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

New Zealand School of Music Big Band: Too Cool

by Jack Bowers
August 28, 2015

While the latest CD by the splendid New Zealand School of Music Big Band may not be Too Cool, it's definitely chilly enough to demand that the average listener wear earmuffs while sampling its frigid yet at the same time fiery bill of fare. Blues got you down? A few bars of the orchestra's sunny curtain-raiser, Bill Liston's “Blues to Begin With," should cast them into the nearest dustbin. If not, you may be too far gone to benefit from ...

Album Review

Fred Hersch: Solo

by Mark Sullivan
August 28, 2015

To paraphrase the famous remark Miles Davis made about Bill Evans, Fred Hersch plays the piano the way it ought to be played. This album documents a live performance from August, 2014, which was not originally intended for release. But when Hersch listened to it, he changed his mind. “I firmly believe this may be the all-around best solo album I've ever done, “ he says. “I liked the piano and the environment of playing in a small wooden church ...

Album Review

Giacomo Gates: Everything Is Cool

Read "Everything Is Cool" reviewed by Nicholas F. Mondello

by Nicholas F. Mondello
August 28, 2015

Federal regulations require food and beverage manufacturers to provide “Nutrition Facts" on all package labels. They want you to know what you're digging into. Now, if recordings had that same requirement, Everything Is Cool from Giacomo Gates might read this way: “Ingredients: 100% genuine talent and devotion to the true art of jazz vocalizing. All natural and swinging ingredients. No artificial jive, smooth jazz, or ju-ju. Organic, filled with mojo, and very much the Real Deal, Baby!" ...

Album Review

The Dan Trudell Trio: Dan Trudell Plays The Piano

Read "Dan Trudell Plays The Piano" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
August 27, 2015

The decline of the joyously swinging piano trio has been greatly exaggerated. It may be an endangered species, but it's still out there, roaming the countryside, appearing when you least expect it, and making the occasional trip into a studio. Exhibit A is this fine recording from Dan Trudell, a Midwestern musical treasure who's renowned for his organ playing. Here, he casts aside that behemoth of an instrument and takes to the piano to deliver an ebullient program of music ...

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Album Review

Yelena Eckemoff Quartet: Everblue

Read "Everblue" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
August 27, 2015

In a quick follow-up to her masterful two CD set Lions, Russian-born and now North Carolina-based pianist Yelena Eckemoff offers up Everblue, the most “ECM Records-sounding" set not on that deservedly esteemed label. It is, rather, released on her own L&H Productions. The names of the sidemen on the date explain in part the ECM-like sound: saxophonist Tore Brunborg, bassist Arild Andersen, and drummer Jon Christensen, the Norwegian contingent, are all long time ECM Records artists, as leaders ...

Extended Analysis

The Weave: Knowledge Porridge

by Phil Barnes
August 27, 2015

Once there was a time when to be an individual meant pursuing self-realisation, working out who you were, how you felt about the world and what you believed for yourself. If that meant that say Thelonious Monk, Sun Ra or Charles Mingus were viewed as eccentrics then too bad, it was just how they were or wanted to be seen. Regrettably in our modern age things have changed and individualism now has more than a whiff of selfishness, nasty politics ...

Album Review

Percival Roman: Spiritual Frequencies

Read "Spiritual Frequencies" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
August 27, 2015

The Raleigh, North Carolina based drummer Percival Roman has a proclivity for his free jazz counterparts, some of whom occupy the front cover design of Romans's album Spiritual Frequencies. Roman, who also records under his given name, T.J. Goode, took his inspiration from disparate sources. Influenced by the hip hop album Midnight Marauders from A Tribe Called Quest (Jive Records, 1993) and a 2013 British science fiction film called Frequencies, Roman has produced a freewheeling translation of mystical events to ...

Album Review

Olavi Trio: Oh, La Vie!

Read "Oh, La Vie!" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
August 27, 2015

These Finnish improvisers frame spontaneous combustion and mellower moments on their second outing for Tum Records. They're also one of many bands to dispel stereotypes that Scandinavian ensembles are largely about performing chamber jazz amid ethereal soundscapes, evidenced throughout the years on ECM Records and so on. Of course that's not a bad attribute, yet the region does breed a prismatic array of disparate musicians and artists that pursue cutting-edge nomenclatures by bridging genres with the greatest of ease.

The Vinyl Post

The Complete Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Recordings

by C. Andrew Hovan
August 27, 2015

So the story goes, Tony Bennett and Bill Evans first met each other at The White House back in 1962. President Kennedy was throwing a jazz party and the singer and pianist crossed paths backstage. Fast forward some thirteen years later and the pair would come together for the first of two albums to highlight their ways with a standard. Billed simply as The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album and released by Fantasy Records back in 1975, the pair's debut has ...

Live Review

Live From Birmingham: The Tubes, Youngblood Brass Band, Bill Bailey & Deerhoof

by Martin Longley
August 27, 2015

The Tubes The Robin R&B Club August 13, 2015 The Tubes are touring to celebrate four decades of existence. Always something of a cultish alternative, and quite possibly bringing the punters out in droves due to a certain nostalgic curiosity, this Bilston show was the last night of their UK leg, and the atmosphere was suitably charged. Hailing from San Francisco, this bunch of japers have always been concerned with the satiric poke, ...