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.

My Blue Note Obsession

Lou Donaldson: Alligator Bogaloo – Blue Note 4263

by Marc Davis
February 24, 2015

Alligator Bogaloo is very much a product of its time--1967--and it is extremely groovy. Start with the cover. A woman with crazy eye makeup wears a nutty hijab-like getup and is waving her arms like an early-day Bangle walking like an Egyptian. Tres psychedelic. Well, no surprise there. It's April 1967. The Summer of Love is about to begin. In two months, Sly and the Family Stone will burst into the public's consciousness and create modern ...

Album Review

Matador: Matador

Read "Matador" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
February 24, 2015

Guitarist and singer Santiago Bogacz's, stage name Matador, second eponymous EP can easily serve as a score for an independent, art house, film. As with his first release Bogacz continues to explore and fuse Americana and Latin motifs but the current disc is thematically more cohesive and has a definite dramatic atmosphere. On “Sin título #3" for instance, thick guitar chords simmer underneath his evocative vocals. Flamenco tinged phrases meld into the bluesy music creating a haunting and ...

Album Review

Alyssa Allgood: Lady Bird

Read "Lady Bird" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
February 24, 2015

Today scat is, literally, a dirty word. In a more polite age it was what Louis Armstrong did when he forgot the words to “Heebie-Jeebies." Such was Pops' influence that, even though it was a mistake, soon everyone was doing it. After bebop kicked in, King Pleasure took things further when he first improvised wordlessly, then wrote down his own words to James Moody's solo on “I'm In The Mood For Love." Others followed ...

Album Review

Bly De Blyant: Hindsight Bias

Read "Hindsight Bias" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 24, 2015

This genre-leaping international trio is fronted by Norwegian drummer Øyvind Skarbø, and features Icelandic guitarist Hilmar Jensson (TYFT, Jim Black's AlasNoAxis) and Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily (Marc Ribot, John Zorn). With its second album, the trio's enterprising electro-organic mix proffers a sense of adventure via these compact and disparate pieces, underscored by memorable themes, which is a recurring factor that seeds a delightfully prismatic program. The musicians gradually construct a mid-tempo Indie-rocker with an appealing hook on “Jiddu," ...

Album Review

Detroit Bop Quintet: Two Birds

Read "Two Birds" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 24, 2015

On December 21st 1947 Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter, and Max Roach recorded four Parker compositions for Savoy at United Sound Systems recording studio in Detroit, Michigan. Parker's Quintet was in town for two weeks, performing and backing Sarah Vaughan at the El Sino Club. It appears that Parker hustled to lay down four sides before the 1948 recording ban was to go into effect. This is the same studio that would later record John Lee Hooker, ...

Interview

Marshall Gilkes: Relishing Big Band Success

by R.J. DeLuke
February 23, 2015

Marshall Gilkes is a trombonist of monster chops and great taste whenever he puts the brass to his lips in any performance. He's seen sitting in the trombone section of the Maria Schneider Orchestra in recent years, and has associations with other big bands, either subbing in, or as a member of the WDR Big Band in Germany for a time earlier this decade. Gilkes also has extensive classical training (a few years ago he nearly landed the ...

Album Review

Spin Marvel: Infolding

Read "Infolding" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 23, 2015

Spin Marvel is all about shaping sounds. Ambient landscapes, minimalistic tides, atmospherics, trance-inducing passages, and electro-acoustic marriages are all part of the package when this group gets going. When drummer Martin France put Spin Marvel together and orchestrated the creation of its eponymous debut, the band was presented as a quartet with trippy musical aspirations and the skills to pull off whatever it wanted. On the band's follow-up--Spin Marvel 2: The Reluctantly Politicised Mr. James (Edition Recrods, ...

Album Review

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

Read "Conversations With Owls" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 23, 2015

The opening track to drummer Jeff Cosgrove's third release under his own name is The Owl, listening to his composition brings to mind poet Carl Sandburg's words, “The fog comes/on little cat feet/It sits looking/over harbor and city/on silent haunches/and then moves on." The composition is not what you might expect from a drummer led recording. Then again Cosgrove is not your typical skins thumper. The music barely blows the curtains aside as it tiptoes in, heels raised, walking on ...

Album Review

Yosi Levy: The Yosi Levy Acoustic Project

Read "The Yosi Levy Acoustic Project" reviewed by James Nadal

by James Nadal
February 23, 2015

Beyond the element of surprise found in the music of exotic lands, there is the alluring mystery which emanates from the ancestral origins of the culture itself. Guitarist Yosi Levy, with The Acoustic Project, has produced an amazing fusion of traditional Middle Eastern and Indian music injected with improvisational jazz textures and nuances, offering an amalgamation which sounds vaguely familiar yet remains furtive and mystical. Levy is an accomplished guitarist with an innate intellectual knowledge of Israeli music, ...

Rediscovery

Pat Metheny Group: Travels

by John Kelman
February 23, 2015

Pat Metheny GroupTravelsECM Records 1983 There are some records that cannot help but become etched in the memory as a reminder of times past... a happy circumstance, perhaps, or (though hopefully not) something less positive in one's life. Today's Rediscovery is an album that, no matter the time of year, brings back memories of warm summer evenings beneath a star-lit country sky. When Pat Metheny Group--the guitarist's then-six year-old group that had, by that ...