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

Jess Rowland: Spambots

Read "Spambots" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 27, 2015

San Francisco-based sound artist, synthesist and commissioned composer Jess Rowland assembles a freaky android-like aural fest via text-to-speech loops, cyclical narrations and perhaps modern era Beat poetry atop supercharged electronics and dissimilar tonalities. Running at LP length, Rowland and drummer Pete Stalsky don't overcook matters. Her overlapping narrations, sometimes built on short phrases and a mélange of effects ride above the drummer's staggered cadences. Yet the duo intersperses crunching distortion and electro-mechanical type sounds into the mix. Rowland ...

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Album Review

Mud Morganfield: For Pops | A Tribute To Muddy Waters

Read "For Pops | A Tribute To Muddy Waters" reviewed by Walter Atkins

by Walter Atkins
March 27, 2015

For this CD release, Mud Morganfield pays tribute and shows love to his father, the legendary blues artist Muddy Waters. Listening to the Mud Morganfield and Kim Wilson disc For Pops | A Tribute To Muddy Waters, the energy of the first track “Gone to Main Street" is impressive. Morganfield's deep bluesy vocals are richly supported with a solid band featuring Wilson on harmonica. The liner notes mention the group had a house party the night before the ...

Book Excerpts

Listen to This: Miles Davis and "Bitches Brew"

by Victor Svorinich
March 26, 2015

The following is an excerpt from the “MUSIC" chapter of Listen to This: Miles Davis and “Bitches Brew" by Victor Svorinich (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Call It Anything “I'd like to say one thing about Miles Davis. One time he said to me, 'Hey Wayne, do you get tired of playing music that sounds like music?'" --Wayne Shorter “Call It Anything" was one of the working titles used for Bitches Brew. It ...

Take Five With...

Take Five with Courtney Bryan

by AAJ Staff
March 26, 2015

Meet Courtney Bryan: Courtney Bryan, a native of New Orleans, is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests" (New York Times). Her music ranges from solo works to large ensembles in the new music and jazz idioms, film scores, and collaborations with dancers, visual artists, writers, and actors. On April 9, 2015, her new work Sanctum for orchestra and recorded sound, commissioned by American Composers Orchestra (ACO), will be given its world premiere by ACO at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, ...

Album Review

Kirk Knuffke: Arms & Hands

Read "Arms & Hands" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 26, 2015

Sometime, watch children as they eat the M&Ms. They will separate the colors into several piles--green, red, brown, yellow, orange, and blue. It's not that each color tastes different, except for maybe blue--I don't remember ever seeing that color before. Nonetheless, they go about savoring each color batch as an independent experience. Those little candies come to mind while attending to cornetist Kirk Knuffke's release Arms & Hands. The disc (released as both CD and LP) is a trio recording ...

Album Review

Ryan Truesdell Gil Evans Project: Lines of Color

Read "Lines of Color" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
March 26, 2015

The biggest ribbons in composer/arranger Gil Evans' (1912-1988) resume are three groundbreaking Columbia Records albums he recorded with trumpeter Miles Davis: Miles Ahead (1958); Porgy and Bess (1959); and Sketches of Spain (1960). These were orchestral jazz of the finest caliber, recorded a decade after Evans' earlier work with Davis on the seminal Capitol Records set Birth of the Cool, released in 1957. Evans' charts--written with the the inclusion of the then unusual (in jazz) French horns and the then ...

Album Review

-isq: Too

by Bruce Lindsay
March 26, 2015

Too is the second album from London-based quartet -isq. No surprise there. The slightly odd presentation of the band's name remains in place and continues to trouble the usually faultless activities of the planet's internet search engines. The line-up from debut album -isq (Cheesepeas Records, 2013) is still intact. The band's distinctive “every silver lining has a cloud" approach to songwriting--lyrics by singer Irene Serra--was a strength of the debut and is also pretty much at the core of these ...

Live Review

Dead Combo & Camane at New Jersey Performing Arts Center

by Ernest Barteldes
March 26, 2015

Dead Combo + Camané New Jersey Performing Arts Center Newark, NJ March 15, 2015 On their NJPAC debut, the Lisbon-based duo formed by Tó Trips and Pedro V. Gonçalves walked silently onto the stage as a short video introduction was played. They immediately launched into “Povo Que Cais Descalco," an instrumental based around acoustic and electric guitar, immediately following “Waiting For Nick," a tune filled with distortion and fast riffs. The duo ...

Album Review

Ernesto Cervini: Turboprop

Read "Turboprop" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
March 26, 2015

Toronto jazz drummer Ernesto Cervini presents his fourth album as leader with the high-flying Turboprop offering a sophisticated modern jazz sound in a ten-piece repertoire of originals and standard material from the likes of Charlie Parker and Keith Jarrett among others. A robust drummer with a forceful presence on the drums, Cervini's style is reminiscent of the great Art Blakey, Billy Higgins and to a much lesser degree, even drawing comparisons to the power style of fusion jazz drummer Billy ...

Album Review

Marius Neset: Pinball

Read "Pinball" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
March 26, 2015

Though Marius Neset thrives in small ensemble settings, his writing has increasingly exhibited orchestral ambition, as witnessed on the thrilling Birds (Edition Records, 2013), which saw his quintet augmented by brass, accordion and woodwind instruments to spectacular effect, and on Lion (ACT Music, 2014), a powerful outing with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. The aptly named Pinball sees Neset in equally expansive mood, navigating often complex charts with his core quintet bolstered on half the tracks by cello, violin and flute. ...