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

Jim "Kimo" West: Guitar Stories: Slack Key & Beyond

Read "Guitar Stories: Slack Key & Beyond" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
April 2, 2016

Guitar Stories presents a lovely, diverse collection of music centered around Kimo West's composing and excellent guitar playing. West is a proponent of the Hawaiian slack key guitar style, a fingerstyle playing technique using various open tunings. He credits the name of the tuning used on each track, as well as including a list spelling out the full guitar tuning for each. So it's appropriate that the album opens with “Na Koa Moku O Keawe," a baritone guitar ...

Album Review

Rodolfo Zuniga Surfaces: North Star

Read "North Star" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 2, 2016

Costa Rican native and Miami-based jazz drummer, Rodolfo Zuniga is a world-class drummer who has performed with some of the best artists in the business, served as a sideman on various recordings and can be found performing throughout the South Florida area as a much in-demand drummer. As well as being a fixture in the areas vibrant and growing jazz scene, the drummer also performs throughout Central and South America as well as serving as an educator with Florida International ...

Album Review

Renku: Live In Greenwich Village

Read "Live In Greenwich Village" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
April 2, 2016

Born in Israel, raised in Paris and the American Midwest, saxophonist Michael Attias has lived in NYC since 1994. But in spite of that lengthy sojourn, only relatively recently has Attias come to the fore. He might just have found his ideal vehicle in Renku. That's the name of the co-operative threesome rounded out by in demand bassist John Hébert and idiosyncratic drummer Satoshi Takeishi. The moniker derives from a collaborative style of Japanese poetry that balances freedom and rigor. ...

Extended Analysis

Sanguine Hum: What We Ask Is Where We Begin - The Songs for Days Sessions

by John Kelman
April 2, 2016

Few groups in the history of music can be credited with having come up with something as wonderfully absurd (yet, somehow, totally making sense) as Sanguine Hum. On its last album, the two-CD concept album Now We Have Light (Esoteric Antenna, 2014), the group told the story of a Dystopian future where our hero, Don (just Don), uncovers the “Buttered Cat Theory of Perpetual Energy" (if you want to know what that is, you'll have to read the review).

Album Review

Michael Borgestede & Roberto Loreggian: Handel: Complete Harpsichord Music

Read "Handel: Complete Harpsichord Music" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
April 2, 2016

It would be Romantic if it weren't so Baroque... The revered Italian keyboard master decided to take in a salon costume party while visiting Venice on his most recent concert tour. All attendees were appropriately masked, including one imposing figure seated at the harpsichord, playing. Listening to the performer for a moment, the Master, Domenico Scarlatti, remarked, Che può essere solo una delle due persone che giocano, il caro Sassone o il diavolo. ("That can be only one ...

Live Review

Vossa Jazz 2016

by Ian Patterson
April 1, 2016

Vossa Jazz Various venues Voss, Norway March 18-20, 2016 Perched high on the mountain side, the weather-beaten wooden farm houses of the Voss folk museum command a truly impressive view of the town below, ringed by snow-capped mountains, interlocking valleys and ice-covered fjords that stretch to the four points of the compass. Founded in 1917—the same year the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz record—the museum's bric-a-brac of bygone days and ...

Album Review

Darren English: Imagine Nation

Read "Imagine Nation" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
April 1, 2016

Trumpeter Darren English carries the spirit of South Africa and the entire history of jazz in his horn. On this, his debut album, the Cape Town-born, Atlanta-based English pays tribute to the late Nelson Mandela, matches wits and chops with fellow trumpeters Russell Gunn and Joe Gransden on “Cherokee," partners with vocalist Carmen Bradford on a pair of classics, and goes toe-to-toe with saxophonist Greg Tardy on “Bullet In The Gunn." He comes away from all of it sounding confident, ...

Album Review

Hiromi: Spark

by Jeff Winbush
April 1, 2016

There are three reasons why some people will not enjoy Spark, the fourth album from the Trio Project featuring Hiromi Uehara, the Japanese-born pianist and composer and drummer Simon Phillips and bassist Anthony Jackson:1. It's too complex. 2. It rocks too hard to be jazz. 3. It's long (72 minutes).None of these are good reasons. Here are three reasons which are good ones.1. Simplicity has its place. So does complexity. 2. Jazz is not ...

Album Review

Ratatet: Arctic

by James Nadal
April 1, 2016

The Ridgeway Arts non-profit venture in San Francisco Bay Area, was established by bassist/educator Jeff Denson, to provide and promote performance, education and recording opportunities for serious artists. The electro- acoustic ensemble, Ratatet, released Arctic as part of this program, and is an example what can be accomplished with dedication and determination. Ratatet was formed by drummer Alan Hall, with the intention of performing jazz that is expansive and ingenious. With the novel approach of having bassoonist Paul ...

Album Review

Cameron Mizell: The Edge of Visibility

Read "The Edge of Visibility" reviewed by Jim Olin

by Jim Olin
April 1, 2016

How the mind liberally generates artistic transcendence is a phenomenal concept, and creating music is a customary form to express the ethereal otherworldliness of what is beyond the mundane. Guitarist Cameron Mizell's fearless spirit travels to a different cosmos with his album The Edge of Visibility. Mizell undauntedly rambles the peripheries of his imagination. The album epitomizes a vast and inventive sonic encounter, an unconventional plunge into subliminal escape and mood-altering cognizance. The melodic and stirring “These Sheets" ...