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

Leonardo Suarez Paz and Fernando Suarez Paz: Escualo

Read "Escualo" reviewed by Duncan Heining

by Duncan Heining
November 24, 2016

Leonardo Suarez Paz is surely now the torchbearer of Argentine Tango and the legacy of its greatest composer, Astor Piazzolla. His father Fernando Suarez Paz, of course, played with Piazzolla for many years and father and son have often performed his and works by other composers of tango. It is our fortune that Suarez Paz hijo has persuaded Suarez Paz padre out of retirement, if only one more time. Both father and son respect tango as a living ...

Album Review

Ikarus: Chronosome

Read "Chronosome" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 24, 2016

Drummer Ramón Oliveras is the composer and leader of Ikarus and Chronosome is this band's second release, after the powerful and stunning Echo . There is no sophomore jinx here, as this recording starts off where the earlier one begins only to fly higher and delve deeper while still creating immense physical soundspaces. The album was produced by Nik Bartsch and Oliveras, and the music of Ikarus, as stated before, does fall within somewhere within the genre defined ...

Album Review

Jordan Young: Jazz Jukebox

Read "Jazz Jukebox" reviewed by C. Andrew Hovan

by C. Andrew Hovan
November 24, 2016

One of the strengths of Marc Free's Posi-Tone imprimatur is that it is responsible for introducing us to many great and upcoming jazz artists. Drummer Jordan Young is a Detroit native who has studied with some of the best of the modern-day masters and is making a name for himself in New York. His sophomore release for Posi-Tone, Jazz Jukebox, is a bristling thirteen-track collection that lives up to its name. There's a nice smattering of standards, pop ditties, and ...

Album Review

Raphael Malfliet: Noumenon

Read "Noumenon" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
November 23, 2016

Belgian-born bassist Raphael Malfliet graduated from the Conservatory in Antwerp in 2014, moving to New York shortly afterward. Though the music on his debut trio album Noumenon is outside of well-defined genres, his influences of modern classical and improvisation are evident from the start. One is as likely to hear traces of Elliott Sharp as they would be to hear the micropolyphony of Gyorgi Legeti.The trio consists of Malfliet, guitarist Todd Neufeld and drummer Carlo Costa. Neufeld has ...

Extended Analysis

Nat Birchall: Creation

by Phil Barnes
November 23, 2016

Coming less than a year after the 2015 release Invocations on Henley's Jazzman records, Creation finds Nat Birchall back on his own Sound Soul and Spirit label. Long term collaborator Adam Fairhall on piano, and Johnny Hunter on drums are retained from that record and we welcome back Andy Hay as a second drummer, last heard on 2011's 'Sacred Dimension' as well as saying hello to new boy Michael Bardon on bass. Whether influenced by the line-up changes ...

Album Review

Joe McPhee: Flowers

by John Sharpe
November 23, 2016

Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee has a long history of solo albums stretching back to Tenor (Hat Hut, 1976). Furthermore he's one of the few improvisers still to regularly perform and record in that format. Flowers, his eleventh unaccompanied release, was recorded at the Jazz ao Centro Festival in Coimbra in 2009 and rescued from obscurity by the Portuguese Cipsela imprint. As he explains during the show, the title is an allusion to McPhee's credo that we should give our heroes their ...

Album Review

Mike Westbrook: Paris

by Duncan Heining
November 23, 2016

Listen to any number of Mike Westbrook records and you might want to ask, “Why doesn't he take a solo?" Aside from the occasional piano cadenza, Westbrook seems to prefer to let his compositions do the talking, ably aided by trustworthy musical confederates. Westbrook celebrated his 80th birthday in March 2016 and Paris is a perfect way of acknowledging that noble event. Produced and recorded live by Jon Hiseman, the album is a feast for the ears. Hiseman ...

Album Review

Beekman: Beekman Vol. 02

Read "Beekman Vol. 02" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 23, 2016

Beekman is a collective quartet with members from all over the world: pianist Yago Vazquez from Spain, saxophonist Kyle Nasser from the U.S., bassist Pablo Menares from Chile and drummer Rodrigo Recabarren also from Chile. Nasser's work was heard on the intriguing Restive Soul, while Vazquez made a very strong contribution on Stream with veterans Scott Lee and Jeff Hirshfield. The group has a sound that fuses not only the musical aesthetics of different continents (without becoming “World ...

Album Review

Dave Fiuczynski: Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian Microjam!

Read "Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian Microjam!" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
November 23, 2016

Simultaneously dedicated to 20th century classical composer Olivier Messiaen and legendary rap and hip-hop producer J Dilla, Flam! Blam! Pan-Asian Microjam! is a musical adventurer's dream and a purist's nightmare. But anything more conventional from conceptualist, composer and guitarist David Fiuczynski would probably be disappointing--after all, he's the “Fuze" who lit the raging bonfire of the Screaming Headless Torsos, whose rock experimentation was once famously described as a “jazz/rock/funk orgy." Flam! Blam! draws from Fiuczynski's service as Director ...

Multiple Reviews

Three saxophonists' very different paths since "Propagations"

by John Eyles
November 23, 2016

Back in 2007, Marc Baron on alto, Bertrand Denzler on tenor and Jean-Luc Guionnet also on alto were three-quarters of the unnamed saxophone quartet that recorded the ground-breaking album Propagations (Potlatch, 2007), alongside Stéphane Rives on soprano. Together, the four reinvented the rule book for a saxophone quartet in the new millennium, ignoring the conventional vocabulary and introducing greater use of sustained notes and pad noise... Disappointingly, despite the album's musical and critical success, the four have not ...