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

Les Rhinoceros: Les Rhincéros III

Read "Les Rhincéros III" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
August 18, 2016

Les Rhinocéros is one of the most engaging anomalies to come out of underground legend John Zorn's forever expanding circle in a long time. The trio of Michael Coltun (basses, electronics, and anything else he can get his hands on), Amit Peled (guitars, ditto), and Jonathan Burrier (drums & percussion) has been destroying and artfully rebuilding audiences since 2010. So impressed was Zorn by their forthright mash-up of everything from math rock and noise to thrash metal and reggae that ...

Album Review

RED Trio & John Butcher: Summer Skyshift

Read "Summer Skyshift" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
August 18, 2016

It was the release of Empire (No Business, 2011) that constituted the point at which many people first began to pay attention to the Portuguese Red Trio. That collaboration with English saxophonist John Butcher featured on several year end lists. It paved the way for a series of further alliances, documented on disc with trumpeter Nate Wooley and vibraphonist Mattias Ståhl, as well as other albums by the core trio. With Summer Skyshift, the band has come full circle as ...

Album Review

Per Mathisen: Sounds of 3

Read "Sounds of 3" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
August 18, 2016

“We never solo, we always solo." Like so many great ideas, Joe Zawinul's iconic line about his group Weather Report is both brilliantly simple and allows for endless possibilities. No single player gets featured in the spotlight while the others provide a steady pattern behind them; rather everyone constantly improvises around the framework of a given piece and all contributions are equally important to the whole. Known as “The Norwegian bass Viking" (for good reason as this album shows), Per ...

Album Review

Kat Riggins: Blues Revival

Read "Blues Revival" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
August 18, 2016

On occasion, a surprise artist stands out amongst the records which arrive for review consideration. Kat Riggins is a blues singer whose Blues Revival had a tendency to beckon for an encore after the first few tracks were played, to reaffirm what was being heard. As most recordings today employ an array of studio musicians, rare is the working band where such a gifted vocalist as Riggins is paired with an expressive guitarist as Darrell Raines, who shines brightly on ...

Album Review

Porta Palace Collective: Neuroplastic Groove

Read "Neuroplastic Groove" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 18, 2016

The Italian Porta Palace Collective began its work as a Torino-based quintet led by trumpeter Johnny Lapio releasing its self-titled debut album last year (Rudi Records, 2015). This album offered European abstraction of modern jazz with with touches of free jazz and avant-garde, featuring the Collective augmented by veteran trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, known from the Italian Instabile Orchestra and many collaborations with European free-improvisers, as the main composer.The follow-up album, Neuroplastic Groove, expands the already established aesthetics, continues ...

Interview

Dave Liebman and Michael Kaplan: How Does the Brain Make All that Jazz?

by Victor L. Schermer
August 17, 2016

With recent advances in neuroscience, the relationship between music and the brain has become the subject of new research and generated a great deal of public interest. Best sellers like Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia (Knopf, 2007) and Daniel Levitin's This Is Your Brain On Music (Dutton Penguin, 2006) have brought the attention of a wider public to the mysterious ways in which the billions of neurons (nerve cells) in our brain hear, process, and produce sounds that are meaningful and even ...

Interview

Bobby Hutcherson: A Life In Jazz

by AAJ Staff
August 17, 2016

This interview was first published at All About Jazz in February 1999. Listen to any one of Bobby Hutcherson's albums for Blue Note during the mid-'60's and '70's, he made well over thirty, and you will see just why he is the best vibraphonist in jazz. Dialogue with Andrew Hill, Components with a fiery Joe Chambers, and Live at Montreux, all superb. It was a personal honor to get an opportunity to sit down and chat with Hutcherson. ...

Live Review

The Tierney Sutton Band at SFJAZZ Center

by Asher Wolf
August 17, 2016

The Tierney Sutton Band SFJAZZ Center Summer Jazz Festival San Francisco, CA July 17, 2016 When Tierney Sutton holds a note it sucks the listener in like the gravity of an object slowly accumulating mass. Breaking the rhythm of her spare, surgically precise vocal brushwork, Sutton occasionally freezes on a certain pitch, taking the audience captive until they are forced to regard the intricacies of her timbral landscape. After a second or two, the ...

Album Review

Refraction: Inerrant Space

Read "Inerrant Space" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
August 17, 2016

Refraction is an Australian piano trio led by drummer Chris Broomhead, who also composed most of the music. He is joined by pianist Brenton Foster (who contributes two tunes) and double bassist Jordan Tarento. Inerrant Space definitely does not sound like a “drummer's album." It's very much a group sound, as the collective group name implies. Broomhead makes his mark by his writing and sensitive playing: there are no drum solos. The music is bright, lyrical and impressionistic, ...

Album Review

Michael Shrieve: Michael Shrieve's Spellbinder

Read "Michael Shrieve's Spellbinder" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
August 17, 2016

Despite a varied series of projects, prolific master drummer Michael Shrieve has maintained a comparatively low profile since his days as a member of the original Santana band. But with the reunion of that ensemble, the time's certainly right for him to step directly into the limelight with Spellbinder, which, even it doesn't exhibit the same deep-rooted fire and ingenuity of Shrieve's higher-profile ensemble, is almost as challenging as it is accessible. As great a name as is ...