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

Jeff Lorber Fusion: Prototype

Read "Prototype" reviewed by Jeff Winbush

by Jeff Winbush
April 13, 2017

Fusion. Is there a dirtier word to the refined ears of the jazz connoisseur? For them the sound of their sacred music mashed up with low-brow rock or common R n' B rhythms must be as harsh and annoying as sharpened nails dragging across a blackboard. Well, suck it up, buttercups, because Prototype is nothing if not Jeff Lorber and his crew of merrymakers rocking and rolling and funkin' it up as bad they wanna be. The core ...

Opinion

NEA Dismantling: Let's Do The Time Warp Again

by Homer Jackson
April 12, 2017

In a response to the recent local and national actions demanding that President Trump rescind his proposal to dismantle the NEA/NEH/IMLS, I feel like I'm in a sorta twisted, time-warp. Twenty years ago, in the midst of the 1990s, the very same debate to decimate the NEA by a Republican-empowered Congress took place. Lots of news stories, factoids and even mythology about the benefits and/or wasted resources concerning the Arts and Arts Education clogged the air waves. After ...

Album Review

Amanda Monaco: Glitter

by Dan Bilawsky
April 12, 2017

The multi-talented Mae West once said that “personality is the glitter that sends your little gleam across the footlights and the orchestra pit into that big black space where the audience is." West, of course, thrived in a different era, worked in different formats, and was more than likely addressing another artistic discipline entirely with that specific statement. But those remarks still apply here. In fact, everything in there--minus the orchestra pit and footlights--is really dead-on. Guitarist ...

New York @ Night

Glass @ 80: Philip Glass & Foday Musa Suso with Jeffrey Zeigler and Asher Delerme

by Peter Jurew
April 12, 2017

Philip Glass National Sawdust Brooklyn, NY March 12, 2017 On their own, National Sawdust and World Music Institute are two smartly run non-profit cultural organizations that produce wonderful programming for smart, loyal audiences. Together, the two can be dynamic co-conspirators in the effort to stage the kind of riveting, genre-bending artistic expression that can transcend borders and begin to salve the collective wounds inflicted by our sorry times. Such was the case in December when ...

Album Review

Trish Clowes: My Iris

by Phil Barnes
April 12, 2017

There's an energy and a focus about this, Clowes fourth album for UK indie Basho records, that suggests a creative breakthrough. My Iris has kept that restlessness and love of music irrespective of genre apparent in Clowes earlier work, but feels a better constructed programme where the stylistic shifts are organic developments that blend naturally into the set-up of the compositions. Jazz is the core, but the breadth that comes from listening widely lifts this above the herd.On ...

Album Review

Francois Carrier: The Joy of Being

Read "The Joy of Being" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
April 12, 2017

Canadian reedman Francois Carrier and drummer Michel Lambert enjoy a fertile alliance. They first met back in 1998, when they invited the great Dewey Redman to join them. Since then they've waxed no fewer than 12 discs either in duet or together with other guests and collaborators. On The Joy Of Being they team up with Polish bassist Rafal Mazur, for the second time after Unknowable (NotTwo, 2016), in a live date from the esteemed Alchemia Club in Krakow. Together ...

Album Review

Antonio Adolfo: Hybrido - From Rio To Wayne Shorter

Read "Hybrido - From Rio To Wayne Shorter" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
April 12, 2017

With well over thirty albums to his name, Brazilian composer and pianist Antonio Adolfo has now conjured up a really attractive paean to the master saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter. The selection of tracks is excellent because it clearly demonstrates just how key a figure Shorter is to jazz. It doesn't replicate the 1988 Blue Note collection The Best Of Wayne Shorter but does include three numbers from that album. “Deluge" offers a warm ensemble-led invocation of this ...

Album Review

Mr. Sipp: Knock A Hole In It

Read "Knock A Hole In It" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
April 12, 2017

Castro Coleman has an extensive and impressive resume as a guitarist and producer in the gospel genre, having appeared, in a variety of guises, on over fifty records. In 2013, he reinvented himself as Mr. Sipp, diving headfirst into the blues scene, producing It's My Guitar, the following year, as a result of his own efforts. He was already associated with Malaco Records through his gospel work, and in 2015, released Mississippi Blues Child, for that label, to wide acclaim, ...

Live Review

Babel Med Music 2017

by Martin Longley
April 12, 2017

Babel Med Music 2017 Marseille, France March 16-18, 2017 Babel Med Music is at once a public festival, a conference and a trade fair, possessing the capacity to be experienced on multiple levels, as the ratios of these aspects are juggled by the individual attendee. Its thrust is primarily towards global sounds, rootsy and ethnically-inclined, from purist into fusion, but mostly the latter. This year, there has been an attempt to include jazz as ...

Album Review

Manuel Valera Trio: The Seasons

Read "The Seasons" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
April 11, 2017

Although Manuel Valera originally staked his claim to fame as a “Latin jazz" pianist, it's fair to say that he has sought to transcend the constraints imposed by that label. On this release, the second by his trio with bassist Hans Glawischnig and drummer E.J. Strickland, Valera displays just as much interest in drawing from the musical worlds of classical and pop, refracted through the general prism of post-bop, as anything immediately identifiable as “Latin" jazz. With a well-developed group ...