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

Doug Munro And La Pompe Attack: The Harry Warren Song Book

Read "The Harry Warren Song Book" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
January 31, 2017

Doug Munro is the great nephew of Harry Warren who was the first major American songwriter to compose specifically for films. All the tunes on this CD are from movies with the exception of two Munro originals, “Blues For Harry" and “You Again" and barring those two and “Nagasaki," were all written in the 1930s and 1940s. The music is played in the swinging style of The Quintet Of The Hot Club Of France, whose most famous stars, ...

Album Review

Francois Carrier: OUTgoing

by Budd Kopman
January 31, 2017

In the realm of Western music, the role of the performer has been rather circumscribed. In Classical music, the composer is king and the range of “allowed" expression rather limited. For most of its history, jazz performers relied on tunes as the basis for their improvisations, and thus, the composer (or tunesmith) was still needed, with the best creating tunes having a memorable melodic arc or harmony, giving the player solid and recognizable support. Modern jazz ...

Bailey's Bundles

Female Vocals 2017 I – Cynthia Hilts, Judith Nijland, Andrea Claburn, Sandy Cressman, Lisa Biales

by C. Michael Bailey
January 30, 2017

Take a day off and the recordings pile up and bury you. Female jazz vocals continue to dominate recordings with no indication on letting up. Most these recordings are very good and deserve recognition. So here is my picayune effort to address a few of them. Cynthia Hilts Lyric Fury Blonde Coyote 2016 “Twenty years ago, Brooklyn-based pianist/composer Cynthia Hilts was seeking to form a band 'that sounds like ...

Album Review

Mariah Parker Indo Latin Jazz: Live in Concert

Read "Live in Concert" reviewed by David Becker

by David Becker
January 30, 2017

Traditional Indian music, various Latin styles and contemporary jazz have negotiated an unlikely but productive friendship in the Indo Latin Jazz Ensemble, a periodically convened combo of top Northern California jazz and world music players led by pianist Mariah Parker. She reunites the unit for Live in Concert (Ancient Future.com Records, 2017), a collection of smartly imagined original tunes that touch on range of cultural influences but never push connections. You'd expect nothing less from a cast a ...

Album Review

Joëlle Léandre: A Woman's Work...

Read "A Woman's Work..." reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
January 30, 2017

How do you sum up the career of an improvising artist like Joëlle Léandre? Do you reissue a package of recordings from her 40 years of performance? That is probably not possible, given the multiple labels and the location and ownership of the masters. Besides, free improvisation, almost by definition, dissipates (or probably should dissipate) upon performance. Recordings contain only a fraction of the whole experience. When it comes to Léandre's oeuvre, total immersion in her music is the only ...

Album Review

John Abercrombie Quartet: Up and Coming

Read "Up and Coming" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
January 30, 2017

Up and Coming is the second release by this version of the John Abercrombie Quartet, following 39 Steps (ECM, 2013). It further cements the longtime relationship between Abercrombie and pianist Marc Copland, which extends back to when both were playing in Chico Hamilton's band in the early '70s (Copland was still playing alto saxophone then, before deciding to concentrate on the piano). They have recorded together many times: two notable examples before joining forces in this quartet are Copland's Another ...

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Live Review

John Handy Tribute At SFJAZZ

by Walter Atkins
January 30, 2017

John Handy Tribute SFJAZZ Miner Auditorium SFJAZZ Fifth Season Celebration San Francisco CA January 22, 2017 The SFJAZZ Center ignited its fifth season celebration with two extraordinary weeks that included the Dr. Martin Luther King Day Open House and the star studded Zakir Hussain Gala Night (covered here). There were tribute nights this week for legendary drummer Tony Williams, prominent Bay Area saxophonist Joe Henderson, and the late inaugural SFJAZZ ...

Album Review

John Tilbury, John Lely, Dirar Kalash, Christian Wolff: Seaside

by John Eyles
January 30, 2017

Bearing catalogue number at100, Seaside marks another important milestone for Another Timbre--the one hundredth release on the label's main imprint, some nine years after its first releases. To mark the event, Simon Reynell has issued music of which he is particularly proud, played by John Tilbury, John Lely on electronics and the Palestine-born, Hague resident Dirar Kalash on oud. The recording is the very first to feature Tilbury on his clavichord (which he acquired in late 2015) rather than his ...

Album Review

Jihye Lee Orchestra: April

by Dan Bilawsky
January 29, 2017

On the morning of April 16, 2014, four hundred seventy-six souls were living life as they knew it, traveling on the ferry Sewol from Incheon to Jeju in South Korea. Then it all came to an abrupt halt when the ship capsized and sank. The South Korean Coast Guard, commercial vessels, and fishing boats managed to arrive in time to save more than one hundred seventy lives; the rest were lost, taken by the ship into a watery grave. That ...

Album Review

Ballister: Slag

by Mark Corroto
January 29, 2017

If you were a fan of cyclist Marco Pantani, you must have appreciated the manner in which he could defeat his opponents in a 100 mile bicycle race. Nicknamed il pirata (the pirate), he could rip their legs off from the start, but the real thing of beauty was the numerous other ways he could win. Maybe that is why experiencing the live concert recording SLAG evokes Pantani's style. The trio of saxophonist Dave Rempis, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and drummer ...