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.

Catching Up With

Louis Hayes: Still Moving Straight Ahead

by Joan Gannij
May 23, 2017

Louis Hayes will turn 80 on May 31 (2017), but the party is still goin' hearty. He started celebrating this milestone back in February with an 18-day tour that began in Barcelona and concluded in Amsterdam. It was mostly one-nighters with three nights in Athens, two in Paris and London appearances at the usual places, like Fasching in Stockholm, the Sunset Club and Ronnie Scott's. I caught the Detroit native during his final concert at the Bimhuis in the Dutch ...

Album Review

Peter Dominguez: Groove Dreams

Read "Groove Dreams" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
May 23, 2017

Groove Dreams resonates on a number of levels. In the most obvious sense, it's a testament to the skill, imagination, and resourcefulness of bassist Peter Dominguez, an artist who operates with a profound depth of understanding in both formal and creative realms. But it's also a link to the relationship that Dominguez formed with bass icon Milt Hinton, a showcase for the latter's finely crafted eighteenth-century Italian instrument, and a piece of documentary evidence indicative of the high value that ...

Album Review

PHO: Two

by Joe Gatto
May 23, 2017

PHO, the Minneapolis funk band, is one of the hottest rising stars on the modern funk music scene. Even Prince thought so. The Purple One got hip to PHO, and then invited the group to open for Larry Graham at Paisley Park. Since then, PHO has played with The Motet, Dopapod, Dam-Funk, Dumpstaphunk and many more. It was early 2016 when Prince found the band via Youtube and posted about them on his social media. This ...

Album Review

Hampshire And Foat: Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand

Read "Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
May 23, 2017

Greg Foat has been making waves on the British jazz scene for several years now with albums such as Dancers At The End Of Time prime examples of his creative originality. He's a big fan of the “golden age" of British jazz spanning the 1960s and 70s but his compositions are never derivative. Foat has teamed-up here with his mate from the Isle of Wight, Warren Hampshire whose day job is as a member of British indie band The Bees.

Album Review

Itaru Oki - Nobuyoshi Ino - Choi Sun Bae: Kami Fusen

Read "Kami Fusen" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
May 23, 2017

Prominent Japanese trumpeter Itaru Oki and bassist Nobuyoshi Ino recorded this album in 1996 at a Café in Yamaguchi, Japan, and Korean trumpeter Choi Sun Bae flew into town just for this gig. Consequently, no drums or chordal instruments enable the trio to work from an open forum with few if any restrictions, especially when considering the free jazz aspects. Yet, they do convey a cozy group-centric deportment on these works consisting of variable ebbs and flows amid bright and ...

Multiple Reviews

Tim Motzer: Wandering the Depths of Space

by Geno Thackara
May 22, 2017

There are guitarists, and then there are sound sculptors who use the guitar as one tool among many (and of course there's no small overlap between the two). Tim Motzer happily resides in both camps but tends to lean toward the latter description most--when running a single axe through a continually changing array of jerry-rigged technology, it's not unusual for him to spend as much time twiddling knobs as he does fingering frets. With such a range of sonics to ...

Album Review

Quercus: Nightfall

Read "Nightfall" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
May 22, 2017

It may have taken seven years for the innovative British trio featuring singer June Tabor, saxophonist Iain Ballamy and pianist Huw Warren to find a label and release their first album together, but they sure landed on their feet. Not only was the trio's 2013 debut, Quercus, released on the renowned ECM imprint; it was also enthusiastically received by critics and fans alike, winning that year's prestigious German record critics' Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Jahrespreis (Album of the Year). And ...

Album Review

Verneri Pohjola: Pekka

by Roger Farbey
May 22, 2017

The highly-anticipated follow-up to Verneri Pohjola's widely acclaimed 2015 album Bullhorn consolidates his position as Finland's foremost jazz musician. His prodigious talent is hardly surprising given that his late father was the internationally acclaimed jazz-influenced prog-rock bassist and composer Pekka Pohjola, who died in 2008 aged just 56. This album is a reworking of some of Pohjola senior's tunes, but integrated into his son's vibrant compositions. It necessarily takes a different turn from Pohjola's previous album, harnessing elements of jazz ...

Album Review

Calabria Foti: In the Still of the Night

Read "In the Still of the Night" reviewed by Nicholas F. Mondello

by Nicholas F. Mondello
May 22, 2017

With In the Still of the Night, vocalist Calabria Foti joins the ranks of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Oscar Peterson, and many others -vocalists and instrumentalists -who have dived deeply into the Cole Porter canon. It takes a very special talent to deftly probe the poetic and pithy romantic lingo that the Classic material offers. So, while that ocean is Trench deep, how is one to pluck new musical perspectives and give old ones a novel patina? Foti, along with ...

Album Review

Mihaly Dresch Quartet with Chris Potter: Zea

by Glenn Astarita
May 22, 2017

Hungarian reedman Mihaly Dresch is one of the more prominent jazz artists in Eastern Europe and generally sets high standards for his work. On this beautifully crafted live outing with American sax great Chris Potter, the ensemble melds tuneful melodies with Hungarian folk, dirge-like balladry, hyper-mode bop and progressive jazz via an uplifting mode of operations amid high-flying motifs and buoyant storylines. Potter contributes 2 tracks, but the opener “Togo," is a composition by famed drummer Ed Blackwell, ...