcoming clubs, permanently shuttered at its original location during the pandemic--was in the midst of starting a new lease on life in a different space. On November 10 of that year, venue proprietor Joon Lee held an open house to signal the shape of a scene to ...

Album Review

Sharon Minemoto: Goodbye, Strawberry Hill

Read "Goodbye, Strawberry Hill" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 30, 2026

The years 1942 through 1945 embody a dark chapter in American and Canadian history--not only in terms of the grievous losses of life and treasure during World War II but also for the abandonment of human rights and the cruel and indefensible treatment of many thousands of their fellow citizens, more specifically those of Japanese descent. Generations have passed, and most people today have either forgotten or never knew about what happened during those few horrendous years--but many ...

Radio & Podcasts

Meredith Bates: The Quiet Science Of Sound Worlds

by Lawrence Peryer
May 30, 2026

Today we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Meredith Bates, a JUNO Award-winning violinist and composer based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.Meredith's recent double album, The Observer Effect, spans roughly 140 minutes of electroacoustic music built from violin, viola, field recordings, and electronics, composed and recorded live in the studio, with very few edits. It's grounded in the physics principle that observation changes what's being observed, an idea she takes personally, musically, and politically.Meredith talks about ...

Album Review

David Torn: Now I Imagine A Place Not The Same

Read "Now I Imagine A Place Not The Same" reviewed by Maciej Stasiowski

by Maciej Stasiowski
May 30, 2026

Lacking recognizable features, yet constituting a genre of their own, John Constable's 1821-1822 cloud studies come up as an evocative metaphor for David Torn's Only Sky (ECM Records, 2015). What Constable referred to as “skying," almost two centuries later, made a comeback as an arrangement of distortions, loops, and cascaded signal processing, which Torn jokingly nicknamed “guitaring." That album collected improvised compositions for a solo guitarist and a halo of effect pedals and--with a little help from the cover photograph--connoted ...