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.

Profile

The Giant Legacy of Rudy Van Gelder

by Greg Simmons
October 5, 2016

Recording Engineer Rudy Van Gelder died at home of natural causes on August 25th at the age of 91. His legacy--and it's a big one--is the countless recordings he made during modern jazz's greatest period of innovation. Almost any jazz musician of note who was making records--especially if they were working on the east coast--was captured at some point with Van Gelder at the controls. Be-boppers, hard-boppers, post-boppers, soul jazz, free jazz, fusion--pick a sub category. If you want to ...

Multiple Reviews

Steve Lawson: A Crack Where the Light Gets In / The Way Home

by Geno Thackara
October 5, 2016

British bassist Steve Lawson likes to tag his music as “the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had." That's not to say that it's bright and cheerful all the time (though that's nice when it happens); rather it's colorful and evocative enough to make each respective kind of day a little richer. Whether playing in a small combo (usually a duo) or going it alone with and without effects, he makes sure improvisation and spontaneity lie at the center ...

Live Review

John Coltrane Birthday Celebration: Harnessing The Coltrane Effect

by Paul Rauch
October 5, 2016

Richard Cole Group Tula's Jazz Club Seattle WA September 23, 2016 The calendar read September 23, 2016, the 90th anniversary of the birth of John Coltrane, and as in many cities in America, and around the world, the music of this master innovator is being celebrated in performance, by modern jazz musicians who have been musically inspired by his courage, by his absence of compromise, by his relentless impatience, by his quest ...

Album Review

Jonathan Finlayson: Moving Still

Read "Moving Still" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
October 5, 2016

If the title of trumpeter-composer Jonathan Finlayson's sophomore outing doesn't fully express his keenness in balancing conceptual grounding and rigor with fly-to-the-outer-limits expressiveness, the music certainly does. Moving Still--the highly anticipated follow up to Moment And The Message (Pi Recordings, 2013)--finds Finlayson doing what he does best: offsetting intricate lines and latticework with episodes of openness, tweaking thoughts in real time, and slicing through his own architectural creations to penetrating effect. It's a work of grand design and artistic authority, ...

Album Review

Rova Channeling Coltrane: Electric Ascension

Read "Electric Ascension" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
October 5, 2016

John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1965) stands as a seminal moment in the development of modern jazz, presenting structured large group improvisation which renounced both the form and content of almost all previous models. It was never performed live, and this was one of the facts which initially captured the attention of the now venerable ROVA Saxophone Quartet, who have explored the work on multiple occasions. First was John Coltrane's Ascension (Black Saint, 1997) a fairly faithful homage which mirrored the ...

Album Review

Andre Canniere: The Darkening Blue

Read "The Darkening Blue" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
October 5, 2016

Five of the ten numbers here are songs with lyrics, four of which are translations of poems by Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and one is written by Monique Canniere, whose words were inspired by American author Charles Bukowski's “Bluebird." The pastoral solo piano opening to “Autumn Day" belies the strong entrance by the whole sextet including Brigitte Beraha's vibrant vocals and Andre Canniere's strident trumpet, also heard again to good effect on the swinging “Going Blind" again ...

Album Review

Tim Davies Big Band: The Expensive Train Set

Read "The Expensive Train Set" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 5, 2016

Tim Davies, who led a big band in his native Australia before relocating to Los Angeles in 2000, reprises that experience on parts of The Expensive Train Set, returning home to supervise his Melbourne ensemble on four selections, presiding over his Los Angeles-based band on four others, and somehow managing to blend the two groups together as one on the ambitious title song, which Davies calls “the centerpiece of the album," as well it should be. Whereas ...

Live Review

Hyde Park Jazz Festival 2016

by Mark Corroto
October 4, 2016

Hyde Park Jazz Festival Chicago, IL September 24-25, 2016Regard the Hyde Park Jazz Festival as you would your favorite restaurant, where it just so happens that you are best friends with the chef. You have an embarrassment of riches because everything on the menu, which is fresh and delicious, organic, and mostly locally sourced, is free to you. When they do feature a special from out-of-town it is always innovative and original. Only one ...

Album Review

Rale Micic: Night Music

Read "Night Music" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 4, 2016

On Night Music, his fourth album as leader of his own group, Rale Micic (pronounced Rah-lay Mee-cheech), a Serbian-born guitarist who has lived and gigged in New York City for more than fifteen years, pays tribute to the music of the Hungarian classical composer Bela Bartok who, as it turns out, spent his last years living in the same Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, in upper Manhattan, where Micic has made his home for the past dozen years. Having learned ...

Album Review

Richard Sussman: The Evolution Suite

Read "The Evolution Suite" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 4, 2016

Arranger/conductor Gunther Schuller coined, in 1957, the term “Third Stream," to describe a musical synthesis of jazz and classical music. Early examples of this sound include Miles Davis/Gil Evans' Sketches of Spain (Columbia Records, 1961), saxophonist Stan Getz' Focus (Verve Records, 1961), and the Dizzy Gillespie/J.J. Johnson collaboration, the oddly overlooked and excellent Perceptions (Verve Records, 1961). Pianist/composer Richard Sussman takes that Third Stream idea a step further with The Evolution Suite, by combining jazz, classical and ...