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

Henry Kaiser and Ray Russell: The Celestial Squid

Read "The Celestial Squid" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
March 10, 2015

Jazz fusion guitarist Ray Russell and polystylistic experimentalist Henry Kaiser have never previously recorded together. Kaiser's recorded output is prodigious whereas Russell's is more modest. His debut album Turn Circle(1968) was swiftly followed by a clutch of critically acclaimed but more challenging ones such as Dragon Hill (1969) and Secret Asylum (1973) prior to Russell changing tack to more fusion based recordings. It is these “challenging" works to which The Celestial Squid invites most comparison. “Gutken Limpo" opens ...

Album Review

YK Samarinda: Jazz for Borneo

Read "Jazz for Borneo" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
March 10, 2015

Ethnic fusion jazz is a term that has gained currency in Indonesia in recent years and is typically applied to bands who incorporate elements of Indonesian folk music--melodies and/or instrumentation--into a jazz-fusion aesthetic. The four-piece YK Samarinda from East Kalimantan, Borneo, falls into this broad category; its use of the sapeh (or sampeh)--a traditional lute originally used in ritual trance music of the Dayak and Orang Ulu people of central Borneo--lends a distinctive though secondary color to the more dominant ...

Album Review

Ben Wolfe: The Whisperer

Read "The Whisperer" reviewed by David A. Orthmann

by David A. Orthmann
March 10, 2015

While swimming in the rather large body of sounds that comprise the jazz mainstream, Ben Wolfe's The Whisperer evinces no obvious stylistic points of reference or influence, possesses unusual depth, and adds up to something larger and more significant than a composite of impressive individual performances. Wolfe's compositions--eleven out of the disc's twelve tracks--comprise the record's core. He crafts melodies that are familiar in a good way, and encases them in tightly knit, logical, non-standard forms. There's ...

Extended Analysis

Gefion

by John Kelman
March 10, 2015

It's been a long time coming. Jakob Bro made his first ECM appearance as a member of drummer Paul Motian's twin-sax/triple-guitar band on the late drummer's Garden of Eden (2006). Three more years passed before he returned, this time as a member of Tomasz Stanko's trans-European quintet on 2009's Dark Eyes--a group that evolved considerably from its early performance at Norway's 2009 Molde International Jazz Festival to a far more confident showing a year later at the TD Ottawa Jazz ...

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Interview

A Remembrance of Percy Heath

by R.J. DeLuke
March 9, 2015

This article was originally published at All About Jazz in May 2005. Percy Heath could play the hell out of that big contrabass. Played it for more than half a century. With Bird and Miles and Diz and 'Trane and Brownie and the venerable Modern Jazz Quartet and on and on. And if you're reading this you know that already, probably. He played in dumps; he played R&B. Played for next to nothing. But he also ...

Profile

We Three Kings: The Heath Brothers

by AAJ Staff
March 9, 2015

This article was originally published at All About Jazz in 2002. Bundle these three brothers' experiences and associations through their individual and collective careers, and anyone with even the slightest notion of jazz appreciation will indubitably realize the significance of the Heath triumvirate--bassist Percy, saxophonist Jimmy, and drummer Albert “Tootie." What an in-depth jazz history textbook could be created, based solely upon the Heaths' history in jazz. From bebop pioneers Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious ...

Album Review

Josh Nelson: Exploring Mars

Read "Exploring Mars" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 9, 2015

Exploring Mars is fueled by a love of science fiction, intellectual inquisitiveness, and musical inventiveness of the highest order. Pianist Josh Nelson, initially inspired by the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars in the summer of 2012, put together a project that's musically expansive and wholly unique: It's safe to say that he's the first person to tie together author Ray Bradbury's writings, original music that ranges from the friendly to the far-out, tributes to four rover landings, and ...

Album Review

David Angel Big Band: Camshafts and Butterflies

Read "Camshafts and Butterflies" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 9, 2015

Like the proverbial tree falling in an empty forest, if a big band plays but no one hears it, does it still make a sound? That's basically the story of the David Angel Big Band, which has been rehearsing nearly every week for well-nigh half a century but has been heard by almost no one until now. Angel, a saxophonist / arranger who has made a good living for many years “ghost-writing" music for television and films and teaching composition ...

Album Review

Chantale Gagné: The Left Side Of The Moon

Read "The Left Side Of The Moon" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
March 9, 2015

Montreal native pianist Chantal Gagné's third release as a leader, Left Side of the Moon brims with a fantastical mysticism. A translucent aura surrounds the ten Gagné compositions, and one cover, that comprise the album while an intense, organic passion permeates their core.The darkly hued title track for instance is an incandescent ballad with an intriguingly tense ambience. Gagné's classically influenced cascading phrases and saxophonist Steve Wilson's ardently undulating lines embellish the main theme before drummer Lewis Nash's ...

Album Review

Han-earl Park: Anomic Aphasia

Read "Anomic Aphasia" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
March 9, 2015

The music on Han-earl Park's third CD for Slam, Anomic Aphasia, derives from two similar but significantly different Park projects. The first is Eris 136199, an improvising trio consisting of guitarists Park and Nick Didkovsky (leader of Doctor Nerve) plus saxophonist Catherine Sikora. Described by Park as “the noisy, unruly complexity of the ensemble Eris 136199" they are responsible for the opening and closing tracks, “Monopod" (seen, on the actual day of this recording, in the YouTube clip below) and ...