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.

Interview

Halie Loren: Butterfly Soaring

by R.J. DeLuke
August 26, 2015

Its hard to categorize Halie Loren--for those who feel the need to do so--a singer/songwriter who started performing at age 10 in her native state of Alaska and now, from her home in Oregon, tours jazz clubs and jazz events on a regular basis in different parts of the world and regales audiences with her light, supple and sensual voice. She's unconcerned with categorization. Loren enjoys singing one of the great standards created before her time, that she ...

Book Review

The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz

by David A. Orthmann
August 26, 2015

The Velvet Lounge: On Late Chicago Jazz Gerald Majer 224 pages ISBN: #023113682X Columbia University Press 2005 Three men sit around a table in a restaurant that--for one night a week--masquerades as a jazz club. The dinner plates have been cleared, and we're waiting to settle the check. On the other side of a divider, the musicians are getting ready for the night's opening set. The service is slow so there's time ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Bennie Green: Soul Stirrin’ - 1958

by Marc Davis
August 26, 2015

In the 1950s, Blue Note was a reliable bastion of hard bop. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers set the tone, and dozens of artists--some famous, some not--followed. But Blue Note also had small oases of not-bop, often by artists you've never heard of. Bennie Green is one of those guys, and if you haven't heard him, you should. Specifically, you should hear Soul Stirrin'. This is a bluesy, almost pre-bop record. Green plays trombone, but ...

Album Review

Liberty Ellman: Radiate

by Dan Bilawsky
August 26, 2015

Guitarist Liberty Ellman works at the crossroads of intellectual inquisitiveness and rabid expressionism. That's been evident both in his own small but impressive discography and in his musical travels with Henry Threadgill's Zooid over the past fifteen years. On Radiate--Ellman's first album in nine years, third on the Pi Recordings imprint--those two roads quickly meet. The album-opening “Supercell" proves to be a deep-grooving masterpiece that plays unification and disconnection against each other to create something magical. Damion ...

Album Review

Mike LeDonne: AwwlRight!

Read "AwwlRight!" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
August 26, 2015

On AwwlRight!, his eighth outing at the Hammond B3 for Savant Records, pianist-turned-organist Mike LeDonne uses the same personnel and prescription that have worked so well for him in the past, guiding his sure-handed Groover Quartet through its paces in a series of bracing tunes that are all but guaranteed to quicken the mind and enliven the soul of anyone who admires and appreciates robust and well-designed contemporary jazz. LeDonne's cozy ensemble blends collectively with an almost ...

Album Review

François Carrier: Unknowable

Read "Unknowable" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
August 26, 2015

The mystery of spontaneously created music is most certainly “unknowable," but saxophonist François Carrier has shown himself to be completely at home facing, and embracing, the unknown. Unknowable finds Carrier and his long-time percussionist Michel Lambert meeting acoustic bass guitarist Rafal Mazur at the Alchemia Jazz Klub on June 1, 2014 at the recommendation of Marek Winiarski, the owner of Not Two Records. The live, completely unrehearsed set went so well, and felt so intense and present that ...

Album Review

Eple Trio: Universal Cycle

Read "Universal Cycle" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 26, 2015

The fourth album of the Norwegian Eple Trio--pianist Andreas Ulvo, bassist Sigurd Hole and drummer Jonas H. Sjøvaag--marks an exciting new chapter in the trio ten years of work. The album was recorded in a remote studio in the vast forestry scenery of Sweden where evolution, its most extreme and barren forms challenges humanity, where the dimension of time has a different sense, where man adopts, conquers and surrenders to nature, in an endless universal cycle. Sjøvaag, who ...

Live Review

Paris Jazz Diary 2015: Saxophonists Branford Marsalis, Azar Lawrence

by Patricia Myers
August 25, 2015

Paris Jazz Diary 2015: Saxophonists Branford Marsalis, Azar Lawrence New Morning, Sunside jazz clubs Paris, France July 21-22, 2015 Back-to-back jazz nights featured dynamic saxophonists Branford Marsalis and Azar Lawrence performing in two of the top music clubs of Paris, both leading quartets. Marsalis was on the big stage in the 200-seat New Morning and Lawrence played in the more intimate Sunside jazz club. Both delivered with fire and ferocity, playing tenor and soprano saxophones ...

Multiple Reviews

Strange Solo Sounds: SK Kakraba and Jonah Parzen-Johnson

by Jakob Baekgaard
August 25, 2015

Sounds are all around us. Some of them are so familiar that we barely recognize them. Music is a special kind of sound. It puts us in touch with the world or provides an escape from it. Sometimes, music is even able to conjure a world of sound that is hard to imagine. It can be done through artistic manipulation with an already known instrument or, perhaps, a strange instrument is introduced that is like seeing the world with a ...

Album Review

Chris Trinidad: Chris Trinidad’s Certain Times

Read "Chris Trinidad’s Certain Times" reviewed by Mark Sullivan

by Mark Sullivan
August 25, 2015

Bright, upbeat modern jazz from bassist/composer Chris Trinidad and his quartet. The Filipino-Canadian leader (now residing in the Bay Area) set out to make groove-oriented music; he structured the tunes with few chords (to give the soloists more freedom), and chose a low woodwind sound to occasionally double his bass riffs. The choice of instrumentation has the side benefit of giving the group a slightly unusual sound. Baritone saxophonist Charlie Gurke doubles Trinidad's bass part right out of ...