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

Shane Parish: Undertaker Please Drive Slow

Read "Undertaker Please Drive Slow" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 15, 2017

Guitarist Shane Parish has amassed a strong following due to his affiliation with the ultra-progressive band Ahleuchatistas, known for its impossibly complex unison song-forms, neo-psyche, fuzoid-metal or as his website states: ..."almost like Fugazi meets Captain Beefheart." These days Parish and percussionist Ryan Oslance are performing under the Aleuchatistas moniker as a duo, while dishing out avant-rock sonic-scapes that touch upon numerous genres and then some. Besides the guitarist's other collaborations that usually push the proverbial envelope, he puts the ...

Album Review

The Brian Dickinson Quintet: The Rhythm Method

Read "The Rhythm Method" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
January 14, 2017

Toronto-based pianist Brian Dickinson explores the “quintet with a two sax front line" on The Rhythm Method. He takes his lead from the somewhat overlooked pianist/conceptualist Lennie Tristano, who broke the ground with his historic 1949 Capitol Sessions featuring Lee Konitz on alto sax and Warne Marsh on tenor sax; and with his 1956 recordings with Marsh and Ted Brown, both on tenor. The set opens on Wayne Shorter's “Orion," featuring a sparkling extended solo by Dickenson that ...

Album Review

Elisabeth Melander: Reflections Of A Voice

Read "Reflections Of A Voice" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
January 14, 2017

Elisabeth Melander was born in Boden, a military town in the cold and desolate north of Sweden. She used her vocal abilities and knowledge of music to escape and is now based in the southern cities of Lund and Malmö, travelling all over the Nordic Area, teaching, spreading the word about jazz and encouraging young musicians. Every now and then she brings out an album. Reflections Of A Voice is her latest. It features jazz standards and ...

Album Review

Tim Buckley: Live At The Troubadour 1969

Read "Live At The Troubadour 1969" reviewed by Sacha O'Grady

by Sacha O'Grady
January 14, 2017

For an artist whose recording career spanned less than ten years, Tim Buckley seemed to get a lot done. From 1966's self titled debut, to Look At The Fool, his final album released in 1974, Buckley's oeuvre is as broad as it is varied. Ever the experimental troubadour, no other singer of the time was capable of absorbing such a diverse range of styles, whether that be folk, blues, jazz, rock, or classical, Tim was the ultimate when it came ...

Album Review

Brian Eno: Reflection

Read "Reflection" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
January 14, 2017

Composer and producer Brian Eno's ambient record Reflection truly goes to the mind and the heart in a quiet and seductive way. This hour long intriguing and captivating tapestry of carefully interwoven sounds conjures up landscapes of internal emotions that reflect the warmth and quiet of the first day of the new year when it was released. Eno's records have always been a fascinating blend of aesthetic, emotions, careful strategy and technology and as such have always functioned on many ...

Multiple Reviews

Blues Deluxe: Colin James, Matthew Curry and Johnny Nicholas

by Doug Collette
January 14, 2017

The cultural fragmentation of the last two decades or so has resulted in such a multiplicity of niche categories that the blues community only benefits by its long-term standing of loyalty to the genre. Rather than suffer foolish players gladly or thoughtlessly reward the mediocre results of their efforts, these devoted and inveterate music-lovers deeply relish the likes of Johnny Nicholas, Colin James and Matthew Curry, earnest and admirable as they are reaffirming, vicariously, their own reverence for the blues ...

Profile

Dwight Sills: Creating His Own Space

by Liz Goodwin
January 14, 2017

After delivering three projects on other record labels, guitarist-composer-producer Dwight Sills decided it was time to start creating an outlet for himself on his fourth and most personal CD yet, Short Stories. Creating this outlet was not a new concept for the Houston, Texas resident. Most of the eight tunes on this eclectic and engaging 2016 offering were written by Sills during the early '80s, when he was honing his craft on the ever-burgeoning Houston jazz club circuit. ...

Album Review

São Paulo Underground: Cantos Invisíveis

Read "Cantos Invisíveis" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
January 13, 2017

In the spring of 2015 Rob Mazurek's São Paulo Underground expanded their touring formation and added “Black Cube SP" to their name for a tour that briefly made stops in the U.S. The enlarged group featured the addition of Thomas Rohrer on rabeca, a Brazilian viola. Rohrer, a Swiss native transplanted in Brazil was part of Mazurek's sextet on Return the Tides: Ascension Suite and Holy Ghost (Cuneiform Records, 2014) but had not yet been fully introduced to U.S. market ...

Album Review

Howard Johnson and Gravity: Testimony

Read "Testimony" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
January 13, 2017

Those who see the tuba as a sluggish, unwieldy instrument capable only of rounding out a musical composition in the lower register may have to rethink that appraisal after listening to Testimony, in which multi-instrumentalist and tuba master Howard Johnson ushers no less than half a dozen tubas and rhythm through their paces in a session that is anything but lethargic. True, the tonal range is more in the basement than the attic, but Johnson and his ...

Album Review

Onno Govaert / Marcelo dos Reis / Luís Vicente / Kristján Martinsson: In Layers

Read "In Layers" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
January 13, 2017

You might assume the recording In Layers is another vehicle in Luís Vicente's meteoric rise to the top of improvisational music. If you guess this you are both wrong and somewhat right. While the Portuguese trumpeter has distinguished himself in the Twenty One 4Tet with John Dikeman and Wilbert De Joode, in Chamber 4, Fail Better!, Clocks And Clouds, Frame Trio, Deux Maisons, and the Luís Vicente Trio, you wouldn't know he was the headliner here. Vicente leads ...