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

Noah Preminger: Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground

Read "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
May 1, 2016

Saxophonist Noah Preminger got this backwards. His latest release, Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground should have preceded the 2015 recording Pivot: Live At The 55 Bar. Same quartet of trumpeter Jason Palmer, bassist Kim Cass, and drummer Ian Froman. Same theme, the Delta Blues. The reverse order observation is a historical one. Where John Coltrane would record an album of shortish compositions, then take them to the Village Vanguard to expand them to album length tracks, Preminger ...

Album Review

Marcus Strickland's Twi-Life: Nihil Novi

Read "Nihil Novi" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
April 30, 2016

When you wipe away all of the minutiae and technical matters involved with the recording process, there are really only two schools of thought on the subject: You either aim to capture what's literally there or you choose to produce something that's not. Everything else is semantics and dealing with variants, mixtures, and/or a balance between the two. Those who aim to strictly capture are trying to bottle true-to-life sound, and those who produce prefer to use those sounds as ...

Album Review

Randy Simon Jazz Project: The Linda Sessions

Read "The Linda Sessions" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
April 30, 2016

The Randy Simon Jazz Project brings to mind, on The Linda Sessions, a high end sports car in top condition zooming down a straight highway, with a rhythm section/drive train boosted by a piano and a guitar. The sound is clean, momentum smooth and straight forward. The tune--the opener of a two CD set--is “Just Deal With It." The band is as tight as a late fifties/early sixties Blue Note Records session, featuring the four man rhythm section with a ...

Book Review

Bowie: Photographs by Steve Schapiro

by Nenad Georgievski
April 30, 2016

Bowie: Photographs by Steve Schapiro Steve Schapiro 104 Pages ISBN: 9781576878064 Powerhouse Books 2016 One thing is for certain, in his work, be it lyrics, visuals or music, singer David Bowie almost never embraced clear meaning. A one-man melting pot for ideas, his whole persona was so inventive and strange that it made people so fun and sometimes so hard to keep up with him on the path of his artistic adventures over ...

Album Review

Cafêzz: Sol Boricua

Read "Sol Boricua" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
April 30, 2016

Coffee was introduced by the Spanish to the island of Puerto Rico in the mid 1700's, it's history coinciding with the hybridized Spanish/African musical entity which has come to define the island. The local jazz ensemble Cafêzz based their name and repertoire around coffee inspired themes--releasing “Music & Friends," in 2014-- and on Sol Boricua they delve further into the islands multi-faceted musical heritage with diverse latte and espresso selections.Carmen Noemí, the band's leader, pianist and composer, along ...

Album Review

Terrence McManus & John Hebert: Saints and Sinners

Read "Saints and Sinners" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
April 30, 2016

Here's an album that was recorded in 2010 and released in 2015. Hence, It's better late than never, especially since this duo production by rising star experimental guitarist Terrence McManus and all-universe jazz session bassist and leader, John Hebert tease our imaginations via these nine contrasting works. The duo's creative improvisational sparks and acute call and response mechanisms tender deft expressionism from start to finish. They pose a challenging sequence of circumstances that spawn an abundance of mind-bending gambits.

Bailey's Bundles

Jazz Quanta April – Five Women IV: Ella Fitzgerald, Bonnie Eisele, Stacy Sullivan, Eileen Howard, Lauren White

by C. Michael Bailey
April 30, 2016

We are enjoying a rich period of jazz vocals creation; the story continues... Ella Fitzgerald Jazz at the Philharmonic: The Ella Fitzgerald Set Verve 2016 Ella Fitzgerald is certainly the vocalist to include first in this review as hers is one of the few voices that are the jazz vocals gold standard. The Universal Music Group, owner of the Verve Records catalog, have discovered yet one more way to repackage ...

Multiple Reviews

Rich Robinson: Solo Reissues

by Doug Collette
April 30, 2016

The co-founding siblings of the Black Crowes, Chris and Rich Robinson have taken markedly different approaches to their projects outside the confines of that now-defunct (?) band. During the group's first self-imposed hiatus the former put together a band to tour as well as record, ta sequence of events leading directly to the formation of his eponymous Brotherhood well in advance of the Crowes' ultimate fragmentation in 2015. Younger brother Rich worked at a more methodical pace, making records during ...

Live From Philadelphia

Brad Mehldau Trio / GoGo Penguin at World Cafe Live

by Geno Thackara
April 29, 2016

If there's one thing about music that keeps us all going, it has to be endless adaptability. There's no instrument or genre that doesn't have some fresh possibilities still to discover (except maybe hair metal, I suppose). Philadelphia's World Cafe Live offered yet another illustration of the idea by hosting two exceptional piano trios within the space of a week. The basic setup may be the same, but the results could have hardly been more different. Brad Mehldau ...

Live Review

The Rhythm Future Quartet at The Evening Muse

by Mark Sullivan
April 29, 2016

The Rhythm Future Quartet The Evening Muse Charlotte, NC April 23, 2016 The Rhythm Future Quartet plays Gypsy jazz with one eye towards the past and the other towards the present. They've got the style, they've got the chops, and they're not afraid to try new things. As one of a series of shows billed as album release parties for their second release Travels, much of the program was taken from there. Bassist Greg ...