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.

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In The Biz

David Longoria: Embracing Innovation

by Kathy Sanborn
November 9, 2016

Popular trumpeter, songwriter, and producer David Longoria has achieved success in music by refusing to follow the musical crowd. Growing up in relatively poor circumstances, Longoria learned to trust his instincts and to embrace innovation as he set his sights on becoming the internationally respected musician that he is today. At the age of ten, Longoria chose the trumpet as his primary instrument. It took the youth over a year to raise sixty-five dollars, the amount required ...

Live Review

Katie Thiroux Quartet at Birdland

by Dan Bilawsky
November 8, 2016

Katie Thiroux Quartet Birdland New York, NY November 6, 2016 Joy swings eternal in the music of bassist-vocalist Katie Thiroux. And that's just one of the many gifts that spring forth from this skyrocketing talent. Over the past eighteen months, Thiroux has had one deserved success after another. It started with the arrival of one of the most auspicious debuts in recent memory--the Jeff Hamilton-produced Introducing Katie Thiroux (Basskat Records, 2015)--and snowballed from there. ...

Album Review

Martin Bejerano: Trio Miami

Read "Trio Miami" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
November 8, 2016

While nobody could successfully argue that the cost of playing with jazz legend Roy Haynes outweighs the benefits--a wealth of experience and time to connect with one of this music's greatest figures, tremendous exposure and opportunity on the performance front, time to build a group dynamic with one of the few true working bands out there, the incentives that often come with top-tier bookings--there is still a small price to be paid. For pianist Martin Bejerano (and his fellow travelers ...

Album Review

Enrico Pieranunzi: New Spring - Live At The Village Vanguard

Read "New Spring - Live At The Village Vanguard" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 8, 2016

Pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's latest offering, New Spring --Live At The Village Vanguard ties together, in different ways, two previous CAM Jazz releases. The most recent is the studio album Proximity featuring saxophonist Donny McCaslin (who also plays in the live album) in a bass-less quartet. The earlier album is Live At The Village Vanguard with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Marc Johnson, and is one of Motian's last recordings before his death. Thus, New Spring, recorded over two ...

Album Review

Adam Pieronczyk:

by Dan McClenaghan
November 8, 2016

Most CD reviews don't start like this, but here it is: author Erik Von Daniken came up with the “ancient astronauts thesis," laid out in his popular book, Chariots Of the Gods? (1968), speculating on the extraterrestrial meddling in early human cultures, claiming that those Earth people at those particular times lacked the requisite know how for the construction of things like the pyramids, so beings from outer space swooped in showed them all about it. It's a theory that's ...

Album Review

US4: My Scandinavian Blues: A Tribute To Horace Parlan

Read "My Scandinavian Blues: A Tribute To Horace Parlan" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
November 8, 2016

In the year of his birth Horace Parlan suffered an attack of polio that left him with a partially crippled right hand. He developed his own style of playing (involving a percussive left hand) and went on to become one of the most prolific and soulful pianists of the hard bop era. He played for two years with Charles Mingus and made eight Blue Note albums under his own name. In 1972, at the age of 42, ...

My Favourite Things

Frank Woeste

by Paolo Peviani
November 8, 2016

Frank Woeste is a German pianist living in Paris. He graduated from the Paris Conservatory in 2001, and was awarded 1st or 2nd prize at several international contests such as the Steinway Prize at the Montreux International Piano Competition (Switzerland), the Jazz Hoeilaart International Competition (Belgium) and the Gexto European Jazzcontest (Spain). Among others, he has played with Ibrahim Maalouf, Dave Douglas, Michel Portal, Youn Sun Nah, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, Clarence Penn, Nasheet Waits, Malik ...

Live Review

Enjoy Jazz 2016

by John Kelman
November 7, 2016

2016 Enjoy Jazz Festival Heidelberg, Mannheim & Ludwigshafen, Germany October 24-November 1, 2016 Returning to Heidelberg and the Enjoy Jazz Festival after a three-year absence is still more than a bit like returning to a second home. Not just the same hotel (the ever-charming Hollander Hof, along the Neckar River by an old footbridge), which has not only managed to retain most of its staff from 2009-13, but still remembers and assigns the same hotel room ...

Album Review

Clare Fischer Latin Jazz Big Band: Intenso!

by Jack Bowers
November 7, 2016

If nothing else, an exclamation point is meant to grab one's attention. What matters most, of course, is what precedes (or follows) said mark. On Intenso!, the latest album by the Clare Fischer Latin Jazz Big Band, the music provides its own exclamation point, charging boldly forward as if to say, “Drop whatever you're doing and listen to me!" It's a stratagem that could conceivably work as well as it did for the band's earlier recording, Ritmo!, which earned a ...

Album Review

Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenry: Proximity

Read "Proximity" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 7, 2016

In its 80-year history, the Village Vanguard has had its share of legendary shows and, because of its intimacy, extended gigs and knowledgeable audience, has been the place for a large number of live recordings, including most recently, Enrico Pieranunzi's New Spring. While Proximity is not a live recording, the impetus for the recording happened at the Vanguard, when regular patron Max Koslow heard saxophonist Bill McHenry and free drummer Andrew Cyrille perform as a duo. The magical ...