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

Billie Davies: Hand In Hand In The Hand Of The Moon

Read "Hand In Hand In The Hand Of The Moon" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
May 24, 2016

Free drummer Billie Davies calls Hand In Hand In The Hand Of The Moon a symphony, which implies composition, larger planned structures, etc. Nothing like that is here, as the music was improvised and recorded in one session. However, this music is not just a free session of highly intuitive and sensitive players; it has a reason for being, and that reason is the intersection of the life paths of two artists working in different media -Davies, a musician and ...

Multiple Reviews

Two Scandinavian Jazz Orchestras

by John Eyles
May 23, 2016

It can be notoriously difficult to keep large-scale improvising ensembles in check and prevent their music from spiralling into incoherence. At their best, when the balance between order and chaos is just right, they make thrilling listening and attract fans in abundance, just as jazz big bands once did. Classic examples include Carla Bley & Mike Mantler's Jazz Composers' Orchestra, Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Keith Tippett's Centipede, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers' Orchestra. ...

Album Review

Alchemy Sound Project: Further Explorations

Read "Further Explorations" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
May 23, 2016

The collective, Alchemy Sound Project, is a core quintet of composers and musicians whose compositions, on their debut album, Further Explorations cross over a foundation of chamber music with traditional jazz. The central players had united under the banner of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute prior to this project. With diverse interests in global influences as well as backgrounds in a multitude of musical mediums, their challenge was to create jazz influenced by classical principles, a bit of a reverse ...

Album Review

Gilad Atzmon And The Orient House Ensemble: The Whistle Blower

Read "The Whistle Blower" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
May 23, 2016

The Whistle Blower is the eighth album from saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and his Orient House Ensemble, but sounds as fresh as the first. As one of the most fearless improvisers of the UK jazz scene, Atzmon has always worn his politics loudly on his sleeve, and here the story of an Israeli Jew who left home in search of new identities rings truer than ever over the course of seven original tunes. The listener emerges from the other ends of ...

Album Review

Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra: AHEO

by James Nadal
May 23, 2016

Haiti is arguably the most African country outside of Africa. It's culture, traditions, and religious beliefs are intrinsically connected to the continent which was home to the ancestors of its inhabitants. La Fête de la Musique took place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 2014, to honor the music of Haiti, and acknowledge its deep African heritage. Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen was the special guest at this event, in which he performed with Haiti's premier percussionists and singers. The Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra ...

Album Review

Kitt Lyles: Real Talk

Read "Real Talk" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
May 23, 2016

An active performer and educator in the Chicago jazz community, young bassist Kitt Lyles is a graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in Jazz Studies and has performed in venues throughout North America, Latin America and Asia. A sideman on various other recordings, Lyles introduces his debut recording as leader on Real Talk presenting eight original compositions of the contemporary nature. The bassist surrounds himself with a core quintet of Chicago-area musicians, all educators and leaders in ...

Extended Analysis

Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder: Talking Timbuktu

by Nenad Georgievski
May 22, 2016

These days the genre of desert blues boasts one of the most vibrant music movements around the world. The bands and musicians that are part of this genre come from an area that is spread across Western Africa that stretches from Mali to Libya gathering people of various ethnic groups. Artists such as Tinariwen, Terakaft, Boubakar Traore, Tamikrest, Bombino, Habib Koite, Vieux Farka Toure, Amadou and Miriam, to name but a few, can be seen and heard touring the world, ...

Extended Analysis

Dick's Pick's Volume One: Tampa, Florida 12/19/73

by Doug Collette
May 22, 2016

Concluding a reissue program begun in 2011, the Real Gone Music release of Grateful Dead Dick's Picks Volume One brings fitting perspective to a series that, in more ways than one, created a template for archiving an artist's work. And in an unusual approach that is peculiarly appropriate to the mindset of the iconoclastic band and its followers, to begin at the end of the thirty-six volumes and end with the beginning, informs the individual titles and the sequence as ...

Album Review

Corey Christiansen: Factory Girl

Read "Factory Girl" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
May 22, 2016

Guitarist Corey Christiansen began his stint at Origin Records in 2008 with a top notch organ jazz outing, Roll With It. He followed that with an equally engaging disc featuring the same players, Outlaw Tractor on the label in 2010. On these two dates, Christensen and his superb band worked the soul jazz groove typical of the B3 organ genre, featuring a breezy dynamic with superb displays of technique all around, and lots of room for the guitarist's inspired guitar ...

Album Review

Andrea Esperti: Roma-Rio

Read "Roma-Rio" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
May 22, 2016

Putting on this record, you'd be forgiven for thinking that “Roma nun fa la stupida stasera" was a Brazilian jazz staple. But the song is of Italian vintage, like everything that follows on this atmospheric, laid-back album. Described by Swiss-based trombonist and bandleader Andrea Esperti as the “greatest hits of Italian song crashing Rio's Carnival" or, even more evocatively, as “the spirit of La Dolce Vita set to the rhythms of the samba," Roma-Rio is Esperti's love letter to two ...