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.

Extended Analysis

Talk Thelonious: NRBQ + Terry Adams plays Terry Adams Arrangements of Thelonious Monk Songs

by C. Michael Bailey
September 24, 2015

Musician and AAJ contributor Skip Heller calls the New Rhythm and Blues Quartet (NRBQ), “the greatest band of all time." A listen to the band's catalog reveals a depth and breadth of material that betrays an omnivorous appreciation of all American Music, all with a wicked and acute sense-of-humor, something so much music lacks. Never a stadium act, NRBQ has staked out for the past 50 years the responsibility of cataloguing, performing, combining, transmogrifying, and nuclear translating our native brands ...

Album Review

Kristo Rodzevski: Batania

Read "Batania" reviewed by Nenad Georgievski

by Nenad Georgievski
September 24, 2015

The music career of guitarist, singer and doctor Kristo (Krste) Rodževski resumes actively in another city and continent, many miles from his native Bitola in Macedonia. An avid music collectioner and guitarist, he used to play in clubs, most notably in the ancient '90s with “Žeška kontrabanda," the duo with singer Branko Nikolovski in pre-band Foltin times. His active music career was then postponed to his stellar career in medicine but his interest never really waned. Rodževski is a NY ...

Album Review

Luis Munoz: Voz

by James Nadal
September 24, 2015

There is no need to hurry if one has arrived at the space in time where inspiration and music dissolve into a boundless cascade of emotion. Multi-talented Luis Muñoz, has channeled his production skills into a sublime direction on Voz, collaborating with a trio of premier vocalists, augmented by an attuned supporting cast. Though Muñoz contributes his drumming and composing skills, it his sense of trust in others that makes this a special project. Initiating what is a ...

Book Excerpts

Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion

by Jason Bivins
September 24, 2015

Spirits Rejoice! (Oxford University Press, 2015) presents a critical study on jazz and American religion from the 1940's to the present, and engages the religiosity and spirituality of America's foremost jazz musicians. The book features over 200 jazz musicians and is the first book solely dedicated to unpacking the history of jazz and religion in America. The author is Dr. Jason Bivins, a well-respected professor of philosophy and religion at North Carolina State University. This excerpt is from chapter five ...

Live Review

Charles Evans Quartet with Dave Liebman at Philadelphia Art Alliance

by Victor L. Schermer
September 23, 2015

Charles Evans Quartet with Dave Liebman Philadelphia Art Alliance Ars Nova Workshop Philadelphia, PA September 18, 2015 This concert by the Charles Evans Quartet can best be described as “jazz chamber music." The Quartet came together on the occasion of the release their second album, On Beauty (More is More Records, 2015) featuring compositions by leader and baritone saxophonist Charles Evans. The group also includes Dave Liebman on soprano saxophone, Ron Stabinsky on ...

Album Review

Sam Taylor: My Future Just Passed

Read "My Future Just Passed" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
September 23, 2015

In jazz, whether right or wrong, instrumentation carries associations. If you put saxophone, trumpet, bass, and drums together, a portion of jazz fans will automatically think of Ornette Coleman before they hear a note; if you bring together clarinet, vibraphone, piano, and drums, many listeners will immediately move toward Benny Goodman; and if you build a brass ensemble bolstered by drums, you're bound to get thoughts of Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy. Those artists who got there first, did it best, ...

Extended Analysis

Turtle Records: Pioneering British Jazz 1970-1971

by Roger Farbey
September 23, 2015

This extended analysis discusses the celebratory release of the Turtle Records story, a clamshell box set containing a fifty page, 17,000 word booklet written by John McLaughlin biographer Colin Harper which includes rare photographs and new interviews. Crucially, it also includes the only three recordings to be issued on the label. The albums, originally released in 1970 and 1971, were by British jazz musicians whose respective stars were in the ascendant at that time, namely Mike Osborne, Howard Riley and ...

Album Review

Ben Paterson: For Once in My Life

Read "For Once in My Life" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 23, 2015

For Once in My Life is Ben Paterson's fourth album as a leader but first as an organist. In his native Philadelphia--home to such giants of the Hammond as Jimmy Smith, Shirley Scott, Charles Earland and Joey DeFrancesco--Paterson was known as a pianist. He began doubling on organ while living in Chicago, and by the time he moved to New York City in 2013 was gigging regularly on organ and piano all over Manhattan, from Harlem in the north to ...

Album Review

Halperin/Nyberg Connection: Snow Tiger

Read "Snow Tiger" reviewed by James Pearse

by James Pearse
September 23, 2015

There is no such thing as a 'snow tiger.' The closest species that exists is the Siberian tiger but they are the same colour as their Indian cousins (white tigers are “circus-bred mutants" according to the BBC). So, you may ask, what does this creature have to do with a cross-generational collaboration between a pioneer of New York's cool jazz scene and three young Scandinavian jazz musicians?The answer lies in Swedish guitarist Pål Nyberg's long-running interest in the ...

Album Review

Hans Luchs: Time Never Pauses

Read "Time Never Pauses" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
September 23, 2015

Not much can be said about Hans Luchs aside from the fact that he lives in Chicago, looks to be fairly young and plays an intense, assertive and agile guitar on Time Never Pauses, which, incidentally, is Luchs' recorded debut as leader of his own group. Luchs is also a writer who composed eight of the album's ten selections (the others are Duke Ellington's “Come Sunday" and Cole Porter's “Get Out of Town") and arranged all of them.