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

Roxy Coss: Restless Idealism

Read "Restless Idealism" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
February 2, 2016

Roxy Coss was inspired to name the second album as leader of her own group Restless Idealism after reading a passage by Hunter S. Thompson in The Rum Diary, in which he weighs the tension between “a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other." While Coss, as a working musician, has wrestled with both sides of that equation, she weighs anchor essentially on the shore of idealism, a point of view that is ...

Rediscovery

Trio Sud: Young and Fine

by John Kelman
February 2, 2016

Trio Sud Young and Fine Dreyfus Jazz2008 It's hard to believe that a guitarist as fine as France's Sylvain Luc has been so overlooked by supposedly comprehensive music sites like All Music Guide--especially with albums like today's Rediscovery, Young and Fine, featuring his Trio Sud group, out in the world. While you can find Luc at AMG, coverage of his small but significant discography is diminutive, and that's a shame, because Luc may well be ...

Live Review

Live From Old York: Lindi Ortega, Róisín Bán & 3*3 Sheffield

by Martin Longley
February 2, 2016

Lindi Ortega The Duchess January 20, 2016 Just by token of being relative youngsters, singer-guitarist Ortega and her three comrades naturally lend country music a sense of dark irony and delicate subversion. It's always been a fine line between sour gothic Depressville and glitzy sham pop-ification, sometimes even with the latter extreme providing unexpected country chestnuts. Ortega may or may not still dwell in Nashville, but here she was, talking about the wintry ...

Album Review

Colin Cannon: Intermission (Farewell)

Read "Intermission (Farewell)" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
February 1, 2016

Reading the spare (and tongue-in-cheek) liner notes of guitarist/composer Colin Cannon's Intermission (Farewell), one could easily get the idea that Cannon wrote, arranged and produced the album for a relatively small inner circle of friends, family and associates. Referring to that cohort, he writes, ..."and besides you people, I don't particular care who else listens to this--it wasn't made for them." As with Mel Brooks' “The Producers," Cannon has failed to marginalize his wider audience by turning out one of ...

Live Review

Count Basie Orchestra at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts

by Patricia Myers
February 1, 2016

Count Basie Orchestra Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts Scottsdale, Arizona December 19, 2015 The Count Basie Orchestra solidified its 80-year reputation for strong swingability, inventive solo segments and supreme section cohesion during two back-to-back concerts on a tour in support of the band's first-ever Christmas-theme album. But those seasonal charts didn't dominate the program, instead were scattered like raisins in a melodic holiday pudding. Several soloists cleverly injected Christmas-song snippets into the band's expected ...

Extended Analysis

Bill Frisell: When You Wish Upon a Star

by John Kelman
February 1, 2016

While jazz and interpretation are hardly strange bedfellows, few musicians have managed to be both as deeply reverent to his source music and profoundly personal and in his approach as guitarist Bill Frisell. That's not to suggest his re-imaginings of other composers' works have been anything remotely approaching predictable; as early as his first “covers" record, Have a Little Faith (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1993), Frisell managed to create a congruent program out of disparate sources ranging from Aaron Copland, John Phillip Sousa ...

Live Review

David Lyttle at The MAC

by Ian Patterson
February 1, 2016

David Lyttle The MAC Belfast January 22, 2016 The soft launch of Brilliant Corners 2016 (March 5-12) took place in Belfast's multi-million pound arts centre, The MAC, and featured Northern Ireland's internationally acclaimed drummer/composer David Lyttle--Moving On Music's Artist-In Residence at The MAC for 2016. The venue, however, was not one of The MAC's main theatres, but instead, a rather curious corner of the complex called The Studio. The Studio looked like an upended ...

Album Review

Le Rex: Wild Man

Read "Wild Man" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 1, 2016

The band moniker Le Rex is culled from an abandoned theater, discovered on the island of Corsica, but there's nothing bleak or dusky about this quintet's musicality. After a successful tour of the US, they parked in Chicago to record this album, which is the musicians' third effort and first for Cuneiform Records. Essentially, these young lads convey remarkable maturity from a compositional perspective, and keep things novel or fresh amid a host of blossoming developments and tightly enacted grooves. ...

Album Review

Gerard Presencer & Danish Radio Big Band: Groove Travels

Read "Groove Travels" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
January 31, 2016

Something of a child prodigy Gerard Presencer became a member of Britain's acclaimed National Youth Jazz Orchestra in 1983 at a mere eleven years of age and NYJO's youngest trumpeter. Along with other young talented UK musicians such as Courtney Pine and Tommy Smith, Presencer was part of a new wave of British jazz. He's played in bands led by Stan Tracey and Charlie Watts but perhaps his most well-known role occurred at age 18 when US3 commissioned him to ...

Album Review

Marc Copland: Zenith

Read "Zenith" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
January 31, 2016

After releasing a series of excellent but under-recognized CDs on various small record labels--starting in the mid-1980s--pianist Marc Copland rose in prominence in 2006 when he took up residence on Germany's Pirouet Records. The highlight of his Pirouet days was a set of trio discs wrapped in a marketing package dubbed “The New York Trio Recordings." Modinha (2006); Voices (2007); and Night Whispers (2008), with a shifting set of band mates: Gary Peacock or Drew Gress on bass, Paul Motian ...