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

Mundell Lowe / Lloyd Wells / Jim Ferguson: Poor Butterfly

Read "Poor Butterfly" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
November 28, 2015

Few people could ever claim to have played and/or recorded with such a storied list of performers as Sarah Vaughan, Ben Webster, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald, Blossom Dearie, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, and Lester Young. But Mundell Lowe can. In fact, that list barely scratches the surface when it comes to the legends that Lowe has worked with over the course of his lifetime. At ninety-three years of age he's now a legend himself, standing tall ...

Extended Analysis

Faces: Stay With Me Anthology

by Doug Collette
November 28, 2015

Something of a miniature cross between the 4CD hardbound set, Five Guys Walk Into a Bar (Rhino, 2004) and the five-disc box You Can Make Me Dance, Sing or Anything (1970-1975) (Rhino, 2015), this double disc package contains official album recordings, (in recently remastered form), singles and live cuts that, combined with a passionate, insightful essay by David Fricke, accurately reaffirms the infectious impact of a band that, while they were together, seemed alternately a sidebar and a full-fledged chapter ...

Album Review

Signe Bisgaard: Meander

Read "Meander" reviewed by Jakob Baekgaard

by Jakob Baekgaard
November 28, 2015

A big ensemble often equals a big sound, but sometimes it is more interesting to think about the potential of sound rather than the idea of using all instruments at once. The Danish composer and pianist, Signe Bisgaard, thinks about the potential of sound on her album Meander. She does not use all instruments at once, even though she has a vast arsenal of musical voices at her disposal. Instead, she lets the instruments drift in and ...

Album Review

Bobby Matos Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble: Bobby Matos: Ritmo & Blues

Read "Bobby Matos: Ritmo & Blues" reviewed by Chuck Koton

by Chuck Koton
November 28, 2015

Fate blessed Bobby Matos. For a kid who dreamed of growing up to be a Latin jazz musician, he could not have been born in a more fortuitous time and place. In the years after World War Two, Nueva York's Hispanic population exploded. Between the years 1940 and 1960, the number of Puerto Ricans increased from a mere 60,000 to over 600,000. The Cuban presence also increased exponentially but considerably less in absolute terms. But while Puerto ...

Album Review

Luís Lopes/Jean-Luc Guionnet: Live At Culturgest

Read "Live At Culturgest" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
November 28, 2015

All great art invokes the imagination. Think of your favorite movie and the two hours of viewing that transported you into a different world. Music can accomplish the same ends. Take this live date at Culturgest in Lisbon. The meeting between Portuguese guitarist Luís Lopes and French saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet creates that same cathartic response. The pairing of the two musicians with seemingly different philosophies makes this an interesting session. Lopes comes from a rock and punk background ...

Album Review

Martin Küchen/Jon Rune Strøm/Tollef Østvang: Melted Snow

Read "Melted Snow" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 28, 2015

Not Quite All Included or Some Included might be appropriate names for the trio of Swedish saxophonist Martin Küchen, and Norwegian bassist Jon Rune Strøm and drummer Tollef Østvang. Reason being that the repertoire on Melted Snow partially replicates that on Satan in Plain Clothes (Clean Feed, 2015) by All Included, which comprises the same threesome with the addition of trombonist Mats Alekint and trumpeter Thomas Johansson. Unsurprisingly the seven cuts on this limited edition LP boast the same mixture ...

Album Review

Claudio Sanna: Ammentos

Read "Ammentos" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
November 28, 2015

A new voice worthy of your consideration is Sardinian pianist Claudio Sanna. His debut Ammentos, or “Memories,' finds a fully developed mature sound that is formed by classical music, but as with many jazz artists, open to other musics. Classically trained artists like Sanna, Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock before him, can also be of their time. Where Jarrett has his transference with Charles Lloyd, Hancock learned jazz from Donald Byrd and then both ended up at the ...

Album Review

Samuel Torres Group: Forced Displacement

Read "Forced Displacement" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
November 27, 2015

When Chamber Music America awarded Colombian-born, New York-based percussionist Samuel Torres a New Jazz Works grant in 2012, the wheels started spinning in his mind. Ultimately, it would be his native land that would help determine the directional vision for the grant-funded work: Torres, inspired by a visit to San Juan de Urabá and an encounter with Afro-Colombian folkloric master Emilsen Pacheco, settled on the idea of a suite to shed light on those who've been most affected by the ...

Album Review

Juhani Aaltonen & Iro Haarla: Kirkastus

Read "Kirkastus" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
November 27, 2015

The most striking thing about Kirkastus--a duo outing by a pair of seasoned Finnish free jazzers, saxophonist Juhani Aaltonen and pianist/harpist Iro Haarla--is the unalloyed beauty of the sound they've made. Aaltonen, in his eighth decade now, has the longer term veteran's credentials. His saxophone style draws from late period John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, with moments of growling and feral roars, subdued and refined here, and set beside moments of reverie and introspection and nuanced story-telling, with the occasional ...

Album Review

Marie Kruttli Quintet: What Do I Miss

Read "What Do I Miss" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
November 27, 2015

What Do I Miss is pianist Marie Kruttli's second album as leader, hot on the heels of her trio debut, Kartapousse, which was released in mid-2015. Once again the tunes are all Kruttli's original compositions, but this time round it's a quintet outing: a short, five track EP recorded in Brooklyn during Kruttli's three-month stay in New York and released on the young German label QFTF. Krüttli's New York quintet not only adds tenor saxophone (Francesco Geminiani) and ...