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

Romain Collin: Press Enter

Read "Press Enter" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
December 26, 2015

French pianist Romain Collin's third release as a leader, Press Enter, can easily serve as a soundtrack for an art house flick. This is very natural for Collin who has both written music for several films and proved himself an accomplished performer. Collin uses intricately constructed harmonic fragments to build captivating sonic mosaics thus most of the originals on this disc are densely textured and cinematic. The thrilling “Webs" has an expectant ambience that drummer Kendrick Scott and ...

Album Review

Bret Higgins' Atlas Revolt: Bret Higgins' Atlas Revolt

Read "Bret Higgins' Atlas Revolt" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 26, 2015

Canadian bassist Bret Higgins' Atlas Revolt ensemble celebrates its inaugural outing on composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer John Zorn's diverse and far-reaching Tzadik record label. Consequently, Higgins is a member of the Canadian band Zebrina --cited as bringing “Jewish music into the 21st century" --and features venerable American clarinetist Ben Goldberg on the 2014 Tzadik release Hamidbar Medaber Atlas Revolt cogently fuses Middle Eastern and North African modalities with jazz-rock, hard rock, funk and hints of Klezmer into a ...

Live Review

Difford And Tilbrook at the Paramount

by Mike Perciaccante
December 26, 2015

Difford And Tilbrook The Paramount Huntington, NY December 12, 2015 Christmas came approximately two weeks early to Long Island this year. The Paramount (located in Huntington, NY), the venue ranked by Billboard magazine as one of the best concert venues in the country, was the site of a fantastic show sub-billed as the At Odds Brothers. The duo of Difford and Tilbrook, the closest thing (among songwriting partnerships) to Lennon and McCartney since that dynamic ...

Bailey's Bundles

Notable and Nearly Missed 2015

by C. Michael Bailey
December 25, 2015

John Petrucelli Quintet--The Way (Self Produced, 2014). New Jersey-native saxophonist John Petrucelli is an ambitious young man releasing his debut recording, The Way, as a two-CD set. The eleven selections presented are divided roughly in half, original compositions to standards. Petrucelli's quintet contains both a guitar and piano as harmony instruments, providing a fully-realized foundation for this performance. Thelonious Monk's “Gallop's Gallop" is a circuitous case in point. The complexity of the piece is muted by the mastery with which ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Tina Brooks: True Blue - 1960

by Marc Davis
December 25, 2015

I love finding little-known records by almost-unknown artists. There's nothing wrong with soaking in the comfortable pool of guys you know oh-so-well. I can listen to Art Blakey, Jimmy Smith and Kenny Burrell all day. But even the greats can wear you out. How many times can you listen to the Beatles' “Hey Jude" before the na-na-na-na's get tiresome? For those moments, it's nice to sample a one-hit wonder. Tina Brooks is that guy.

Live Review

Bobby Zankel Quartet at the Philadelphia Art Alliance

by Victor L. Schermer
December 25, 2015

Bobby Zankel/ Dave Burrell/ William Parker/ Andrew Cyrille QuartetPhiladelphia Art Alliance Ars Nova Workshop Philadelphia, PA December 18, 2015 When you bring together four of the most passionate avant-garde jazz musicians, something interesting is bound to occur. In this concert, the musicians were not only top shelf but, in addition, they were superbly well-matched and the planets were all in the right configuration for magic to happen. Most importantly, the personnel assembled for ...

Album Review

Dave Wilson: There Was Never

Read "There Was Never" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
December 25, 2015

Saxophonist Dave Wilson cuts an imposing figure on the cover of There Was Never, his fourth album in total and his first on the Zoho Music imprint. There's intensity fixed on his face, with eyes closed in concentration and embouchure set for attack. And then there's his tenor saxophone. It has a larger than life presence in the photo. This is the picture of a man on a mission, a leader who knows what he wants, a musician who knows ...

Album Review

Joe McPhee / Jamie Saft / Joe Morris / Charles Downs: Ticonderoga

Read "Ticonderoga" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
December 25, 2015

As the liners explain, this date was inspired by bassist Joe Morris and pianist Jamie Saft's shared love for the seminal John Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard Again (Impulse, 1966) album. In the subsequent discussion with the other participants, it transpired that reedman Joe McPhee actually witnessed that gig from the center of the front row. The outcome is a sequence of collective inventions very much in the same barnstorming spirit.But the result is not an explicit ...

Album Review

Matija Dedić: Matija svira Arsena

Read "Matija svira Arsena" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
December 25, 2015

Recorded just two weeks after his father's passing, Matija svira Arsena (or Matija Plays the Music of Arsen) by jazz pianist Matija Dedic is a moving tribute to Arsen Dedic, the renowned Croatian singer, songwriter, writer, translator and composer. Probably there is a plethora of artists today who are too easily compared to some of the most renowned artists of our times, songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, but none of them in reality could get close to the ...

Year in Review

John Sharpe's Best Releases of 2015

by John Sharpe
December 24, 2015

Here in no special order are ten new releases, reviewed in All About Jazz, which stood out among those I heard this year. Mats Gustafsson Hidros 6 Knockin' (Not Two Records) An avant-garde jazz composition based on the songs of '50s rocker Little Richard. Really? Yep, that's the premise behind Swedish reedman Mats Gustafsson's large scale work recorded at the Krakow Jazz Autumn in 2013. A significant part of the achievement is down ...