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

DJM trio: Cave Art

Read "Cave Art" reviewed by Rokas Kucinskas

by Rokas Kucinskas
August 20, 2016

Dominic J Marshall is a pianist, composer, and aspiring electronic music artist. The Leeds College of Music and Conservatorium van Amsterdam graduate is best known for his piano trios in Netherlands and United Kingdom, where he mostly performs. His past releases, with the exception of his electronic music, are rooted in contemporary jazz piano tradition: technical, harmonically and rhythmically challenging music, which is mostly based on thematic improvisations. Cave Art is different. Perhaps so different that it is everything but ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Brandon Goodwin of B's Bees

by AAJ Staff
August 19, 2016

About Brandon Goodwin: Montreal group B's Bees is a hard swinging jazz outfit known for writing compelling original music and playing high energy interpretations of the music of past masters such as The Jazz Messengers, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Haden. Comprised of five core members, they wowed the audience at their debut concert at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2012. When bandleader Brandon Goodwin won a scholarship to play at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2012, ...

Album Review

Allison Adams Tucker: WANDERlust

Read "WANDERlust" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
August 19, 2016

Many modern-day jazz vocalists have been known to touchdown in a few different locales over the course of an album, but few to none get their passports stamped in as many places as Allison Adams Tucker does on the aptly named WANDERlust. Tucker brings her multilingual brilliance and cultural savvy to the fore during this expertly planned travelogue. Tucker's voice is a beautiful instrument--one that floats, flies, and seduces with its no-fuss delivery--and she makes great use ...

Album Review

Michael Gamble and The Rhythm Serenaders: Michael Gamble and The Rhythm Serenaders

Read "Michael Gamble and The Rhythm Serenaders" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
August 19, 2016

Swing Era music was exciting, infectiously rhythmic music, played for dancers. Bassist and bandleader Michael Gamble and the company of musicians making up The Rhythm Serenaders stay true to both the sound and the spirit of that time in this program of well known Swing standards, plus a few more obscure standards that might have been. They draw from the repertoires of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ben Webster, Billie Holiday,and Artie Shaw's Gramercy Five, to name a few. ...

Album Review

Tarun Balani Collective: Dharma

by Dave Wayne
August 19, 2016

Drummer / composer Tarun Balani's previous album, Sacred World (Self Produced, 2013), offered audiences a fresh look at the synthesis and Indian music and jazz. On Dharma, Balani steps back a bit from the music of his homeland. The result is still an invigorating listen. Balani's composing here makes extensive use of hypnotic, propulsive ostinati. Conceptually, the pieces here resemble some of Eberhard Weber's or Ralph Towner's ECM recordings of the mid-to-late 1970s. Keep in mind that the production and ...

Album Review

Peggy Stern: Z Octet

Read "Z Octet" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
August 19, 2016

Austin, Texas-based pianist/composer Peggy Stern has 30 years and 12 recordings to her considerable credit. Her repertoire knows no perimeter, and includes mainstream jazz, bossa nova, and most of all, her own finely crafted compositions. For her lucky 13th release, Z Octet Stern turns in a ten-piece recital of chamber music. Again defying categorization, this is chamber music, not classical chamber music, not jazz chamber music or any other genre one could pin to the critical bulletin board. It is ...

Album Review

Joëlle Léandre - Urs Leimgruber - Fred Frith - Alvin Curran: Oakland/Lisboa

Read "Oakland/Lisboa" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
August 19, 2016

Under the moniker MMM Quartet a crew from diverse points of the compass assembled for a concert at the 2014 Jazz Em Agosto in Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal). Three of the four principals have associations with Mills College in Oakland (the MMM acronym improbably stands for Mills Music Mafia), while the Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber is the solitary interloper. With constituent parts like French bassist Joëlle Léandre, English guitarist Fred Frith and veteran American pianist, composer and electronics whizz Alvin Curran, ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Patrick Zimmerli

by AAJ Staff
August 18, 2016

About Patrick Zimmerli New York-and Paris-based composer/saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli writes a sophisticated yet approachable hybrid of contemporary classical and jazz music. Recent collaborators include Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Brooklyn Rider String Quartet, Brian Blade, Luciana Souza, the Knights Orchestra and the Escher String Quartet. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, Salle Pleyel in Paris, Sala São Paolo in Brazil, the Vienna Konzerthaus Grosser Saal and the new ...

Album Review

Quinsin Nachoff: Flux

by Dan McClenaghan
August 18, 2016

Saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff sounds right at home on Mythology Records--saxophonist/producer/provocateur David Binney's label. Everything on Mythology has a intensity and modernity, a brashness and in-your-face confidence of delivery, whether it's Binney as the leader, or on sets headed up by pianists John Escreet or Edward Simon, or Quinsin Nachoff. Flux is Nachoff's debut on the label, a two saxophone front line with piano and drums, and no bass in the mix, in the mode of Vijay Iyer's Fieldwork ...

New York Beat

Joey DeFrancesco at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola

by Nick Catalano
August 18, 2016

As the New York August heat blazed onto the streets on Saturday night (August 13th), Joey DeFrancesco and his trio rocketed into Dizzy's with their own burning repertoire. The B-3 wizard played four selections from his new HighNote CD Trip Mode and had an audience which included Bill Charlap, Paquito D'Rivera, and Todd Barkan roaring with approval for the tunes--some written with metronome settings breaking the sound barrier. The new group features guitarist Dan Wilson and drummer ...