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.

Live Review

Miles Mosley and the West Coast Get Down at the Santa Monica Pier

by Christopher Hoard
September 21, 2015

Miles Mosley and The West Coast Get Down Twilight Concerts at The Santa Monica Pier Santa Monica, CA September 3, 2015 The West Coast Get Down continues to manifest themselves in myriad versions this year. They've been a fixture for more than a decade in Los Angeles, bringing in standing-room only devotees to small cubs and jazz dive bars--among them their long standing free shows at Hollywood's Piano bar, where they established a successful residencies ...

Live Review

Brazilians Spice Up Annual Montana Guitar Festival

by Mark Holston
September 21, 2015

Crown of the Continent Guitar Festival Flathead Lake Lodge Bigfork, Montana August 30-September 5, 2015 Forget for a moment the stellar roster of international guitar greats at Bigfork, Montana's annual Crown of the Continent Guitar Festival, their inspired performances and enthusiastic, SRO crowds. This annual weeklong mixture of master classes and nightly public performances on the grounds of a half century-old traditional “dude ranch" boasts something that likely no other festival in the ...

Live Review

Live From Chicago: Matthew Skoller, Dengue Fever & Christian Scott

by Martin Longley
September 20, 2015

Matthew Skoller Buddy Guy's Legends September 6, 2015 Perhaps the B.B. King Blues Club in NYC was modelled on Buddy Guy's Chicago joint, which opened way back in 1989. It certainly has a similar feel and concept, although Buddy's is more intimate than B.B.'s and noticeably more devoted to blues, rarely straying from the core. The New Orleans-style menu is another similarity, as is the first-come, first-served tabling policy. Matthew ...

Album Review

Sonar: Black Light

Read "Black Light" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
September 20, 2015

By virtue of its experimental and often convoluted definition, progressive jazz seems to require an increasingly larger umbrella. Under that broadly encompassing category, the Switzerland- based quartet SONAR is a noteworthy and unconventional standout. Black Light is their fourth release (but only the second to be made widely available) and for those who have followed the artistic development of the group it is all the more revelatory an experience. SONAR has nuanced the more percussive tone of Static Motion (Cuneiform ...

Album Review

Vladan: Ornaments

Read "Ornaments" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
September 20, 2015

Pianist Vladan Mijatovic, who goes professionally by his first name only, has won Best Jazz Musician and Best Jazz Solo awards at the International Jazz Piano Competition in Freiburg, Germany in 2010 and 2011 and received a scholarship in 2010 to study at the Berklee College of Music. He is blessed with seemingly limitless technique with which to express what feels like a bottomless well of emotions. To listen to his debut solo album Ornaments is to be ...

Album Review

Tania Giannouli Ensemble: Transcendence

Read "Transcendence" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
September 20, 2015

Athens-based composer-pianist Tania Giannouli's main area of interest is mixed-media--combining music with poetic texts, visuals, theater plays or art installations. Similarly, Giannouli compositions for her sophomore album Transcendence (after Forest Stories, a duet with Portuguese reed player Paulo Chagas, Rattle Records, 2011) blends elements from her classically-trained background, contemporary music, and European chamber jazz--inspired by the lyrical, often melancholic colors of the ECM school (the album is released by a New Zealand label that follows ECM natural scenery cover art), ...

Album Review

Denise Donatelli: Find a Heart

Read "Find a Heart" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
September 20, 2015

Multi Grammy nominee vocalist Denise Donatelli, unveils another gem of an album with the much-anticipated Find A Heart, collaborating once again with producer/arranger, pianist Geoffrey Keezer documenting a surprisingly new direction for the singer as she ventures into the non-standards area. The Great American Songbook will always be with us, here to stay forever as new re-interpretations of classics emerge every day. This project finds the vocalist and pianist exploring new territory as they take the music of modern pop ...

Album Review

Mark Weinstein: In Jerusalem

Read "In Jerusalem" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
September 20, 2015

Flutist Mark Weinstein has made a career of fusing world music elements with jazzy sensibilities with finesse and style. On In Jerusalem he tackles the rich Hasidic heritage of song. He and his band interpret both secular and religious tunes as well as original compositions with delightful spontaneity and ethereal diapason. The Sabbath hymn “Repozaras" opens with Weinstein's flute dancing over bassist Gilad Abro's oud like strums and dual thumping gallop of drummer Haim Peskoff and percussionist Gilad ...

Live Review

2015 Detroit Jazz Festival

by C. Andrew Hovan
September 19, 2015

Detroit Jazz Festival Hart Plaza Detroit, Michigan September 4-7, 2015 As the world's largest free jazz festival, Detroit's annual Labor Day offering provides a rewarding, but daunting task for anyone set to hunker down in the Motor City all Labor Day weekend. This year about 60 performances were in the offing spread over four stages during the course of the four-day event. It is obviously just not possible to experience it all. The sooner one ...

Album Review

Arvo Part: Musica Selecta: A Sequence by Manfred Eicher

Read "Musica Selecta: A Sequence by Manfred Eicher" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
September 19, 2015

Of all the longstanding relationships built between its artists and Manfred Eicher, the musical partnership of ECM Records' founder/primary producer and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt--who turned 80 years old on September 11, 2015--has to be one of the label's most important and fruitful. Certainly, amidst ECM's more composition-focused New Series imprint, there are few others whose collaborations with Eicher have proven to be so personally meaningful, so groundbreaking and so emotionally resonant. While Eicher worked in the classical ...