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

Harutaka Mochizuki: Through The Glass

Read "Through The Glass" reviewed by Nicola Negri

by Nicola Negri
March 25, 2017

Harutaka Mochizuki is a multi-instrumentalist who dedicates a significant part of his output to solo saxophone performances, following a long tradition of Japanese experimental improvisers that, from Kaoru Abe onward, has investigated this particular musical environment with uncompromising rigour. In Through The Glass, Mochizuki confronts this tradition with a very personal voice, distancing himself from the style of Abe, whose influence was evident in previous records, while further developing some of his distinctive traits -- like the preference for ...

Live Review

Christian Lillinger’s Grund at Cologne Philharmonic

by Phillip Woolever
March 25, 2017

Christian Lillinger's Grund Cologne Philharmonic Cologne, Germany March 18, 2017 Many German cities can boast of a vibrant jazz scene. Cologne is one of the most dynamic of them all, with a widespread foundation of educational institutions, popular clubs and broadcasting. Most important, there's a dedicated, cooperative network of well-schooled, non-conforming musicians.One impressive collaborative for just such experienced-based experiments is the septet who form Grund ("ground"), under the compositional direction of drummer Christian ...

Album Review

Derby Derby: Love Dance

Read "Love Dance" reviewed by Troy Dostert

by Troy Dostert
March 25, 2017

Ormo Records is a small French label dedicated to producing out-of-the-mainstream music that has one foot in the jazz tradition and the other alternatively venturing into post-rock, minimalist, and freely-improvised idioms. Bassist Sylvain Didou is the driving force behind the label's music, as he's composed and appeared on each of their releases so far, one of the most noteworthy being the suitably-titled Order/Disorder, by Oblik (from 2015). Despite its avant-garde characteristics, that album was quite convincingly a “jazz" record, with ...

Mr. P.C.'s Guide to Jazz Etiquette and Bandstand Decorum

Solving the Audience Equation, The Fix is On, and It's a Setup!

by Mr. P.C.
March 24, 2017

Dear Mr. P.C.: This whole “jazz musicians play thousands of chords to three people" vs. “rock musicians play three chords for thousands" thing: What is the correct chord/audience ratio? Perhaps zero chords for an infinite audience is the ideal; or all chords for no audience. I certainly have landed closer to the latter. Is art about this kind of calculus? --Randy H., Atlanta Dear Randy: Let's break it ...

Film Review

I Called Him Morgan by Kasper Collin

by Christine Connallon
March 24, 2017

Lee MorganI Called Him Morgan A film by Kasper Collin 2016 Forty five years ago on a precariously snowy night, prolifically talented jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan was fatally wounded at Slug's Saloon in the East Village of New York City, shot down by his common-law wife, Helen, in front of horrified friends and fans at the bar of the venue. Kasper Collin's haunting documentary I Called Him Morgan is a revealing portrait of a ...

Album Review

MEM3: Circles

Read "Circles" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 24, 2017

The modernistic piano trio, MEM3, draws influences from the innovative e.s.t. (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) and the Bad Plus, as well as the legendary drummer Peter Erskine's trio recordings. Circles, MEM3's second outing, puts them in the league with those higher profile groups as they craft an understated and unfailingly lovely trio sound enhanced with subtle electronic effects and fluid interplay. Circles is a remarkably cohesive statement. Pianist Michael Cabe, bassist Mark Lau and drummer Ernesto Cervini craft a ...

Album Review

Monika Ryan: Windmills

Read "Windmills" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
March 24, 2017

Jazz vocalist Monika Ryan has recorded a series of albums as leader since 2000 with the sensuous and audacious Windmills, a tribute to the lyrics of composers Alan and Marilyn Bergman, one of her latest projects. Voicing a repertoire of beautiful love songs and ballads, Ryan caresses the lyrics of each song with a measure of emotion and taste making for a vocal jazz album that's a pleasure to hear often. Supporting her crisp vocal instrument are a ...

Album Review

Billy Mintz: Ugly Beautiful

Read "Ugly Beautiful" reviewed by David A. Orthmann

by David A. Orthmann
March 24, 2017

Consisting of seventeen tracks spanning over two hours of playing time, Ugly Beautiful is a large, sprawling, wise, unflinchingly honest, powerful work of art. Billy Mintz's third recording as a leader--all of which were made in the most recent decade of a fifty-year plus career--stubbornly refuses to conform to stylistic boundaries and gleefully defies expectations of any kind. The record demands to be taken on its own terms. Trying to pin labels or anticipate the course of almost any track ...

Album Review

Miles Okazaki: Trickster

Read "Trickster" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 24, 2017

Guitarist Miles Okazaki (Steve Coleman, Dan Weiss) is a meticulous artist and visionary partly due to his thorny and geometrically inclined theme-building practices. With ECM recording artist Craig Taborn sharing the frontline, the guitarist often makes complex storylines sound effortless by design, paralleled by the quartet's symmetrical pulses and deterministic gait. The band also gels to odd-metered bump and grind motifs and linear progressions amid succinctly stated unison lines. According to Okazaki, “The Calendar" ..." is a song ...

Album Review

Kurt Rosenwinkel: Caipi

by Geannine Reid
March 24, 2017

Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel has been at the forefront of shaping what we call jazz today with the help of dynamic peers such as: Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman and Chris Potter. Rosenwinkel's indelible mark in music is the consummation of being steeped in the rich and deep traditions of jazz, springing off the shoulders of the rich jazz vocabulary and canon as a foundation to stamp out his own musical language. A language that is influenced by ...