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

Jukka Perko + Iiro Rantala: It takes two to Tango

Read "It takes two to Tango" reviewed by Anthony Shaw

by Anthony Shaw
May 3, 2015

This CD from two verging-on-veteran names on the Finnish jazz scene is a little disappointing in its energy, but not in its charm. Jukka Perko and Iiro Rantala have both earned their laurels years back, playing ear-bending, exhilarating jazz, the former with the likes of Dizzey Gillespie in his 1980s line-up and later McCoy Tyner, the latter with Gil Goldstein and then his piano led Trio Töykeät. And of course both have with nearly every Finnish musician of note on ...

Film Review

Romantic Warriors III - Canterbury Tales

by Roger Farbey
May 3, 2015

Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder (Directors/Writers) Romantic Warriors III -Canterbury Tales Zeitgeist Media 2015 Progdocs third documentary film on the progressive music scene hits the motherload focussing on the very start of it all. The so-called Canterbury Scene started with The Wilde Flowers, a nascent version of Soft Machine and to some extent precursor of Caravan too. The Canterbury name emanates from the shared geographical area of some of the scene's chief ...

Album Review

Jeff Cosgrove/Frank Kimbrough/Martin Wind: Conversations With Owls

Read "Conversations With Owls" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
May 3, 2015

Returning to the microphones after producing the scintillating Alternating Current, drummer Jeff Cosgrove pulls together a completely different trio for the marvelous Conversations With Owls. The mystery of improvisation is explained by Jean-Michel Pilc in his important book, It's About Music as when the music plays the musician. There is no beginning and end; there is no separation between the instrument, the others musicians or the audience. Achieving this state is what makes a musician more than just ...

Album Review

Henry Kaiser - Damon Smith - Weasel Walter: Plane Crash Two

Read "Plane Crash Two" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
May 3, 2015

This album was created shortly after experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser's large ensemble collaboration with fabled Brit guitarist Ray Russell The Celestial Squid (Cuneiform, 2015), as Plane Crash Two marks the second installment of the trio's unadulterated free improvisation exploits. Here, three longtime associates generate that special synergy required to pull it off. Regardless of tempo or pitch, the musicians expand, contract and generate call and response patterns via microsecond-like reactions amid the ensuing developments. The program is consummated ...

Album Review

Matthew Shipp & Mat Walerian Duo / The Uppercut: Live At Okuden

Read "Live At Okuden" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
May 3, 2015

Jane Austen was mistaken when she wrote “Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable." Passing away at the age of 41 in 1817, she would not have had the opportunity to hear either jazz, nor the music of Matthew Shipp and Mat Walerian. The surprise here is twofold; first, the discovery of a new voice, Polish reedsman Mat Walerian and second, the opportunity to hear pianist Matthew Shipp in his ...

Album Review

Theo Jackson: Shoeless And The Girl

Read "Shoeless And The Girl" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
May 2, 2015

Theo Jackson's second album, Shoeless And The Girl, is an old-fashioned kind of record. That's “old-fashioned" as in melodic, swinging, understated, lyrically engaging--old-fashioned in a really good way.Jackson's debut, Jericho (Self Produced, 2012), was impressive but the lengthy songs sometimes lost focus. Shoeless And The Girl is a more mature, more savvy, album: the songs all come in at under 5.40, the arrangements are tight and Jackson's lyrics are given the primacy they deserve. Bassist Huntly Gordon and ...

Bailey's Bundles

Johnny Winter And Live

by C. Michael Bailey
May 2, 2015

Johnny Winter And Johnny Winter And Live Columbia 1971 There is no other live rock and roll disc that is both so wrong and so perfect at the same time. Johnny Winter led a power trio in the early 1970s supplemented by guitarist Rick Derringer (who later broke through with the Derringer original “Rock and roll Hoochie-Coo" which Winter had also recorded). This particular live recording, Johnny Winter And Live smacks ...

Album Review

Nils Fischer & Timbazo: Rumberos a Monton

Read "Rumberos a Monton" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
May 2, 2015

On Rumberos a Monton, a renowned European percussionist leads an all-star group of musicians from five Caribbean and South American countries, plus Holland, Germany and the U.S. in celebrating the music of Cuba, especially the rumba. Why can't the rest of the world come together like that? Although he hails from The Netherlands (via Germany, the land of his birth), Nils Fischer, the founder and leader of Timbazo, has a special fondness for the music of Latin America and plays ...

Album Review

Ajoyo: Ajoyo

by James Nadal
May 2, 2015

The best recorded music is sometimes the result of life altering circumstances stimulating the creative impulses in receptive musicians, which then take the idea into the studio. By chance, multi-reed player and composer Yacine Boulares was turned on to the infectious rhythms of Cameroon, leading to the record Ajoyo, a delightful hybrid of expressive vocals highlighted by regional bikutsi and makossa tempos, with a strong dose of afro-beat thrown in for good measure.Surrounding himself with an international cast ...

Album Review

Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen: We Got a Live one Here!

Read "We Got a Live one Here!" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
May 2, 2015

Pimply, hormonal, lower-middle class teenaged boys growing up in the 1960s and '70s were easy marks for fun, subversive, and slightly dangerous music. However, the music being consumed was mostly a generation or two beyond its origin. For Example, “Spoonful" on Cream's 1966 debut recording Fresh Cream (Atco) was an ear-opening introduction to extended performance that would come de rigueur by the 1970s. On Fresh Cream the composition is credited to Willie Dixon who commandeered the song in 1960 for ...