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

Yuhan Su: A Room of One's Own

Read "A Room of One's Own" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
June 8, 2016

Vibraphonist/composer Yuhan Su says she wrote most of the songs on her second album in tiny piano practice rooms where she spent a great deal of time teaching. That's one part of the meaning of the album title. A Room of One's Own also refers to the Virginia Woolf essay of the same name, which explores the reasons why few women had written fiction, as well as any author's need for personal liberty to create art. A potentially heavy topic, ...

Interview

Simin Tander: Daring To Surrender

by Ian Patterson
June 7, 2016

Luck, so the saying goes, is ninety per cent hard work, as Simin Tander knows only too well. The Afghan/German singer is currently making international waves with What Was Said (ECM, 2016), a haunting collaboration with Tord Gustavsen, and is enjoying a higher profile than ever before. Whilst an element of luck of the right-time right-place variety helped Tander and Gustavsen's stars align, Tander's elevation to the cover of jazz magazines and to the stages of major international festivals is ...

Live Review

Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile at the Rubin Museum of Art

by Tyran Grillo
June 7, 2016

Nik Bärtsch's Mobile Rubin Museum of Art New York, NY May 6, 2016 When is music a ritual? A relevant question in regard to pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch, one of few modern musicians to live out his worldview in every thought and action. His “Ronin" project laid fresh tracks in the vast network of ECM Records--no small feat considering the label's diverse, decades-long locomotion. But behind Ronin's curtain, in his native Zürich, ...

Album Review

Markus Stockhausen & Florian Weber: Alba

by Mark Sullivan
June 7, 2016

Alba--the first Markus Stockhausen recording for ECM since Karta (ECM, 2000)--is the premiere recording of trumpeter Stockhausen's duo with pianist Florian Weber, a relationship that spun off from Markus' six-piece world music ensemble Eternal Voyage. Initially Stockhausen wrote all of the material, but as the relationship grew Weber contributed tunes: there are also several impromptu performances in this set. After some early experiments with electronics the pair decided that they sounded stronger playing acoustically, making this an all-acoustic album.

Album Review

Aireene Espiritu: Back Where I Belong

Read "Back Where I Belong" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
June 7, 2016

How can someone go back to where they have never been? How can a ukulele playing folk singer accomplish searing blues and soul vocals with such sincere expression and emotion? These are just two of the mysteries surrounding Aireene Espiritu. Her release Back Where I Belong, reveals the answers, and much more. Though Espiritu has been gigging around the Bay Area for decades, it was at a performance in Oakland (amongst 200 artists) that she caught the ear ...

Album Review

Julian Julien: Terre II

Read "Terre II" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
June 7, 2016

With Terre II, percussionist and composer Julian Julien has given us a thing of cohesive beauty. Though classically veneered, it's a jazz album at heart, mixing two parts right brain for every part left. Joining him are Siegfried Canto (flute), Michaël Havard (soprano, tenor, and baritone saxophones), Rémi Dumoulin (bass clarinet), Guillaume Billaux (guitar), Médéric Collignon (cornet, voice), Adeline Lecce (cello), and Hélène Argo (voice). Julien has chosen these musicians not only by reputation, but for their diversity. Drawing on ...

Album Review

John Surman: Westering Home

Read "Westering Home" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
June 7, 2016

Originally released on Chris Blackwell's Island Records, John Surman's first solo album was a complete departure from his previous works. It presaged the canon of pastoral solo recordings he was to produce later for ECM in contrast to his more robust and conventionally orchestrated recordings. His second and final album for Island, Morning Glory, a year later, was a reversion to the dynamic manifestations to which Surman had been hitherto associated. In subsequent ECM and other recordings Surman ...

Hi-Res Jazz

Songlines: An Independent Voice for New Music

by Mark Werlin
June 6, 2016

The independent Vancouver-based record label Songlines Recordings was established in 1992. Inspired by the contemporary jazz music scene in Vancouver, label founder Tony Reif began recording Canadian, American, Dutch, German and French composer-performers. Over the next two decades, the core group of musicians who recorded frequently for Songlines included Benoît Delbecq, Harris Eisenstadt, Gordon Grdina, Wayne Horvitz, Francois Houle, Brad Shepik and Michael Blake. Plot a zig-zag route from Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, to San Francisco and Reno, from New ...

Getting Into Jazz

Barney Kessel: The First Four Albums

by Mark Barnett
June 6, 2016

Getting Started If you're new to jazz, go to our Getting Into Jazz primer for some hints on how to listen. CD Capsule Beautiful work by a luminary of the jazz guitar. These albums are a showcase for Kessel's skill and sensitivity, and a reminder of how gifted he was as an arranger. Background Barney Kessel, perhaps the most celebrated jazz guitarist of the 1950s and ...

Album Review

John Daversa: Kaleidoscope Eyes: Music of the Beatles

Read "Kaleidoscope Eyes: Music of the Beatles" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
June 6, 2016

Does the world need another collection of Beatles covers? The same argument could be had about any of the dozens of standards that regularly, sometimes ad nauseam, crop up on new releases. But redundancy is validated each time an Amy Winehouse takes on “Body and Soul" or Avicii reinvents “Feeling Good," and those instances serve as wakeup calls to re-appreciate the originals. There should be little doubt that the works of John Lennon and Paul McCartney--and occasionally George Harrison--need to ...