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

Liam Noble: A Room Somewhere

Read "A Room Somewhere" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
May 13, 2015

A Room Somewhere is Liam Noble's second solo album: a mix of standards and improvised pieces that showcases this fine pianist's talents to excellent effect. Occasionally, critics refer to second albums as “difficult." The assumption is that the first album draws inspiration from 20 years of the artist's life, the second draws on one or two years at best. Noble avoids that difficulty by leaving a 20-year gap between his debut solo recording, Close Your Eyes (FMR REcords, ...

Album Review

Cactus Truck: Seizures Palace

Read "Seizures Palace" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
May 13, 2015

You have to go back to the energy jazz of Splatter Trio or maybe the punk band Black Flag to find a band comparable to Cactus Truck. The Amsterdam-based trio of drummer Onno Govaert (Vanilla Riot), bassist/guitarist Jasper Stadhouders (The Bureau Of Atomic Tourism), and American-born saxophonist John Dikeman (Universal Indians) play a brand of, bar-clearing music, that both repels and, ultimately, compels.Seizures Palace is their seventh release, if you count CDr and cassette only releases. It is ...

Album Review

James Lloyd: Here We Go!

Read "Here We Go!" reviewed by Jeff Winbush

by Jeff Winbush
May 13, 2015

Solo albums from a member of a longtime band are usually driven by one of two impulses. Either the material is something which doesn't quite fit the group's sound or it is dipping a toe in the pool to test the waters for splitting from the band. Along with drummer Curtis Harmon, keyboardist James Lloyd has been a constant in Pieces of a Dream since 1978 when Grover Washington, Jr. took them under his wing and signed his fellow Philadelphia ...

Album Review

Maria Schneider: Lembra De Mim

Read "Lembra De Mim" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
May 13, 2015

June of 2015 can't come soon enough for fans of the Maria Schneider Orchestra. That month will see the release of the The Thompson Fields--the long-awaited followup to the stunning Sky Blue (ArtistShare, 2007). In the meantime, Schneider has been gracious enough to deliver a pair of bonus tracks to tide everyone over until the album drops: an updated take on “Dance You Monster To My Soft Song," a piece originally presented on Evanescence (Enja, 1994), and her arrangement of ...

Live Review

Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia Tribute to Strayhorn and Golson at the Kimmel Center

by Victor L. Schermer
May 12, 2015

Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia Spring Concert Honoring Billy Strayhorn and Benny Golson Perelman Theater Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts Philadelphia, PA May 9, 2015 This concert was billed as “A Tribute to Billy Strayhorn," but it was, in fact, evenly divided between Strayhorn's music and that of the venerable Philadephia native, Benny Golson, who brought himself and his iconic jazz standard tunes to the new and highly touted Jazz Orchestra of ...

Book Review

The New Orleans Jazz Scene, 1970-2000: A Personal Retrospective

by Charles Suhor
May 12, 2015

The New Orleans Jazz Scene, 1970-2000: A Personal Retrospective Thomas W. Jacobsen 208 Pages ISBN: 0807156981 LSU Press 2014 Full disclosure: I've long been an admirer of Thomas Jacobsen's writing, the catholicity of his musical tastes, and his warm personal regard for New Orleans musicians. The last was evident in his 2011 work for LSU Press, Traditional New Orleans Jazz: Conversations with the Men Who Make the Music, and his articles for Mississippi ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: Moanin’ – Blue Note 4003

by Marc Davis
May 12, 2015

Jazz fans will argue forever over the best version of The Jazz Messengers. Was it the group with Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan that made A Night in Tunisia in 1960? The 1954 edition with Horace Silver, Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson that made A Night at Birdland? (Which isn't technically a Jazz Messengers album, but really it is.) Or maybe the 1980s version with Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis? Here's an argument for the lineup that made ...

Album Review

Thomas Bergeron: Sacred Feast

Read "Sacred Feast" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
May 12, 2015

On the surface, the late Olivier Messiaen was no lover of jazz. When the topic came up in an interview that he gave in the mid '80s, he was quick to say that jazz, as a style, was something of a stylistic “robber" or borrower rather than an innovator, and that he'd “never been fond of jazz." So what would he think of Sacred Feast, a program of Messiaen-inspired pieces from multifaceted trumpeter Thomas Bergeron? That's hard to say, especially ...

Album Review

Henry Threadgill Zooid: In for a Penny, In for a Pound

Read "In for a Penny, In for a Pound" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
May 12, 2015

Don't call this jazz. In a 2013 interview with Larry Appelbaum at the Library of Congress, saxophonist, flautist, and composer Henry Threadgill, in so many words, denounced the association of labelling his music with a diluted categorization. Having performed with free thinking musicians like Muhal Richard Abrams and Anthony Braxton; lead highly regarded and out of the mainstream groups such as Air, Very Very Circus, and currently and arguably his best ensemble, Zooid; Threadgill continues to orbit around forward thinking ...

Album Review

Thomas Mapfumo: Lion Songs

Read "Lion Songs" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
May 12, 2015

The constant political and social unrest in Zimbabwe stemming from its oppressed period of colonization when it was wrongly known as Rhodesia, spawned chimurenga music--the music of struggle and resistance. The artist who personified this musical activism is Thomas Mapfumo, the Lion of Zimbabwe. His unwavering dedication to this movement since the 1970's is the subject of a biography by ethnomusicologist Banning Eyre, best known for his production work at Afropop Worldwide. Eyre is also the producer of this record, ...