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

Alex Sipiagin: Balance 38-58

Read "Balance 38-58" reviewed by Andrew Luhn

by Andrew Luhn
March 9, 2015

Jazz fans who have followed trumpeter Alex Sipiagin's career thus far will have noticed that he likes to approach his original (and highly unique) music differently on each new album he presents. His 2013 release on the distinguished Criss Cross label, Overlooking Moments, presented his music in a stripped-down, chord-less quartet setting and focused on the dynamic interplay between Sipiagin, tenor-giant Chris Potter, and the formidable rhythm section of Scott Colley and Eric Harland. In contrast, his excellent 2011 sextet ...

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Building a Jazz Library

Thelonious Monk

by Chris M. Slawecki
March 8, 2015

Thelonious Sphere Monk is one of the true great jazz originals. Monk's family moved from North Carolina to New York City while he was still an infant. He began piano lessons around age 12, playing Harlem rent parties then graduating to Harlem clubs such as Minton's Playhouse. Monk often played with Dizzy Gillespie and Coleman Hawkins through the early 1940s. As Minton's house pianist, Monk was entrenched as THE bebop pianist: At Minton's, with Gillespie, Charlie ...

Album Review

Angelica Matveeva: Vocalese

Read "Vocalese" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 8, 2015

"Vocalese" is defined as, “a style or musical genre of jazz singing wherein words are sung to melodies that were originally part of an all-instrumental composition or improvisation." The grand purveyors of this jazz vocals offshoot include King Pleasure, Eddie Jefferson, Jon Hendricks and Bob Dorough. It is the most “jazzy" of jazz idioms. A grand introduction exists in the aforementioned Eddie Jefferson's Letter From Home (Riverside, 1961). Another grand example is the polyglot Angelica Matveeva's appropriately ...

Live Review

Paquito D'Rivera at Mount Vernon Country Club

by Geoff Anderson
March 8, 2015

Paquito D'Rivera Mount Vernon Country Club Golden, Colorado February 27, 2015 Jazz. Pass it on. That was a big part of what happened Friday night at the Mount Vernon Country Club in the foothills west of Denver. National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master and multiple Grammy winner Paquito D'Rivera led an ensemble of primarily college students in an evening of Latin jazz. The groove was solid, the song selection impeccable and the ...

Album Review

Reggie Quinerly: Invictus

Read "Invictus" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
March 8, 2015

Artists who sit at home waiting for success to find them will be sitting at home forever. Success in the modern jazz landscape only comes through a keen understanding and acceptance of the concept of self-determination, a fact which hasn't escaped drummer Reggie Quinerly. Invictus--the second album from the Houston-reared, New Jersey-based drummer--takes its title from a famed poem by William Ernest Henley. Through his words, Henley espoused the idea of creating and controlling one's own destiny; ...

Album Review

Gebhard Ullmann/Basement Research: Hat And Shoes (Gebhard Ullmann/Basement Research)

Read "Hat And Shoes (Gebhard Ullmann/Basement Research)" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
March 8, 2015

Multi-reed player Gebhard Ullmann celebrated his fiftieth birthday in 2007 with the release of New Basement Research, a powerful recording which had personnel changed from the earlier releases of this project. For those new to Ullmann, see this retrospective. Hat And Shoes celebrates a number of milestones: Ullmann's fiftieth release as a leader or co-leader and the twentieth year of the Basement Research project itself, which started with the eponymous Soul Note release from 1995.

Extended Analysis

Oliver Josifovski: Nezgasnati Ognishta

by Nenad Georgievski
March 8, 2015

With the privately commissioned record “Nezgasnati Ognista" (Unextinguished Hearths) Olivier Josifovski, multiinstrumentalist and band leader of band Ljubojna, adds another chapter in his illustrious career. Even though this project may not bear the name Ljubojna on the cover sleeves, it was recorded with many musicians that are part or were of it, so in a way, this is its “undercover record." Some artists are inspired by musical legacies and traditions, but choose to work strictly within the confines ...

Album Review

Mames Babegenush: Mames Babegenush

Read "Mames Babegenush" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 8, 2015

Eastern Europe on the razor's edge. The Eastern European music called Klezmer is so pungently identifiable that only a few bars of accordion and clarinet conjures aural images that are both refreshingly foreign and comfortably familiar. It is music that lacks a self-conscience, it can be performed seriously, joyously, in satire, or complete jest and it retains its fundamental grace and power. In a testament of this global village, the Danish Klezmer band Mames Babegenush ("Mom's aubergine salad" in Yiddish, ...

Book Review

On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom By Dennis McNally

by C. Michael Bailey
March 8, 2015

On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom Dennis McNally 384 Pages ISBN: #978-1619024496 Counterpoint 2014 Since Samuel Charters The Country Blues (Reinhart) in 1959, beginning, effectively, the serious reportage of American Folk Music, in particular the blues, there have been two far-reaching trilogies that address American Folk Music against the larger backdrop of race and culture. The first is Peter Guralnick's Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues, ...

Album Review

Devin Sinha: The Seventh Season

Read "The Seventh Season" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 8, 2015

A resident of Seattle, WA, singer/songwriter Devin Sinha's Midwestern upbringing casts a folkish muse, paralleled by the rustic album cover artwork illustrating a wheat field and weather worn fence. But Sinha incorporates a touch of the forever hip Pacific Northwest Indie rock panorama as he poses an articulate view of life's experiences, here on his second solo outing. Sinha's straight-forward delivery integrated with yearning melodic overtones project an aura that he's lived the life portrayed via the lyrics ...