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.

From Far and Wide

Jazz In Buenos Aires: Fresh Breezes From The South

by Mark Holston
September 25, 2015

Galería Apolo is one of many 1950s-style shopping arcades that flank Avenida Corrientes, the gaudy, pedestrian-packed “Broadway" of Argentina's cosmopolitan and bustling capital city. A dimly lit galería, it's the kind of one-stop-shopping destination where tiny specialty shops sell everything from comic books to costume jewelry and a visitor can get a watch repaired or satisfy a caffeine craving. It is a miniscule retail space called Minton's, however, that commands the most fervent customer loyalty. Buenos Aires boasts many small ...

Album Review

Richard Nelson / Aardvark Jazz Orchestra: Deep River

Read "Deep River" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 25, 2015

If the name of this new CD by guitarist Richard Nelson and Boston's intrepid Aardvark Jazz Orchestra sounds familiar, that's because it is the same as a spiritual of unknown origin that has been sung for perhaps hundreds of years in churches and other venues and recorded a number of times in films, once by the legendary singer / actor Paul Robeson. What is less customary is composer / arranger Nelson's progressive approach to the music of days gone by ...

Album Review

Nick Mazzarella Trio: Ultraviolet

Read "Ultraviolet" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
September 25, 2015

Nick Mazzarella's first trio recording Aviary in 2009, clocked in at just 30 minutes. Although brief, the compelling force of the saxophonist's presence signaled a new unblemished voice in jazz. He has gone on to become a strong presence in the Chicago jazz scene, performing with Ken Vandermark (Audio One & Chicago Reed Quartet), Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orchestra), Mars Williams, Fred Lonberg-Holm, and Mike Reed. As a leader, he has formed a quartet, quintet, and can be heard ...

Album Review

Leap of Faith/Thomas Heberer: Solution Concepts

Read "Solution Concepts" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
September 25, 2015

The twenty year history of Leap of Faith includes an eleven year hiatus that is noteworthy more for the cooperative's ability to seamlessly pick up the pieces than for an uber-extended break. Cellist Glynis Lomon--a one-time student of Bill Dixon--was working the Boston circuit with multi-reedist PEK in the 1990s. The two honed their far reaching technical skills taking them into the Leaping Water Trio, a precursor to Leap of Faith whose 1995 debut included trombonist Mark McGrain and occasional ...

Album Review

Dale Head: Swing, Straight Up

Read "Swing, Straight Up" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
September 25, 2015

Vocalist and trumpeter Dale Head is an unheralded local guy and a staple sideman from the Bay Area who performs the music of Frank Sinatra, Joe Williams to Harry James and others as he plays the classic to standards for audiences throughout southern California and elsewhere. On Swing, Straight Up, Head makes a splashing, swinging national recording debut singing and playing the horn in re-imagining and re-invigorating music from The Great American Songbook and putting a new spin on old ...

Multiple Reviews

Two Simultaneous Jon Irabagon Releases: Quartet & Solo

by Mark Sullivan
September 25, 2015

Saxophonist Jon Irabagon has worked in a wide variety of settings, including Mostly Other People Do The Killing, the Mary Halvorson Quintet, Barry Altschul's 3Dom Factor, and the Dave Douglas Quintet. For the 2015 release on his own Irabbagast Records label he released two records on the same day: Behind the Sky, with his quartet plus guest trumpeter Tom Harrell; and Inaction is An Action, for solo sopranino saxophone. The two albums could hardly be farther apart stylistically. Taken together ...

In the Artist's Own Words

But Beautiful: My Life with Billie Holiday

by Lara Downes
September 24, 2015

Every Saturday morning, when I was a little girl, my sisters and I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for what we called “Saturday Classes": piano lessons, theory, music history--serious classical music training for serious little musicians. Saturday afternoons, when we got home, we had a ritual. We'd get out our “dress-up" from the vintage steamer trunk that housed a collection of my mother's 1960's party dresses and my grandmother's furs, go through my parents' record collection--the Beatles, ...

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Jazz Humor

Yogi Berra Explains Jazz

by Steve Chalke
September 24, 2015

In memory of the man who came to the fork in the road, and took it. Interviewer: What do you expect is in store for the future of jazz trumpet? Yogi: I'm thinkin' there'll be a group of guys who've never met talkin' about it all the time... Interviewer: Can you explain jazz? Yogi: I can't, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part ...

Album Review

Fernanda Cunha: Olhos De Mar

Read "Olhos De Mar" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
September 24, 2015

The Brazilian sounds, Samba and Bossa Nova, washed over the United States like a wave in the early sixties. American saxophonist Stan Getz, in his collaborations with Brazilian artists Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto, on Getz/Gilberto (Verve Records, 1962) and American guitarist Charlie Byrd, on Jazz Samba (Verve Records, 1962) can take a good deal of the credit. The craze culminated, perhaps, with the radio hit “The Girl From Ipanema," from the Getz/Gilberto disc, featuring a lovely and dispassionate ...

Album Review

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

Read "Ticonderoga" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
September 24, 2015

Ticonderoga was inspired by a conversation between Joe Morris and Jamie Saft regarding their mutual admiration for John Coltrane's Live at the Village Vanguard Again (Impulse!, 1966). Paying homage to the historic date, the pair invited free jazz veterans Joe McPhee and Charles Downs to convene for an informal recording session at Saft's studio in the Catskill Mountains, located just down the river from Ticonderoga, a Mohawk word meaning “the junction of two waterways."Lending credence to the album's ...