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.

Live Review

Sarajevo Jazz Festival 2016

by Francesco Martinelli
November 18, 2016

Sarajevo Jazz Festival 2016 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina November 2-6, 2016 When your plane lands in Sarajevo, its wheels roll over the crumbling underground tunnel that was the only connection of the city to the outside world during the Serbian siege from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996. It was twenty years ago, and a few months later, in a devastated town, Edin Zubcevic launched his first jazz festival. “This ...

Album Review

Scott Amendola vs. Wil Blades: Greatest Hits

Read "Greatest Hits" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
November 18, 2016

Hardly the adversarial enterprise its billing implies, Greatest Hits is not keyboardist Wil Blades' first duo with a master percussionist: he recorded Shimmy (Amulet, 2012) with Billy Martin (of Medeski, Martin & Wood fame) in 2012. And any music lover who relished Martin's somewhat more abstract collaboration with keyboardist Medeski, Mago (Amulet, 2007) will be nevertheless satisfied with the largely earthy, accessible results of this project: this wryly-titled collaboration with drummer Scott Amendola is a comparable companion piece, even though ...

Album Review

Sao Paulo Underground: Cantos Invisíveis

Read "Cantos Invisíveis" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
November 18, 2016

Democratically led by Chicago-based sound explorer Rob Mazurek, São Paulo Underground has been defying genre conventions and musical boundaries for almost a decade. Originally formed with percussionist Mauricio Takara and keyboardist Guilherme Granado during Mazurek's sojourn in Brazil (2000-2005), the ensemble's membership has undergone a subtle change on its fifth album with the addition of Swiss-born multi-instrumentalist Thomas Rohrer, a frequent collaborator of Mazurek's.Translated from Portuguese as “invisible songs," Mazurek says of Cantos Invisíveis, “the way we make ...

Album Review

Shirantha Beddage: Momentum

by Dave Wayne
November 18, 2016

The fact that Momentum is only Shirantha Beddage's third album as a leader since 2007 suggests that he's either putting a lot of thought into his music, or that he has a lot of other stuff going on. One thing he has going on is composing music for the FX television series Fargo. Still, it's kind of interesting that, in today's media- mad world, someone would leave a 4 or 5 year gap between albums. For Momentum, Beddage has reconvened ...

Album Review

Marc Ribot: Live In Tokyo

Read "Live In Tokyo" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
November 18, 2016

Ah, The Sound of Philadelphia. For folks lucky enough to grow up in or around the City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection in the mid-to late-1970s (I'm one), the very phrase resounds with memories, most emanating from Sigma Sound Studios on North 12th Street: Thick yet clear arrangements, pumping and thumping basslines and rhythms, masterful vocalists smooth (Billy Paul) and rough (Teddy Pendergrass), guided by the firm yet sensitive hands of soul entrepreneurs Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and ...

Album Review

Leigh Pilzer: Strunkin'

Read "Strunkin'" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
November 18, 2016

Leigh Pilzer is a baritone saxophonist from the Washington, DC area who has made a busy career for herself teaching, playing in various small groups and holding down the baritone chair in the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, the DIVA Jazz Orchestra and the Bohemian Caverns Jazz Orchestra. On this, her first CD as a leader, she fronts a small group made up of her bandmates from all three of those ensembles. This is a live recording of Pilzer's ...

Under the Radar

Dai Liang, aka A Bu: Beijing Prodigy

by Karl Ackermann
November 17, 2016

In 1950, in the wake of World War II and the early years of the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong founded the Central Conservatory of Music as a consolidation of several musical institutions. Located in Beijing, the school resides on the former site of the seventeenth century residence of one Prince Yixuan. The campus has developed into a global institution offering advanced degrees in a setting that mixes original building from the Qing Dynasty with state-of-the-art ...

Interview

Samantha Boshnack: A Musical World Without Boundaries

by Paul Rauch
November 17, 2016

The city of Seattle has an eclectic relationship with jazz historically, in terms of innovation and embracing the notion of music without boundaries, of musical communities interacting and supporting each other. Samantha Boshnack fits perfectly into that musical paradigm. Whether writing and performing with her 14 piece ensemble B'shnorkestra, or in a quintet setting, Boshnack has pushed musical boundaries in a multitude of directions. Her music carries a social narrative, an emotional intelligence uniquely her own. Her new release, Global ...

Album Review

Divergence Jazz Orchestra: Fake It Until You Make It

Read "Fake It Until You Make It" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
November 17, 2016

Fake It Until You Make It is the second recording by Australia's young and ebullient Divergence Jazz Orchestra, ably co-supervised by composer / arranger Jenna Cave and trombonist Paul Weber (our apology to Weber for not having named him as such in a review of the orchestra's debut album, The Opening Statement). The DJO was formed four years ago (2012) by Cave and Weber “to provide a space where composers and musicians could come together, explore ideas and make music." ...

Album Review

Tisziji Munoz: Alpha Nebula Expanded: The Monster Peace

Read "Alpha Nebula Expanded: The Monster Peace" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
November 17, 2016

The visionary guitarist Tisziji Munoz was introduced to the listening public in the late 1970s as a sideman on a now impossibly rare Pharoah Sanders album (Pharoah, India Navigation, 1977). This was followed by his debut as a leader, Rendezvous With Now (India Navigation, 1978). After a decade-long gap in recording activity, Munoz began releasing albums on his own Anami Music label at a furious pace in the early 1990s. Since then, he's collaborated with a mind-boggling array of musical ...