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

Mario Pavone: Blue Dialect

Read "Blue Dialect" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
July 24, 2015

Gone are the days where a jazz trio maintains a three month residency, playing nightly in a club. Nor are there world traveling units that refine their skills nightly on the road, working and reworking material. There will be no more piano trios led by the likes of Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans. But have no fear, there are combinations, encounters, and partnerships that come together with just the players to make special music. Bassist Mario Pavone's new ...

Interview

Denise King: Making the Tradition New

by Victor L. Schermer
July 23, 2015

Denise King is a Philadelphia vocalist who has made the world her oyster with her unique ability to navigate between rhythm and blues and sultry jazz standards. Discovered in the 1980s by an R&B songwriter-producer, King quickly found her way in the City of Brotherly Love with some of the top musicians in both popular and jazz settings. In the New Millennium, she has been shuttling back and forth between the U.S. and Europe delivering stellar performances on both continents. ...

Live Review

Sonny Fortune at Lancaster Avenue Jazz Festival, Philadelphia

by Victor L. Schermer
July 23, 2015

Sonny Fortune Quartet Ninth Annual Lancaster Avenue Jazz Festival Philadelphia, PA July 18, 2015 It isn't often that you're going to hear a jazz legend like saxophonist Sonny Fortune at an inner city vest pocket park festival featuring mostly young lions and R&B groups, but in this case, at Saunders Park Green in Philadelphia's Powelton Village, Fortune was a local boy come home, and it was a sentimental thrill to see and hear this ...

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Album Review

Better than TV: Late

by Bruce Lindsay
July 23, 2015

Better than TV, huh? A few years ago that assertion--from a young quintet based in Cambridge, UK--would have been quite a boast. Today, not so much. Still, congrats to the band for coming up with the name. It's memorable and a tad quirky, which is good, because on this evidence the band, with a strong bop sensibility and a way with a memorable melody line, could well be around for some time. Late is the band's debut: eight ...

Album Review

Adam Pieronczyk Quartet: A-Trane Nights

Read "A-Trane Nights" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
July 23, 2015

When the subject of “Polish Jazz" comes up, the most likely name to get mentioned might be Krzysztof Komeda, the pioneering pianist who wrote the soundtrack music for several of Roman Polanski's films, most notably Rosemary's Baby (1968). Move up to current times and you'll find another Polish jazz artist of special note, saxophonist Adam Pieroncyzk, who crafted a marvelous tribute to Komeda in 2011, Komeda: The Innocent Sorcerer (Jazzwerkstatt). With A-Trane Nights, Pieronczyk offers something different. Replacing ...

Album Review

Mary May: This Is What You Are

Read "This Is What You Are" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
July 23, 2015

When Mary May heard Sarah Vaughan sing “If I Loved You" it blew her away. “She sang in a way I had never heard anyone sing before." Then came Anita O'Day, Nancy Wilson and Marion Montgomery. They all made May yearn to follow in their footsteps. But Scots being--famously--careful people, it took a long time before May would opt for a career as a jazz singer, scarcely the most steady of occupations. She continued ...

Album Review

Julian Schneemann: Roundabout

Read "Roundabout" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
July 23, 2015

Pianist, composer and arranger Julian Schneemann must be given credit for his extreme ambition in the creation of his wonderful debut recording, Roundabout. Not only does he mix French horn and bassoon with the more “normal" jazz instruments to get a sound one does not often hear, he has mixed “classical" music with “jazz" so thoroughly that the result is neither and both. Furthermore, in today's track-oriented world, he has dared to produce an album that is a ...

Live Review

North Sea Jazz Festival Recap: A Moveable, Musical Feast

by Joan Gannij
July 22, 2015

North Sea Jazz Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands July 10-12, 2015 Three days immersed in sounds and sensations. Followed by two days at home in zombie mode, zen silence. Rather than do an exhausting commute from Amsterdam to Rotterdam each day (by train or auto (50 miles / 75 kilometers each way), I opted to stay at a B&B in Delft, one of the oldest towns in The Netherlands, and the de facto capital back in 1581, ...

Book Excerpts

Mingus Speaks

by John Goodman
July 22, 2015

Mingus on the Avant-Garde and Tradition Here's Charles Mingus talking about two of his favorite subjects, the avant-garde pretenders and the need for jazz players to understand the traditions of their music. The excerpt is from my book Mingus Speaks (2013, University of California Press). --John F Goodman Mingus: Everybody's got ego and everybody who lives in a human body thinks they're better than another guy. Even if a guy's considered to be a nigger ...

Album Review

NSU Jazz'Tet: Out Front

Read "Out Front" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
July 22, 2015

The NSU Jazz'Tet is comprised of seven students (and one faculty member, director / saxophonist Tommy Poole) from the Jazz Studies program at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. Together they present an assortment of small-group jazz that is scrupulously modern yet firmly grounded in the music's time-honored traditions. Bop is a salient part of their vocabulary, as are blues, ballads, Latin rhythms, funk and even a waltz. Besides putting their best foot forward musically, most members ...