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

Simon Jermyn’s Trot A Mouse: Pictorial Atlas Of Mammals

Read "Pictorial Atlas Of Mammals" reviewed by Henning Bolte

by Henning Bolte
October 23, 2015

At times the music of an album can be strikingly different from common and even one's own perceptional mental grids and might challenge one's own horizon of expectation. This album is not only a clear example of it. It is unusual and fascinating how adversative, contrastive features are balanced out in its music: rough and gentle, raw and breezy, thwarting and streaming. Remarkable here is the gripping impact of its special unity of the sound of the 6-string ...

What is Jazz?

Deconstructing Money Jungle

by Graham E Peterson
October 23, 2015

Duke Ellington was born at the turn of the century. Because his career stretched from the roaring twenties to just after the Nixon scandal, and because of the large breathe of his work he has been a household name for decades. Most individuals know Ellington for his work pioneering big band music, as a bandleader, composer, and brilliant improviser. Few ever reference Ellington's solo piano music or small ensemble work; mainly because he did not make many recordings of this ...

What is Jazz?

Hashtag Jazz

by Margret Grebowicz
October 22, 2015

In his 1994 study Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Paul Berliner describes American jazz as a community cutting across “boundaries defined by age, class, vocation, and ethnicity" and concludes that “it is their abiding love for the music that binds this diverse population together." (Berliner, 1994, p. 36) Twenty years later, jazz community can no longer be described in such unified terms. In fact, many contemporary musicians and fans are unified around the idea that jazz-the-artform is ...

Album Review

Lafayette Harris, Jr.: Bend To The Light

Read "Bend To The Light" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
October 22, 2015

While art often takes cues from life, and life certainly offers up its fair share of trials, tribulations, and dark spells, pianist Lafayette Harris, Jr. prefers to emphasize the positive while pouring existential thought into his music. On Bend To The Light--the seventh offering from Harris over the past twenty-plus years--hope, happiness, and positive vibes dominate. He delivers uplifting originals that point to his past and present, investigates the work of artists as different as pop-soul crooner ...

Album Review

Girls in Airports: Fables

by Ian Patterson
October 22, 2015

Copenhagen quartet Girls in Airport is in fine form on Fables, its fourth release, and first on the Edition Records label. There are fewer big tunes than before although the band's trademark melodic hooks and rhythmic drive, its understated lyricism and hypnotic grooves are all present in abundance. What's been brought into sharper focus is the emotional currency in the writing and a narrative thread that seems to flow through these nine compositions. Significantly too, the percussive bite that Victor ...

Album Review

Kirsten Edkins: Art & Soul

Read "Art & Soul" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
October 22, 2015

Saxophonist Kirsten Edkins delivers a delightful and charming batch of mainstream jazz with her engaging and exuberant debut Art & Soul. The tracks alternate between soulful, smoky burners and cooler, airier ones with relaxed tempos and intricate arrangements. Keyboardist Larry Goldings' earthy, simmering Hammond B3 often drives the former type. For instance, “Mean Greens" opens with drummer Mark Ferber's throbbing beats and loose rumble. Goldings' eloquent phrases brim with soul and earthy, simmering vamps and are quite exciting ...

Album Review

Alex Maksymiw: Without A Word

Read "Without A Word" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
October 22, 2015

Toronto native, guitarist Alex Maksymiw has lent his admirable faculties to ensembles such as the Village Vanguard Orchestra and with reedman Dick Oatts among many other notables. Here, Maksymiw realigns with all-star saxophonist Marcus Strickland for a multifaceted quartet date, brimming with ethereal motifs and many works that merit repeated listens. Maksymiw is the pacesetter with his understated atmospheric chord voicings and subliminal ostinato grooves shrewdly mixed just enough in the background to provide a liquescent trancelike underpinning ...

Genius Guide to Jazz

The Day the Music Died

by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
October 21, 2015

On one of my infrequent trips outside the 'Dome recently, I stopped at a convenience store for a cold Coke Zero when I noticed a man about my age (48. 52, in heels) driving a red 1988 Pontiac Trans Am and blasting Whitesnake's “Here I Go Again" on his car stereo. He wore Zubaz workout pants that were at least twenty years out of style, a faded Def Leppard T-shirt, and sported a greying mullet. In that moment, I could ...

Album Review

Mason Razavi/Bennett Roth-Newell: After You

Read "After You" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
October 21, 2015

While guitarist Mason Razavi and pianist Bennett Roth-Newell have had plenty of opportunities to connect musically in Razavi's Quartet, his expanded Quartet Plus, and elsewhere, this marks the first time that this pair has pared things down to record as a duo. Over the course of eight songs--five originals, two jazz standards, and an album-ending take on a classic from The Beatles--Razavi and Roth-Newell manage to establish themselves as centrists with a shared belief in the powers ...

Album Review

Solveig Slettahjell-Knut Reiersrud with In The Country: Trail Of Souls

Read "Trail Of Souls" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
October 21, 2015

Vocalist Solveig Slettahjell and blues guitarist/harmonica player Knut Reiersrud record together for the first time on Trail Of Souls. They're joined by another three Norwegian musicians--pianist Morten Qvenlid, bassist Roger Arntzen and drummer Pål Hausken, known collectively as In The Country--on a programme of songs drawn from early blues, spirituals and classic rock songwriters.The performances are uniformly high quality--Qvenild's synth and piano parts are subtle, Sletahjell's vocals are heartfelt and understated, Reiersrud's acoustic guitar is lyrical and flowing. ...