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.

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Live Review

Madeleine Peyroux at Yoshi's Oakland

by Walter Atkins
November 4, 2015

Madeleine Peyroux Yoshi's Oakland Oakland California October 27, 2015 Madeleine Peyroux flew into the comfortable confines of Yoshi's Oakland for a two-day mid week stand. On this Tuesday evening, she featured hit songs from her first anthology album Keep Me in Your Heart for a While: The Best of Madeleine Peyroux (Rounder, 2014). The opening night's second set showcased her personalized blend of blues, jazz and country. Her trio included veterans Jon Herington and Barak ...

Album Review

Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: Firehouse

Read "Firehouse" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 4, 2015

With his new Acoustic Unity threesome Norwegian drummer Gard Nilssen enters the saxophone trio stakes with an ebullient swagger. Since coming onto the scene in 2006, Nilssen has become an in-demand figure, featuring in outfits such as Cortex, bassists Arild Andersen's sextet and Per Zanussi's quintet. On Firehouse, the group carves out a distinctive identity manifest in tight, sometimes involved, arrangements which provide launchpads for focused group exploration set firmly in the jazz lineage. At times in their raw energy ...

Album Review

Keiko Matsui: Live In Tokyo

Read "Live In Tokyo" reviewed by Jeff Winbush

by Jeff Winbush
November 4, 2015

Most of the time releasing a live album is a good way to mark time between trips to the studio as they are quick and easy cash grabs where a musician sells the fans a cheap ticket to a show they weren't at. The Rolling Stones are masters of this slick tactic with no less than a dozen official live albums in their discography. The fatal flaw with live albums is they are audio representations of a visual ...

Album Review

Duke Ellington And His Orchestra: The Treasury Shows, Vol 20

Read "The Treasury Shows, Vol 20" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
November 4, 2015

What makes this album stand out among the welter of Treasury Show releases is that most of the tracks feature Oscar Pettiford on bass. Duke Ellington hired many excellent bass players but only two who were great. The first was Jimmy Blanton. In the short time he was with the band--from 1939-1941--he transformed the bass into a front line instrument, changing its role in jazz forever. When he died, aged just 23, from tuberculosis, Duke searched despairingly ...

Catching Up With

Randy Brecker: Hittin' It with "RandyPOP!"

by Bob Kenselaar
November 3, 2015

In his 62 years playing music--starting trumpet at eight years old--Randy Brecker has played all kinds of music, but for many years now, he's mostly been known as a solid, top-flight, first-call jazz player, a modern post-bop soloist and bandleader who carries around his old '70s fusion-funk Brecker Brothers fame in his back pocket. So, with a new CD called RandyPOP!, you might think he's changing direction entirely to make a foray into the land of Katy Perry or Justin ...

Take Five With...

Take Five with Lars Horntveth of Jaga Jazzist

by AAJ Staff
November 3, 2015

About Jaga Jazzist If Jaga has any rules, there's really just one: every album must sound like nothing that preceded it. With Starfire, the group that has confounded categorization from inception has delivered yet another album unlike any they've ever done before. Yet, at the end of the day--despite touchstones ranging from Gil Evans to Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine to Tortoise, Oslo 13 to Motorpsycho and Fela Kuti to Steve Reich--Starfire still sounds absolutely like nobody but Jaga ...

Album Review

Sputnik3: Orbits

Read "Orbits" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
November 3, 2015

Yet another outstanding piano trio makes its debut with Orbits. The Netherlands based group Sputnik3 owes its name to a philosophy of musical exploration inspired by that famous Russian satellite. The classically trained pianist Loran Witteveen, bassist Stefan Lievestro and Belgian native Raf Vertessen on drums, deftly work their way through Vertessen's complex compositions, each layering on their individual ideas to create a program that is very fresh and different.At the outset, “What About You" draws comparison to ...

Album Review

Convergence Quartet: Owl Jacket

Read "Owl Jacket" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
November 3, 2015

Owl Jacket forms the fourth release over a nine year period from the Convergence Quartet. At the outset, few would have predicted that it would become a going concern, uniting as it did two unknown young English improvisers in pianist Alexander Hawkins and bassist Dominic Lash and two of the brighter emerging talents on the New York scene in cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum and drummer Harris Eisenstadt. But the outfit's continued survival demonstrates not only persistence but also commitment to ...

Album Review

The Peeled Eye: The Peeled Eye

Read "The Peeled Eye" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
November 3, 2015

The Peeled Eye is the debut release from Boris Hauf's revived Shameless label, which has switched from being a subscription-only limited edition label to releasing experimental rock, noise and pop recordings. This release is an edition limited to three hundred copies pressed on yellow vinyl. Collectable, eh? In The Peeled Eye, Hauf's own baritone saxophone is joined by Martin Siewert on guitar, Christian Weber on bass and Steve Heather on drums. Between them, the four members have impressive ...

Album Review

Kazuki Yamanaka: Songs Unconscious-minded

Read "Songs Unconscious-minded" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
November 3, 2015

Alto and soprano saxophonist Kazuki Yamanaka has brought together an impressive array of talent to join him in producing Songs Unconscious-minded. The album's title is a reference to how the seven original tunes bubbled up from Yamanaka's unconscious and presented themselves. The supporting personnel is grouped differently on the various tracks: pianist Fabian Almazan, bassist Linda Oh and drummer E.J. Strickland are together on tracks 1 ("Let Go") and 8 ("HAMABE-NO-UTA -Song Of Seashore"); track 3 ("TA-KE-YA-BU") finds ...