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

Avram Fefer's Big Picture Holiday: Shimmer And Melt

Read "Shimmer And Melt" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
April 1, 2016

Let's rescue the musical descriptor 'fusion,' a pejorative word used in jazz circles to connote a work of lesser weight and significance. We don't use that word when the jazz fusion is carried out by Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, and in this case saxophonist Avram Fefer. His assemblage called Big Picture Holiday merges not just jazz and rock, but the Afrobeat music of Nigeria, Ethiopia and Morocco, James Brown's funk, blues, and the electricity of New Orleans. Fefer, ...

Interview

Walt Weiskopf: All About the Sound

by Bob Kenselaar
March 31, 2016

What is it that drives Walt Weiskopf? It's all about the music, all about the sound.He's reached a large audience in ten years of touring with Steely Dan. He's written a half dozen books on jazz improvisation techniques and methods, and he's taught at the Eastman School of Music, Temple University and New Jersey City University, where he now heads the jazz program. We find the real key to his work, though, in the huge catalog of recordings ...

Album Review

Krakauer's Ancestral Groove: Checkpoint

Read "Checkpoint" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 31, 2016

Clarinetist David Krakauer has been exploring his Eastern European Jewish background through music for the past quarter century. He's managed to touch on his roots in varied ways during that time, tapping into Jewish history with some help from the Kronos Quartet on The Dreams And Prayers Of Isaac The Blind (Nonesuch, 1997), finding common ground for the work of the great Sidney Bechet and klezmer clarinetist Naftule Brandwein on Klezmer, NY (Tzadik, 1998), interpreting the music of John Zorn's ...

Album Review

Kodama Trio: Kodama Trio

Read "Kodama Trio" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
March 31, 2016

Funny how groups come together. The Kodama Trio, resident in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is comprised of three individuals from completely different backgrounds and completely different parts of the country. Pianist Robert Muller, originally from Portland, OR, has spent time in New York City and Copenhagen. A former student of Andrew Hill at Portland State University, Muller is a supremely open-minded musician who's played a lot of jazz, but has also worked extensively with hip hop artist Pete Miser, ace ...

Album Review

Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra: Portraits and Places

Read "Portraits and Places" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 31, 2016

Scott Reeves formed his splendid New York-based orchestra eight years ago, in 2008, and while Portraits and Places marks its recorded debut, Reeves spent a number of years before that sharpening his composing and arranging skills at the highly regarded BMI Jazz Composers Workshop where he received tutelage and counsel from Manny Albam, Mike Abene, Jim McNeely and Mike Holober, among others. Judging from the eight numbers presented here (three of which comprise the colorful L & T Suite), that ...

Album Review

Jeff Lederer's Brooklyn Blowhards: Brooklyn Blowhards

Read "Brooklyn Blowhards" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 31, 2016

Imagine seeing a despondent Albert Ayler walking around Brooklyn on a cold November day in 1970, with his tenor saxophone under his arm. Some say he threw himself into the East River, a suicide by drowning. His loss, our loss, was one a true original voices in jazz. Now picture Ayler with a copy of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale tucked under his arm. Reading the 800-plus pages of Herman Melville's opus has been attempted by many, but completed ...

Album Review

Nik Bärtsch's Mobile: Continuum

Read "Continuum" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
March 31, 2016

The timing couldn't have been better. Following up on the stunning double-CD live outing, Nik Bärtsch's Ronin Live (ECM, 2012), Bärtsch returns with his acoustic group, Mobile, for Continuum. With clarinetist Sha and drummer Kaspar Rast crossing over from Ronin, a new addition, Nicolas Stocker, on drums and percussion completes the core quartet. A string quintet augments three of the eight tracks, infusing a multiplicity of effects in the process. Mobile has been around for almost twenty years ...

Book Excerpts

The Royal Roost: Birthplace of Bop

by Richard Carlin
March 30, 2016

The story of the development of jazz in New York is tied to the story of a few seminal clubs and promoters who helped nurture the music. Just as new musical styles were developing during World War II that would lead to the birth of bebop, so was the jazz scene changing. The clubs that thrived on Fifty Second Street during the mid to late '30s were strictly segregated; black musicians could play at them but could not patronize them. ...

Album Review

Daniel Freedman: Imagine That

Read "Imagine That" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 30, 2016

Few can match drummer Daniel Freedman when it comes to pan-stylistic jazz presentations that cut across cultural lines. This lifelong New Yorker has found a way to bridge sonic worlds, erase boundary lines, and merge various musical languages in masterful fashion in his own work and in support of others. It's no wonder why the best of the best--the one and only Sting, West African superstar Angélique Kidjo, and Israeli clarinet queen Anat Cohen, to mention three--have called on Freedman. ...

Live Review

The Pat Martino Quintet at Chris’ Jazz Café

by Victor L. Schermer
March 30, 2016

The Pat Martino Quintet Chris' Jazz Cafe Philadelphia, PA March 26, 2016 Legendary guitarist Pat Martino has traversed several musical landscapes in a career spanning more than five decades. He went from being a mind-blowing newcomer in the Harlem and soul blues jazz scene in the sixties to a major contributor to hard bop and fusion music in the seventies. Then, in 1980, brain surgery for an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) left him with profound ...