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.

Live Review

Orquesta Akokán at The Freight

by Roy Strassman
August 28, 2026

Orquesta Akokán The Freight & Salvage Live performance Berkeley, CAAugust 7, 2026 Orquesta Akokán had just flown in from its European tour and was playing the first of its Bay Area weekend performances at Berkeley's Freight & Salvage, currently called “The Freight." They hit the ground running with “Con Altura," (With Altitude), a seeming oxymoron, were it not that the band simply took off again, filling the dance floor until the final “adios" some ...

Play This!

Lionel Loueke: Actual Proof

by Geno Thackara
August 28, 2026

Adapting a little Herbie Hancock material is manageable enough for anyone with solid instrumental skills. Doing it without a piano might be a bit more tricky. Adapting it for solo guitar and voice is another challenge entirely, but his longtime sideman Lionel Loueke is more than up to the challenge, not just mastering the song forms but using his innate rhythmic roots to both grasp the melody and bring the funk. ...

Album Review

Oliver-Smith Incomparables: Stomp Your Stuff

Read "Stomp Your Stuff" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 28, 2026

Although he was best known as a pianist, the late Jelly Roll Morton was never shy when it came to blowing his own horn. Among Morton's claims was that he had “invented" jazz, an assertion that almost surely stretches the truth but is virtually impossible to disprove. What is known is that Morton was playing a form of jazz as early as 1904 and that he and a later band, the Red Hot Peppers, helped place “hot jazz" on the ...

Play This!

Brian Bromberg: Top Down

by Geno Thackara
August 28, 2026

One might not think there are many places to find a new wrinkle to instrumental guitar rock, but Brian Bromberg manages it on an interesting technicality: not using any guitars. For this 2005 highway cruise, he doubles himself on electric five-string and high-tuned piccolo bass, making a “trio" outing full of wild grooves and sweet fuzz tones that continually sound just a bit different from your usual axe-fest. ...

Album Review

Enoch Smith Jr.: This Is What Love Does

Read "This Is What Love Does" reviewed by D.W. Long

by D.W. Long
August 28, 2026

When the medium artists use is typically wordless, how do they tell their story? Pianist Enoch Smith Jr.. has confronted this question, turned it over, and not only accepted the challenge, but mastered it. In a follow-up to The Book of Enoch Vol. 1 (Misfitme Music, 2025), Smith continues to joyfully tell his tale through This is What Love Does, his 2026 release. Conceived and executed as an acoustic trio album, the project's nine songs--of which seven are originals--explore family, ...

Album Review

Sullivan Fortner: Leave That In There

Read "Leave That In There" reviewed by Pierre Giroux

by Pierre Giroux
August 28, 2026

Sullivan Fortner has never been an artist short on ideas. But Leave That In There feels different. It is the sound of a musician who has distilled everything he has absorbed from his deep well of Gulf South upbringing, from the piano giants and from spirituals and street parades, into his own language. It is easily his most personal record to date, a musical scrapbook of memories, ancestry, humour, grief, and resilience. The title draws on Spike Lee's ...

Radio & Podcasts

Azar Lawrence, Brad Mehldau, The Bad Plus, Joshua Redman And More

by Lawrence Peryer
August 28, 2026

I am endlessly interested in the intersection of music and ritual. Formal ritual, spiritual gatherings incorporating music, even liturgical music. Then there are the rituals of making music: the band silently setting up and breaking down, on-stage and in the studio. The order in which gear gets assembled and plugged in. The in-jokes or running gags. All of these things contribute to creating a space for magic to happen. This week, the conjuring comes from Koen Holtkamp, Guest Bartender Deborah ...

Radio & Podcasts

Dave Frank

by Daniel Peck
August 28, 2026

Dave Frank is one of the busiest solo jazz pianists and music educators on the scene today. He is the author of the best-selling Hal Leonard book and video series, Joy of Improv and Breakthrough to Improv, was an Associate Professor of piano at Berklee College of Music in Boston from 1987-2004, and was a co-founder of the New York School of Jazz. His involvement in the Dave Frank School of Jazz in New York is kind of ...

Radio & Podcasts

Chapter 3: Manic in Manhattan

by Larry Slater
August 28, 2026

Artie Shaw was an enigma. A self-taught, brilliant clarinetist blessed with movie-star good looks, he became one of the defining musicians of the Big Band era. Yet at the height of his fame, he walked away from the music business, leaving behind a legacy as fascinating as it was influential. In the early '90s, Ted Hallock--a passionate jazz scholar and former Oregon state senator--spent a week with Shaw recording an extraordinary series of in-depth conversations about music, life ...

Catching Up With

Elias Haslanger: Music for 2026, Not 1956

by Hank Hehmsoth
August 27, 2026

Tenor saxophonist and composer Elias Haslanger has spent much of his career carrying several generations of jazz history at once. An Austin native and longtime presence on the Central Texas jazz scene, he has absorbed lessons from mentors including Ellis Marsalis, Dr. James Polk and Maynard Ferguson while developing his own identity as a bandleader and composer. Legacy (Bandstand Presents, 2026), his ninth recording as leader, was released July 24 and features ten original compositions performed with trumpeter and flugelhornist Mike Sailors, pianists Andy ...