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

Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures: Glare of the Tiger

Read "Glare of the Tiger" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 22, 2017

Back in the late 1960s/early 70s, maybe we weren't ready for it. The Beatles explored psychedelia and Indian music, as did a plugged-in Miles Davis. Then came John McLaughlin's Shakti, Don Cherry, Yusef Lateef, and Joe Zawinul's Weather Report, to name a few heads of state. The music they played, which now might be filed under 'World Music,' was not meant to be ghettoized as such. Miles would have just called it “m-f'ing music." Maybe we should, too.

Album Review

Super Hi-Fi: Super Hi Fi Plays Nirvana

Read "Super Hi Fi Plays Nirvana" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
March 22, 2017

Super Hi-Fi founder and bassist Ezra Gale established his cassette-and download-only label Very Special Recordings to give his compatriots and their fans the chance to take a chance. “The fact that cassettes are cheap to manufacture and to buy is huge, because we can take chances and just put out things we love, which we wouldn't be able to do if they cost as much as records," he explains. “And people who see something that's only five or six bucks ...

Live Review

Festival International de Jazz de Port-au-Prince, 2017 - Part 1

by Mark Sullivan
March 21, 2017

Part 1 | Part 2 Festival International de Jazz de Port-au-Prince Port-au-Prince, Haiti March 4-11, 2017 Haiti: the only nation in the world established as the result of a slave revolt; home of Vodou. Haiti: poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; subject to devastating hurricanes and earthquakes. Most potential visitors to Haiti are likely to focus on the second view of the country, especially after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake which caused massive building collapse ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Walter Davis Jr.: Davis Cup - 1959

by Marc Davis
March 21, 2017

Every now and then, I hear a musician in a band and I think, “Damn, can we get rid of the other guys and just hear this one by himself?" That was my immediate thought after listening to Davis Cup, a hard bop cooker from 1959. Walter Davis Jr. is a pianist with a slim discography. He recorded exactly one Blue Note CD as a leader--this one, his debut--and appeared mostly as a sideman on other people's records. ...

Album Review

EchoTest: From Two Balconies

Read "From Two Balconies" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
March 21, 2017

When is a bass duo not a bass duo? For Julie Slick and Marco Machera, the general answer is “whenever we want." Technically they're both electric bassists foremost, but that's far from the only tool in their box. The bottom end was prominent when they first joined forces on Fourth Dementia (self-produced, 2014), but already there was a noticeable emphasis on bending their strings to make guitar and synth sounds too. When they adopted the band name EchoTest with Le ...

Album Review

Eka trio: Eka

by Hrayr Attarian
March 21, 2017

The Malmo based Eka trio is a collaborative group that blends together rock inspired rhythms and jazzy spontaneity to create vibrant and impressionistic music. The eponymous debut consists of eleven captivating originals that are thematically alike but with sufficient distinctiveness as to result in a conceptually cohesive recording without resorting to redundancy.The tracks are simultaneously intimate and cinematic with seamless synergy among the members of the band. The lullaby like “Blues Screen Blues," for instance, opens with Swedish ...

Album Review

Tamuz Nissim & George Nazos: Liquid Melodies

Read "Liquid Melodies" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 21, 2017

"New York City-based Israeli jazz singer" is a cultural metaphor, but that is exactly what singer Tamuz Nissim is. Born into a creative family in Tel Aviv, educated at the Royal Conservatoire of Den Haag, Nissim emerged into to a bourgeoning recording arena with the release of her debut recording, The Music Stays in a Dream (Self Produced, 2013), a collection of ten original compositions that was critically well received. Presently, she joins forces with guitarist George Nazos for Liquid ...

Album Review

Lisa Mezzacappa: avantNOIR

Read "avantNOIR" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 21, 2017

The underlying story for this album by West Coast bassist, composer and improviser, Lisa Mezzacappa emanates from her fascination with Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Dashiell Hammett's crime stories and similar literary works. Hence, the program casts a visual of nighttime in an intimidating metropolis. Toss in several progressive jazz motifs that parallel an action-packed detective thriller or several instances of zany comedic inferences and you have an album that lives by a platform of diversity amid a host of ...

Opinion

Chuck Berry: 1926-2017

by C. Michael Bailey
March 21, 2017

In the same spirit of the evolutionary question, “What comes after Music," I ask how does one simply acknowledge, if not pay homage, to what is beyond Greatness? The Saturday, March 18th New York Times did not do bad with: “While Elvis Presley was rock's first pop star and teenage heartthrob, Mr. Berry was its master theorist and conceptual genius, the songwriter who understood what the kids wanted before they knew themselves. With songs like “Johnny B. Goode" ...

Album Review

Slavic Soul Party: Live at Barbes: Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite

Read "Live at Barbes: Slavic Soul Party Plays Duke Ellington's Far East Suite" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
March 21, 2017

In the late 1990s, visionary percussionist Matt Moran founded Slavic Soul Party, a brass band designed to stretch the boundaries between Eastern and Western European traditional music until those boundaries snap. More than two decades and twenty members later, “New York's Official #1 Brass Band for BalkanSoulGypsyFunk" fully realizes this vision by performing one of Duke Ellington's most famous Billy Strayhorn collaborations: 1963's The Far East Suite, around which Ellington organized a global tour schedule through the Middle East, South ...