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

Todd Coolman & Trifecta: Collectables

Read "Collectables" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
August 2, 2016

Bassist Todd Coolman readily cops to his collections in the liner essay for this delightful date, noting a fondness for accumulating baseball caps, photos and drawings of birds, timepieces, and antique fishing tackle. But it's his collections from the realm of music--also cited in his writing(s)--that shape this date. He's amassed a stockpile of favorite songs over the course of his storied career and he's filled his mental Rolodex with a cache of compatriots ideally suited to different projects. He ...

Album Review

Erna Ferry: Wild About You

Read "Wild About You" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 2, 2016

If singer Erna Ferry's name is new to you, that's more than likely because she's a New Zealander who makes her home in that lovely faraway island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, east of Australia across the Tasman Sea. Ferry, a jazz singer with bluesy overtones, is backed on Wild About You by the exemplary Rodger Fox Big Band, the very best that New Zealand has to offer. The band, in fact, is so formidable that one could be ...

Album Review

Generations Quartet: Oliver Lake/Joe Fonda/Michael Jefrys Stevens/Emil Gross: Flow

by Karl Ackermann
August 2, 2016

As the name would imply, the Generations Quartet spans the ages of its personnel. An off-shoot (of sorts) from the Trio Generations group, it's a semantic difference as saxophone legend Oliver Lake was a guest in the lineup that performed in 2015. From that same tour, we get Flow, a festive exercise of freedom and comradery that could only be realized by a team with the wealth of experience and talent gathered here. Recorded live (but non-sequentially) in Germany, it ...

Album Review

David Honeyboy Edwards: I'm Gonna Tell You Somethin' That I Know

Read "I'm Gonna Tell You Somethin' That I Know" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
August 2, 2016

When David Honeyboy Edwards passed in 2011, with him went one of the last living links to the history of the blues. Born in Mississippi in 1915, he started out as a wandering guitarist, playing acoustic Delta Blues as passed down by the men who invented the genre. First recorded down south in 1942, he eventually settled in Chicago by the 1950's, and witnessed firsthand when the blues went electric, doing some solid sessions at the iconic Chess Studios. I'm ...

Album Review

Brian Andres & the Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel: This Could Be That

Read "This Could Be That" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
August 2, 2016

This Could Be That celebrates the first decade of Brian Andres & his Afro-Cuban Jazz Cartel, which came together in 2007 in and around the San Francisco Bay Area's Latin jazz hothouse. Music is sort of the Andres' family business: Brian's father Mike, a professional woodwind player from the Cincinnati area (who appears on this set), introduced his son to the recording studio while Brian was still a child, while Brian's mother sang for chamber and liturgical music ensembles. By ...

Out and About: The Super Fans

Meet "Jazz Judy" Judy Balos

by Tessa Souter and Andrea Wolper
August 1, 2016

“Jazz Judy" Balos has earned her nickname. A live music fan since the age of 16 when she saw Nina Simone in concert, this New Yorker has been going out to hear live jazz four or five times a week (sometimes even two or three times a day) for over 50 years; she's even traveled to Africa and Europe to see her particular favorites. Long lines, “sold out" notices, lack of transportation? No problem--Jazz Judy has her ways!

My Blue Note Obsession

Art Blakey: A Night in Tunisia – 1961

by Marc Davis
August 1, 2016

Dizzy Gillespie's “A Night in Tunisia" has been done almost to death. Wikipedia says it has been recorded at least 500 times and it is the title track to at least 30 albums. It might be the most recorded bop tune of all time. Who did it best? Take your pick. Dizzy himself recorded many hot versions. All are good and some are great. Charlie Parker and Miles Davis can claim one of the earliest and ...

Album Review

Anthony Branker & Imagine: Beauty Within

Read "Beauty Within" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
August 1, 2016

The “Rising Star" status isn't confined to fresh music school graduates. Dr. Anthony Branker, Educator--who, for twenty-seven years, was engaged in a big way with Princeton University's jazz program--has achieved a recent “rising star" tag as a composer. This after releasing seven top notch CDs for Origin Records, including the masterful Uppity (2013). “Composer/Musical Director" is Branker's title on his recordings. He doesn't play, but rather molds the sounds of several different small group jazz collectives. On Beauty ...

Album Review

Kayhan Kalhor: Hawniyaz

Read "Hawniyaz" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
August 1, 2016

Western music listeners may not be quick to conjure a connection with Iran and improvised music but there is much spontaneity across genres throughout the Central Asian region. One of the few artists known to U.S. markets is kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. The kamancheh, sometimes called the “spike fiddle," is common to Central Asia and dates back to the eleventh century. It has had a long-time presence in Middle Eastern classical music but is frequently used in folk and religious ...

Album Review

The Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra: Storming Through the South

Read "Storming Through the South" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 1, 2016

First, three hearty cheers and a laurel wreath for trumpeter Mike Vax who has kept the splendid Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra together (with some inescapable changes in personnel, not to mention name) for twenty-five years, supervised no less than eighteen annual road tours and produced half a dozen in-concert albums, the most recent of which, Storming Through the South, was recorded during the orchestra's spring excursion in 2015 --sixteen cities in seventeen days covering Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma. ...