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

Mark Helias Open Loose: The Signal Maker

Read "The Signal Maker" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
April 21, 2015

Bassist Mark Helias runs a tight ship. Not in the sense of tricksy arrangements or impossible time signatures. It's more the laser sharp focus his accomplished Open Loose combo brings to the job in hand. And that job is breathing bustling and unpredictable life into the baker's dozen selections that constitute The Signal Maker, the unit's 7th release since 1998. Drummer Tom Rainey has been there since the inception, while saxophonist Tony Malaby is the new boy, having joined a ...

Album Review

Mari Koga: Perfect Blue

Read "Perfect Blue" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 21, 2015

Japanese-born vocalist Mari Koga has been living in New York for some time now, performing in the City's most prestige's jazz clubs and making a name for herself in one of the most vibrant jazz scenes around. With the help of long-time friend and fellow Japanese artist, pianist Chiemi Nakai, Koga now presents her astonishing debut album Perfect Blue, containing fresh new arrangements of a few jazz standards and brisk new originals with elements of Afro-Cuban rhythms comprising the main ...

Interview

Thana Alexa: Singer And Instrument

by R.J. DeLuke
April 20, 2015

Music started tugging at the sleeve at the age of three for Thana Alexa, a New York based singer who began making music there as a violinist, moved to Croatia where she discovered jazz, and returned as a singer poised to sweep into a successful career. It started with the piano--kind of. Her tinkering with a toy piano so impressed her mother that she nearly started her career as a budding pianist. Instead, she gravitated to violin, at ...

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Building a Jazz Library

Vocal Jazz: 1951-1968

by Mathew Bahl
April 20, 2015

These 17 years play out like the vocal jazz equivalent of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Much of the core body of work that makes up vocal jazz was recorded during this relatively short time span. These were the years that saw some of the greatest jazz singers working at the peak of their powers. In the late 1940s, American record companies stumbled upon two ideas that have since become the cornerstone of the ...

Album Review

Sarah Moule: Songs From The Floating World

Read "Songs From The Floating World" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
April 20, 2015

Class will out, as they say. It's certainly true on this album--class bursts out of Songs From The Floating World. From Sarah Moule's sophisticated, cool, vocals and the stylish playing of the cream of British jazzers, through to Simon Wallace's music and arrangements and Fran Landesman's inimitable lyrics, everyone involved with this fine album is a class act. Moule is a leading interpreter of Landesman's songs: her understated approach heightens the impact of the lyrics and ensures that ...

Live Review

Vossa Jazz 2015

by Henning Bolte
April 20, 2015

VOSSA JAZZ Voss March 28 -29, 2015 Vossa Jazz, founded in 1973, an annual three-day event with a great variety of groups and acts, is a highly prestigious jazz festival in Norway. Thanks especially to its commissions and awards, it has an important national and international function. In 1983 the festival became the first in Europe to start assigning commission work. After more than 30 years the series has become an impressive list including ...

Album Review

James Falzone: The Room Is

Read "The Room Is" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
April 20, 2015

Legend has it that Jimmy Giuffre harbored a vehement distaste for the use of percussion in his ensembles. He found drummers distracting, irritating and clamorous. By the time he recorded the classic records 1961 (ECM, 1992) and Free Fall (Columbia, 1963) he had jettisoned drummers from his piano and bass trio. It must have driven marketing executives mad. How would listeners follow the music? Who kept the time? What's with all this freedom?Exactly, what is with all this ...

Album Review

Mario Cruz: A View from the Mind's Eye

Read "A View from the Mind's Eye" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 20, 2015

Coming out of the shadows and finally emerging as much more than a journeyman musician, FT. Worth, Texas native Mario Cruz, makes his Armored Records debut on the impressive and visionary A View from the Mind's Eye, his first totally conceived, creatively controlled and produced musical project reflecting both real and imagined personal stories transformed into beautiful and dynamic musical statements. After joining the Rock-Fusion band Blood Sweat and Tears many years ago, Cruz moved to New York City and ...

Album Review

Tim Ferguson's Inside/Out: Hold That Thought

Read "Hold That Thought" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
April 20, 2015

Bassist Tim Ferguson's unconventional trio Inside/Out is a collaborative group that makes its recorded debut with Hold That Thought. Sandwiched between a piece by bassist Charlie Haden and another by pianist Mal Waldron this engaging mix of free improvisations and original compositions brims with a warm intimacy and intense lyricism. Haden's “Silence" opens with pianist Diane Moser' tolling keys that usher in trumpeter Rob Henke's melancholic, long notes. Henke's horn expands evocatively over Moser's somber lines and the ...

Album Review

The Process: The Process

Read "The Process" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 20, 2015

The Process is like a radioactive atom that centers and orbits around the futuristic power trio of bassist Bill Laswell, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith and Jon Batiste, the latest in his family's longstanding line of New Orleans keyboard visionaries. “The original idea was to film unfamiliar musicians playing together in a room with no preconceived direction. Over time it began to transform into making a record," Laswell explains. “Beginning by exploring each other's musicianship, laying ...