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

Matthew Shipp/Michael Bisio: Live in Seattle

Read "Live in Seattle" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 25, 2016

The Italian renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and scientist Michelangelo di Lodovico is often quoted, when referring to his 17-foot sculpted masterpiece David, “every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." The same thought comes to mind when two musical sculptors chip away at everything that doesn't sound euphonic to, well, you get the idea. For some time now, the pair, bassist Michael Bisio and pianist ...

Live Review

Oh Vida! Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Esperanza Fernández at the 11th Annual Bay Area Flamenco Festival

by Harry S. Pariser
March 24, 2016

Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Esperanza Fernández Herbst Theater Bay Area Flamenco Festival 2016 San Francisco, CA March 9, 2016 They met for the first time in Spain. One a Cuban-born jazz pianist, the other a Flamenco singer. Both were internationally acclaimed performers. They came together as part of the documentary film project Playing Lecuona --which celebrates the life of the great Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona--and then parted ways. The pianist, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, later ...

Multiple Reviews

Dominican Jazz from Summit Records: The Dominican Jazz Project & Socrates Garcia Latin Jazz Orchestra

by Mark Sullivan
March 24, 2016

There must be something in the air, as the Dominican Republic suddenly finds representation on two latin jazz releases from Summit Records. The Dominican Jazz Project grew out of pianist Stephen Anderson's visit to the 2014 Jazzomania Jazz Festival in Santo Domingo. After an additional visit--and additional new musical friendships--the group agreed to record together. So it is essentially a small cooperative group, although about half of the compositions are Anderson's. Composer Socrates Garcia leads a big band ...

Album Review

Simians Of Swing: Simians Of Swing

Read "Simians Of Swing" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
March 24, 2016

Sometimes the best legends are the ones you create about yourself. The Simians of Swing, whose debut release this is, understand. As this legend has it, the London-based band is co-led by an ex-member of the Russian mafia--skilled in the martial arts--and a man who spends his days playing chess on his own while meditating on the role of bass frequencies in global geopolitics. Their songs tell tales of heroes and villains--mostly villains and mostly, one assumes, old colleagues from ...

Album Review

Robin Hayward: Stop Time

Read "Stop Time" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
March 24, 2016

In his native Manchester, England, tuba player and composer Robin Hayward had originally studied classical music before he became involved in London's growing improvisation culture in the mid to late 1990s. Hayward then moved to Berlin to engage with the more open musical culture among younger, like-minded artists. His restless curiosity and inventiveness began to peak in that environment. As Hayward became more interested in the tuba as a solo instrument, he experimented extensively with extended techniques, microtonality ...

Album Review

The Scrambling Ex: The Scrambling Ex

Read "The Scrambling Ex" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
March 24, 2016

Deftly juggling twisted harmonic sequences, free improvised passages, sweet and simple jazz melodies, and stop-on-a-dime rhythmic convolutions, The Scrambling Ex nods at all sorts of musical reference points without aping anyone in particular. An equal collaboration between multi- reed player Peter Van Huffel, guitarist Andreas Willers, and percussionist Oliver Steidle (who's since been replaced by the remarkable American drummer Devin Gray), the trio relentlessly pushes the outside of the musical envelope throughout their eponymous debut album. Willers, a German-born guitarist ...

Album Review

Sue Sheriff: Better Than Anything

Read "Better Than Anything" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 24, 2016

It was in one of those art pieces often used to close an hour out on National Public Radio where a jazz vocalist was being interviewed about the durability and longevity of the “Great American Songbook." The singer remarked that as long as listeners age and have life experience, the standards composed between 1920 and 1960 will always be rediscovered...one must have lived to properly appreciate these songs. Age, experience, life...these are what have been distilled to their essence in ...

Album Review

Dre Hocevar: Collective Effervescence

Read "Collective Effervescence" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 24, 2016

Slovenian drummer Dre Hocevar has expanded his trio via the 2015 Clean Feed release Coding of Eventuality with a quintet format for an electro-acoustic freely improvised set, where the artists operate within avant-garde circles while incorporating microtonal and minimalist forums and abstract classical persuasions. Electronics performer Phillip White intertwines subtle nuances and treatments yet does not dominate or become the primary voice within the group's loosely articulated framework. Hocevar is a colorist due to his cymbals shadings and ...

Jazzin' Around Europe

Kit Downes and Tom Challenger: Organ Crawling

by Duncan Heining
March 23, 2016

Pianist-organist Kit Downes is one of the brightest and most articulate talents to emerge from the British and European scenes in recent times. His refusal to be pinned down to any specific career path or musical trajectory is to his credit but even more so is his ability to produce authentic music without compromise across style, genre or approach. Downes has that quality to his work that says, “Never mind the situation, this is me. This is my music."

Album Review

Rob Garcia: Finding Love in an Oligarchy on a Dying Planet

Read "Finding Love in an Oligarchy on a Dying Planet" reviewed by Franz A. Matzner

by Franz A. Matzner
March 23, 2016

A complex amalgam, drummer-composer Rob Garcia's Finding Love in an Oligarchy on a Dying Planetis as densely constructed and provoking as its title. Despite the socially conscious themes that its track titles, lyrics, and multi-layered musical journeys explore, Garcia has made clear this is not a protest album. At least not in the typical sense. It is not advocacy. It does not call for denial, dissent, or even dismissal of the social ills the album's thirteen pieces directly ...