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

Max Richter: Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works

Read "Three Worlds: Music From Woolf Works" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
February 4, 2017

Since his debut record Memoryhouse, composer Max Richter has consistently delivered music of unquestionable beauty and depth. Over the years, he forged a unique path that saw him melding classical contemporary music with electronic and the result to that was always an engaging progression of various works that went back and forth between the familiar and comfortable with the new and forward-thinking. But it's tricky to try to pigeonhole the music of this composer. There is an unconventional inventiveness where ...

Album Review

The Rolling Stones: Blue And Lonesome

Read "Blue And Lonesome" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
February 4, 2017

Originally begun as an impromptu respite from the recording of new original material, the Rolling Stones' Blue and Lonesome quickly turned into a rediscovery of the group's blues roots. And along the way toward completing the three days of sessions, the iconic rockers rediscovered themselves as a band with as much purpose and passion. Blue and Lonesome is not flashy in the least. It is, rather, pithy in its economy, the Stones approach mirroring the agony/ecstasy duality of ...

Interview

Rick Mandyck: The Return From Now

by Paul Rauch
February 3, 2017

It was a cold Tuesday evening the last week of December. 2016 was mercifully coming to a close, this evening, a final chorus of a long blues blown soulfully, and mournfully into the night. I sat at the bar at Seattle's storied jazz spot, Tula's, in eager anticipation of the evening's performance of a quartet led by veteran bassist, Paul Gabrielson. Gabrielson had gathered a quartet of top tier, Seattle based musicians that evening, featuring pianist Bill Anschell, and drummer ...

Album Review

Jan Lundgren: Potsdamer Platz

Read "Potsdamer Platz" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
February 3, 2017

Pianist Jan Lundgren is a fine example of a classically-trained European musician with a strong empathy with mainstream jazz. Potsdamer Platz is, in turn, a fine example of Lundgren's ability to compose fresh-sounding and often beautiful tunes, allied to a talented quartet of players who know just how to bring the pianist's ideas to life. The all-Scandinavian band is terrific--Finnish saxophonist Jukka Perko, Danish drummer Morten Lund and Lundgren's fellow Swede Dan Berglund on bass. The quartet decamped ...

Album Review

Ralph Towner: My Foolish Heart

Read "My Foolish Heart" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
February 3, 2017

Ralph Towner has occasionally said that he considers himself less a musician than a sort of audio novelist. An album or concert might not tell a single strict narrative, exactly, but dynamic flow is central to his compositions as much as his marvelously expressive fretting and plucking. Unsurprisingly from a player so known for picturesque sensibility (though always a delight to hear), My Foolish Heart paints another lovely series of aural images with a rich depth of experience behind it ...

Album Review

Ralph Towner: My Foolish Heart

Read "My Foolish Heart" reviewed by Henning Bolte

by Henning Bolte
February 3, 2017

If you are lucky enough to experience this guitarist live, the astonishment about the abundance and the richness of colors of his sound on the acoustic instrument should be extraordinary and should let you forget within minutes the bravura of electrified sound. Towner's wealthy guitar playing has something rather complete in itself. For him the solo recording revealed as a primary form of playing to be developed consistently through the years. His first solo album, Diary, dates from 1974 and ...

Album Review

Mirko Fait 5tet: Confidences

Read "Confidences" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
February 3, 2017

Here's more clear evidence courtesy of Italian-born saxophonist Mirko Fait's quintet that tasteful jazz doesn't run its course at America's borders. These are accomplished musicians who know how to swing and can hold their heads high in any company, foreign or domestic. On the other hand, there is nothing here that sets Fait's group apart from many others of its size and makeup; it is simply a well-schooled working ensemble doing its thing, no more and no less.

Album Review

Art Hirahara: Central Line

Read "Central Line" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 2, 2017

The central meaning behind pianist Art Hirahara's Central Line is simple to suss out. In literal terms Hirahara is referencing the Chuo-Sen (Central Line) subway line, a means for establishing his own relationship to the jazz world in Tokyo. But the message of the album runs deeper than that, tapping into the central lines that link person to place, past to present, culture to culture, and musician to musician. This is an exploration and manifestation of those lines that bind, ...

Album Review

Tyrant Lizard: Tyrant Lizard

Read "Tyrant Lizard" reviewed by Paul Rauch

by Paul Rauch
February 2, 2017

Tyrant Lizard is a trio that evolved from the Improvised Music Project at the University of Washington in Seattle, a program that exists as both an artistic movement and registered student organization led by eclectic modernist trumpeter and composer, Cuong Vu. Each of the three musicians are truly original voices of their respective craft, featuring trumpeter Ray Larsen, guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi, and bassist Carmen Rothwell. The trio's self titled first recording is a soundscape of vivid visual imagery, of sonically ...

Album Review

Francois Carrier: Freedom is Space for the Spirit

Read "Freedom is Space for the Spirit" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
February 2, 2017

Saxophonist Francois Carrier had quite a week in late May of 2014. It began when he and his long-time percussionist Michel Lambert played with bassist John Edwards and pianist Steve Beresford at the Vortex Jazz Club in London on May 25th and ended with the duo performing with acoustic bassist Rafal Mazur at the Alchemia Jazz Klub in Krakow, Poland on June 1st and then recording the following day. Sandwiched between London and Krakow was a trip to ...