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

Hamid Drake & Michael Zerang: For Ed Blackwell

Read "For Ed Blackwell" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 11, 2016

This forty-two minute continuous recording of drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang was released on the occasion of the 25th anniversary performance of their Winter Solstice Concerts in December 2015. The percussionists' tradition of welcoming the return of the sun to the northern hemisphere every December 21st by making music predawn only to be illuminated by the sun rise. This session happens to be the second day of percussion duets recorded by the pair in 1995. The first ...

Album Review

Matt Parker Trio: Present Time

Read "Present Time" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
February 11, 2016

Following the well-deserved critical praise for his sextet debut, Worlds Put Together (BYNK Records, 2013), saxophonist/composer Matt Parker returns with a core trio and guests on Present Time. Former classmates from NYC's New School, bassist Alan Hampton and drummer Reggie Quinerly, join Parker on seven original compositions. One standard dating back to 1930 (and Louis Armstrong's first significant recording) along with a previously unrecorded Charles Mingus composition fill out the program.Parker is a Florida native now residing in ...

Album Review

Logan Richardson: Shift

by Mark F. Turner
February 11, 2016

Shift is a welcome return to the emotive stylings of Logan Richardson, the Paris-based, Kansas City-born saxophonist and composer who garnered respect as a fluent voice with his 2007 debut Cerebral Flow (Fresh Sound) and projects with peers like pianist Gerald Clayton in NEXT Collective. With this debut on Blue Note the blending of culturally rich environments feed creative music realized by Richardson's dream band of jazz luminaries: guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Jason Moran and a superb rhythm unit of ...

Album Review

John Blevins: Matterhorn

Read "Matterhorn" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
February 11, 2016

Back in the 1960s, when the music now commonly known as fusion was called “jazz-rock," the earliest bands to get plastered with said label were essentially funk and rock rhythm sections--guitar, bass, keys and drums, plus or minus congas--with a lead singer and a jazzy horn section tacked on. Think Blood Sweat and Tears, or Tower of Power, or any number of the dozens of less-familiar bands in the sub-sub-genre such as Ten Wheel Drive (with Dave Liebman), Osmosis (with ...

Album Review

National Jazz Ensemble: Featuring Gerry Mulligan

Read "Featuring Gerry Mulligan" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
February 10, 2016

Any new CD whose cover proclaims “Featuring Gerry Mulligan" is guaranteed to turn heads, raise antennae and whip up interest. This one, on which Mulligan performs with the then-three-year-old National Jazz Ensemble, was recorded February 19, 1977, in a sold-out auditorium at the New School in New York City. In his liner notes, trumpeter David Berger expresses his regret that more than enough people to warrant a second concert (which couldn't be arranged) had to be turned away that evening. ...

Album Review

Roswell Rudd/Jamie Saft/Trevor Dunn/Balazs Pandi: Strength & Power

Read "Strength & Power" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
February 10, 2016

Octogenarian Roswell Rudd just released a frighteningly traditional recording with vocalist Heather Masse on the brilliant August Love Song (Red House, 2016). But that is not what he is most known for. Rudd has been a jazz freedom fighter who made his bones in the 1960s, when Rudd collaborated with free jazz functionaries: New York Art Quartet; the Michael Mantler & Carla Bley 1968 Jazz Composer, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Larry Coryell and Gato Barbieri. Foremost in his ...

Album Review

Bruce Torff: Down the Line

Read "Down the Line" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
February 10, 2016

Chicago area native, Bruce Torff, leads his second outing on Summit Records, following up on Look Again (2013). Torff is, first and foremost, an academician with three Master Degrees and a PhD from Harvard. He is a professor at Hofstra University and a prolific author, as well an excellent keyboardist and composer. Torff's slim recorded musical history dates back to composing credits on his brother, bassist Brian Torff's Hitchhiker of Karoo (Self-Produced, 1985). He later recorded as part of guitarist ...

Album Review

Leandre - Delbecq - Houle: 14 rue Paul Forte, Paris

Read "14 rue Paul Forte, Paris" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 10, 2016

Leo Records' press release correlates this trio's output to “heavy artillery" music, but it's most assuredly not all about bombast or in-your-face type avant-garde improvisation. Hence, these esteemed improvisers do what they do best in front of a select audience in Paris. Bassist Joelle Léandre and Benoit Delbecq hail from France and like Canadian clarinetist Francois Houle, are among the crème de la crème of global improvisational artisans, and as anticipated, they dutifully get the job done here. The agenda ...

Opinion

An Ode to Vinyl

by Geoff Anderson
February 9, 2016

Snap, crackle, pop! Is that the sound of a bowl of Rice Krispies or an abused record? In a blind test, 7 out of 10 listeners couldn't tell the difference between a record from a broken home and milk activating that morning bowl of puffed air. It's a sad fact: records can sound dreadful. Yet... Records are back. And, ironically, one of the main reasons for their unlikely resurgence is because of their great sound quality. But can anyone really ...

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Album Review

University of Northern Iowa Jazz Band One 2014-15: Local Color

Read "Local Color" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
February 9, 2016

In Local Color, the latest in a long series of splendid albums by the University of Northern Iowa's Jazz Band One, color is one of the primary ingredients; every number, in fact, is awash in radiant colors, from the prismatic opener, UNI alum Michael Conrad's “Gerry's Timepiece," to the chimerical closer, Curtis Fuller's dark-hued “The Egyptian." Between them are burnished original compositions by Brian Crew, Jack Cooper and Rick Hirsch; Wayne Shorter's well-grooved “Fee Fi Fo Fum," Eddie Harris' exuberant ...