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

Conte Candoli: Sincerely, Conte

Read "Sincerely, Conte" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
December 23, 2015

On the old Tonight Show (as in Carson, not Leno, much less Parr), I once remember Conte Candoli unwinding a great solo on “King Porter Stomp." No surprise, I guess, for a guy who cut his teeth with the big bands of the late 1940s. But as he went into his second chorus, he quoted “Epistrophy," whose juxtaposition, as I recall, killed me. “Where did that come from?" But I guess it made sense, because Candoli was a bopper at ...

Record Label Profile

HOOB Records: Ten Years Young

by James Pearse
December 22, 2015

There is something romantic about starting a record label nowadays. With few financial incentives and a whole bunch of work to do to get the record recorded, promoted and distributed, it's a wonder people start records labels it at all. But they do. And many do it very well indeed. Artistic freedom is an oft-cited reason for started a label, especially when those starting the label are artists themselves. Not having to answer to anyone when it comes ...

Album Review

Deborah Shulman: My Heart's In The Wind

Read "My Heart's In The Wind" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
December 22, 2015

My Heart's In The Wind is a modest and muted affair, understated in nature yet emotionally stirring in its own way. It's a collection of music that speaks directly to intimacy, loss, and the bends in life's road. The eleven tracks presented on this quiet beauty tap into a variety of emotions, with love, sadness, mourning, life's vagaries, and the grip of memory all serving as wellsprings of creativity for Los Angeles-based vocalist Deborah Shulman. Shulman's parents ...

Extended Analysis

Nat Birchall: Invocations

by Phil Barnes
December 22, 2015

There is a feeling of a new beginning on this collection from Nat Birchall. Superficially the album is released on Henley-on-Thames' Jazzman records rather than Birchall's own Sound Soul and Spirit records, on which he released the wonderful World Without Form and classic Live in Larissa. More tangibly only Adam Fairhall on piano remains from those two collections, representing the last common link to the pool of musicians Birchall and Matthew Halsall drew from in their classic collaborations on Gondwana ...

Album Review

Bram De Looze: Septych

by John Sharpe
December 22, 2015

Young Belgian pianist Bram De Looze leads a 7-piece outfit of unusual instrumentation and multinational origin through a captivating and ambitious journey on Septych. While De Looze might be best known for his small group work, with his own LABtrio and drummer Dre Hocovar's combo (checkout Coding of Evidentiality (Clean Feed, 2015)), here he flexes his compositional muscles to inspire a program which mixes contemporary music influences with straight improv. In a perplexing twist, while the written selections sound cryptic, ...

Album Review

Rodrigo Amado: This Is Our Language

Read "This Is Our Language" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 22, 2015

Experimental jazz, largely framed on wide-ranging improvisational tactics, inhabits a tightknit if not cloistered community, partially by default due to its avant-garde underpinnings. With the album moniker This Is Our Language, eminent Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado imparts a bond or connection to free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman's fifth album, This Is Our Music (Atlantic, 1960). Legendary saxophonist, trumpeter Joe McPhee consummates the frontline, as the overall muse encapsulates a hybrid exposition of temperate and supersonic explorations amid nods to ...

Album Review

Danny Mixon: Pass It On

Read "Pass It On" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
December 22, 2015

Despite his low profile, veteran pianist Danny Mixon has quite a history. His career has included stints playing with Betty Carter, Kenny Dorham, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Frank Foster, Grant Green, Pharoah Sanders, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Charles Mingus, and many others. Most of Pass It On finds him alternating between solos and trios. Many of the songs chosen come from the usual sources: Duke Ellington ("Single Petal of a Rose"), Thelonious Monk ("Blue Monk"), and the Great American Songbook ("On ...

Year in Review

Hrayr Attarian's Best Releases of 2015

by Hrayr Attarian
December 21, 2015

The year 2015 was truly an exciting one for jazz as it saw many superb releases. If I had, however, the proverbial gun to the head to just choose just one it would be Rudresh Mahanthappa's Bird Calls (ACT, 2015). Nevertheless, the cream of the crop of the year is listed below in five triads. The three best small combo albums are listed on the first row. The three best solo efforts on the second row The three best large ...

Album Review

Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden: Frictions / Frictions Now

Read "Frictions / Frictions Now" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 21, 2015

When an obscure buried treasure is reincarnated and unexpectedly arrives in your mailbox, it often looms as a source of interest. Case in point is this little known Wiesbaden, Germany-based experimental jazz group that formed in the late 1960s and recorded two limited edition LPs: Frictions (1969, Self-produced) and Frictions Now (1971, Self-produced). At the time, free jazz in West Germany was an embryonic idiom with the advent of saxophonist Peter Brotzmann, pianist, Alexander von Schlippenbach and other notables. But ...

Album Review

The Gurdjieff Folk Instruments Ensemble: Komitas

Read "Komitas" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
December 21, 2015

When Armenian arranger and composer Levon Eskenian took on to reimagine the music of Armenian mystic and philosopher Gurdjieff for the Gurdjieff Ensemble's debut record on ECM, he touched upon the wealth of melodies that Gurdjieff initially heard and was inspired by during the travels he undertook during his lifetime through the Caucasus, the Near East and Central Asia, and eventually were hummed to pianist Thomas de Hartmann. And it was Eskenian's fertile imagination, deep knowledge and understanding of both ...