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

Ricardo Grilli: 1954

by Jerome Wilson
October 15, 2016

Ricardo Grilli is a New York-based guitarist whose music is a gentle blend of jazz and progressive rock. He leads a quartet of accomplished musicians who know how to alternately be calm and spacious or rhythmic and grooving. On the calmer side “Rings" has a quietly throbbing beat and mellow texture set up by Joe Martin's bass and Eric Harland's simple drum patterns and “Breathe" is much the same but with a Latin tinge to the rhythm and delicate, lively ...

Album Review

Alyssa Allgood: Out Of The Blue

Read "Out Of The Blue" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
October 15, 2016

Chicago vocalist Alyssa Allgood devotes her first full length album to an unexpected source: the classic hard bop repertoire of Blue Note Records. The label is mainly known for instrumental jazz, and all of these selections were originally instrumental. This presents no problem for Allgood, who demonstrates equal facility scatting, singing wordless vocalise, and writing lyrics (which she does on four tracks). She has a crack band, too: organist Dan Chase, guitarist Tim Fitzgerald, saxophonist Chris Madsen and drummer Matt ...

Album Review

Eric Alexander: Second Impression

Read "Second Impression" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 14, 2016

Not only has tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander recorded more than thirty-five albums as a leader since arriving in New York City some twenty years ago, he has appeared on almost as many others as a sideman. He's such an earnest blue-collar worker that one almost expects him to carry his saxophone in a lunch pail instead of the standard instrument case. Any Second Impression would mirror the first: Alexander is a tireless craftsman who loves to play and, more to ...

Album Review

Empirical: Out 'N' In

Read "Out 'N' In" reviewed by Jakob Baekgaard

by Jakob Baekgaard
October 14, 2016

One of the great things about tributes is that they allow one to revisit and appreciate the influence of artists that deserve more exposure. This is definitely the case with the British group Empirical's tribute to reed player and composer, Eric Dolphy. Out 'n' In was released in 2009 and is still a text book example of how tributes should be done. Instead of playing an album of cover tunes, the group has internalized the influence of Dolphy and created ...

Album Review

Earprint: Earprint

Read "Earprint" reviewed by Jerome Wilson

by Jerome Wilson
October 14, 2016

Earprint follows the pattern laid down by several newer jazz groups in the last few years. They do short, pithy songs in the four to six minute range, sue choppy rhythms which draw a lot from rock and hip hop and construct intricate, slightly tongue-in- cheek melodies. This concept allows them to explore a large swath of musical ideas from their quartet configuration. You hear this in the creeping, twisty clarinet and trumpet interplay of “Boardroom," the funky ...

Album Review

The Richard Sorce Project: Closer Than Before

Read "Closer Than Before" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
October 14, 2016

Lush Brazilian-flavored Latin jazz from composer/pianist/arranger Richard Sorce and his nine-piece group consisting of a five-piece rhythm section, a three-piece horn section and vocalists (augmented by occasional horn and string sections). An accomplished musician and academic, Sorce has received several Meet the Composer grants, is an ASCAP award winning composer and songwriter and the recipient of the Esteemed Faculty Award from New York University, as well as author of several books on musicianship and music theory. So it comes as ...

Profile

Paul Winter Sextet: Count Me In

by Duncan Heining
October 13, 2016

The Paul Winter Sextet might just be one of the best early sixties groups you never heard. Their story, and that of their leader and altoist Paul Winter's, is certainly one of the most remarkable in jazz. Had some director made a film of the Sextet's short life, jazz buffs would have scoffed at the conceit. But it happened, man. It happened. A few years ago, Winter released Count Me In on his own Living Music label. It's ...

New York @ Night

Eric Reed Quartet, Henry Grimes and George Coleman Quartet

by Peter Jurew
October 13, 2016

Eric Reed Quartet SMOKE Jazz & Supper Club New York, NY October 2, 2016 The gifted pianist and composer Eric Reed plays at times with a lightning-quick, cat-like touch, at others with slow, deep resonance, lush and lyrical. He can change from one to the other in the nanosecond it takes his brain to command his deft fingers; the sounds that pour out of the big black Steinway piano are joyous, sad, ...

Album Review

Artiom Krikunov / Ruslan Tustanovskiy: Untitled

by Jack Bowers
October 13, 2016

In 1983, guitarist Joe Pass and tenor saxophone legend Zoot Sims went into a studio and recorded the impressive album Blues for Two. Among those who were most impressed was another guitarist, Artiom Krikunov, who was inspired to pay homage to Messrs. Pass and Sims by recording his own duo album in tandem with Russian-born alto saxophonist Ruslan Tustanovskiy. Perhaps in deference to their illustrious forebears, the album bears no title, simply their names and photos on the front jacket. ...

Album Review

Marco Sanguinetti: Cómo desaparecer completamente

Read "Cómo desaparecer completamente" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
October 13, 2016

Devoting an entire album to another artist's songs is a tradition with, let's say, a checkered history. It can be done out of anything from genuine love to simple goofy novelty. The results are sometimes honorable or even transcendent, other times often pointless copies or cheap money grabs (remember that early-noughties flood of string quartet tributes covering any band that played outside their own garage). Radiohead seemed to invite more covers than most, from the classical-ish piano treatments of Christopher ...