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

The Old 97s: Graveyard Whistling

Read "Graveyard Whistling" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
April 5, 2017

Much of the evolution occurring within a given genre of music occurs in response to predominant movements within that music. For example, in jazz, bebop was a response to the swing era, the latter emphasizing ensemble charts over individual virtuosity and the former celebrating the individual soloist in improvisation. Bebop stimulated the cool jazz movement, featuring music equally as technical, but with a softer texture and finer arrangements. These trends in jazz occurred between 1945 and 1950. The behemoth that ...

Interview

Bria Skonberg: In Flight

by R.J. DeLuke
April 4, 2017

Bria Skonberg's roots are in a city more than 2,000 miles--and a different country--away from New Orleans and the traditional jazz music identified with region at the mouth of the Mississippi River. But when she puts her trumpet to her lips and plays, whether with her own quintet or another formation, running through a standard or original song, the spirit of the Crescent City emerges. Traditional jazz--particularly Louis Armstrong--is what first inspired the young girl in Chilliwack, British ...

Film Review

I Called Him Morgan at Belfast Film Festival 2017

by Ian Patterson
April 4, 2017

I Called Him Morgan (2016) A film by Kasper Collin Belfast Film Festival Strand Arts Centre, Belfast, N. Ireland March 31, 2017 There was something appropriate about the screening of Kasper Collin's documentary I Called Him Morgan in the Strand Arts Centre. The furnishings of this old, art-deco cinema look little changed from the 1950s, when, on the other side of the Atlantic, trumpeter Lee Morgan burst onto the New York jazz scene ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Bud Powell: The Scene Changes - 1958

by Marc Davis
April 4, 2017

The legend of the tortured, tragic jazz genius exists because of people like Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. Both are bebop legends, among the greatest of the greats, founding fathers of the genre. Both were brought down by drugs and mental illness--Parker at 34, Powell at 41. Bird and Bud had a lot in common. Not only were they creators of the new sound of bebop, both were astonishingly fast players--Parker on sax, Powell on piano. Powell took ...

Album Review

Nate Wooley: The Complete Syllables Music

Read "The Complete Syllables Music" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
April 4, 2017

The late Kenneth Gaburo was a noted academic, writer, jazz pianist, electronic music innovator and more. In the 1980s, he headed the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Iowa where he taught that the individual is free to create their own language in terms of their approach to music composition. Gaburo is the inspiration for trumpeter Nate Wooley's latest experimental collection, The Complete Syllables Music.This ambitious four-disc collection adds to Wooley's revolutionary solo repertoire, which includes Trumpet/Amplifier ...

Album Review

Abbey Rader's West Coast Quartet: First Gathering

Read "First Gathering" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
April 4, 2017

Veteran drummer Abbey Rader's foray to California adds a further chapter to the welcome renaissance of reedman Peter Kuhn. Both men were part of the New York loft jazz scene in the 1970s, but while Kuhn eventually dropped from view in the early '80s, Rader persisted, first moving to Europe, but later returning to Florida where he recorded with saxophonist Dave Liebman, and then spent five years with violinist Billy Bang. Now into his seventies, Rader continues to helm freewheeling ...

Album Review

Luis Munoz: The Dead Man

Read "The Dead Man" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
April 4, 2017

In a thought-provoking concept of intertwining a short story by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, with a personal near-death experience set to music, drummer/composer Luis Muñoz offers The Dead Man, as a lesson in living life in the present moment, for that is all there is. Muñoz has been quite productive over the past few years, releasing Luz in 2013, and Voz, in 2015, on his own Pelín Music label. Both records were carefully crafted creations combining Latin vocals ...

Album Review

Sväng: Hauptbahnhof

Read "Hauptbahnhof" reviewed by Anthony Shaw

by Anthony Shaw
April 4, 2017

From the outset, Sväng's eighth album Hauptbahnhof evokes a bygone age of often gilded life, leisured strolls, and acoustic instrumentation. Or is it just the evocative sound of their four harmonicas that immediately conjures marching men, wartime truces and so forth? In any case this album of idiosyncratic tunes, and one song, does more than its best to show that four professionals with their combined harmonic range of over six octaves, can take the harmonica anywhere on the musical spectrum. ...

Album Review

Marc Doffey Quintet: Taking Direction

Read "Taking Direction" reviewed by Marithe Van der Aa

by Marithe Van der Aa
April 4, 2017

Over the course of 17 tracks, the Berlin based Marc Doffey Quintet sets out to create a suite filled with lyrical and dynamic soundscapes... and succeeds. Their debut album, Taking Direction, consists of compositions written by each individual band member and brief, improvised interludes. By including compositions of each member, the Marc Doffey Quintet places a refreshing emphasis on the diversity and various personalities that determine the group's sound. In the jazz scene--a place where it is dangerously ...

Out and About: The Super Fans

Meet John Reilly

by Tessa Souter and Andrea Wolper
April 3, 2017

John Reilly--yet another of our Super Fans who works for the city of New York--was born on Staten Island, where he still lives. We don't know if it's something to do with working for the city, or just a function of growing up in the capital of jazz, but John is the real thing. The son of a Frank Sinatra bobby soxer, he got into jazz in his teens, and the first live performance he attended was one of the ...