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

Gene Segal: Mental Images

Read "Mental Images" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
January 28, 2015

Guitarist and composer Gene Segal has put the intervening years between Mental Images and his recording debut, Hypnotic (Innova Records, 2009), to good use. While Segal still loves the funk, as the opening “Healing Feeling" definitively shows, the remainder of the album doesn't easily fit into any one musical pigeonhole;unless there's a category at your local music store called “accomplished, original jazz-rock from out of left-field."Russian-born and Brooklyn-raised, Segal has assembled quite a band for “Mental Images." Jon ...

Album Review

Joe Harriott Quintet: Abstract/Southern Horizons/Free Form

Read "Abstract/Southern Horizons/Free Form" reviewed by Duncan Heining

by Duncan Heining
January 28, 2015

Swing Low, Sweet Harriott I don't think Joe Harriott's entire catalogue has ever been available at one time. Even in his heyday in the sixties, much of the 1950s material was unavailable. From the seventies onwards, things got really dire. Now that so much is out of copyright, Harriott's work is increasingly being reissued in CD packages, albeit in ways that are confusing and which duplicate other recently released recordings. In 2012, Proper Records put out ...

Extended Analysis

Kenny Wheeler: Songs for Quintet

by John Kelman
January 28, 2015

With the passing of Kenneth Vincent John Wheeler--Kenny Wheeler to his legion of friends and fans--the world lost yet another significant figure in the history of jazz from the mid-'60s through to the second decade of the new millennium, the artist that Norma Winstone (more often than not his singer of choice) called “the Duke Ellington of our times." While Wheeler had, since 2004, been releasing his music on the Italian Cam Jazz label, but it seems wholly appropriate that ...

Book Excerpts

John Coltrane: Exploring the Mystery of A Love Supreme, Part 2

by K. Shackelford
January 27, 2015

Part 1 | Part 2 This year marks the 50th anniversary of John Coltrane's album, A Love Supreme. Here is a critical engagement of various parts of A Love Supreme by UC-Berkeley professor and author Dr. Scott Saul. The excerpt is taken from his award winning book Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Saul provides a penetrating analysis of the deep spirituality embedded in Coltrane's iconic album, supported by a sharp musical ...

Album Review

Kenny Wheeler: Songs for Quintet

Read "Songs for Quintet" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 27, 2015

In the end, time--as is its wont--caught up with Kenny Wheeler, the much-loved Canadian-born trumpeter/flugelhornist and composer who made England his home for over sixty years. Happily, he was able to hear the results of the two-day Abbey Road sessions that produced, Songs for Quintet before he passed away last September 18. These Wheeler originals reveal the inevitable fragility that had crept into Wheeler's delivery--even since the remarkable Mirrors (Edition Records, 2013)--due to declining health but just as clearly emphasize ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Johnny Griffin: A Blowin' Session – Blue Note 1559

by Marc Davis
January 27, 2015

Sometimes dumb luck makes all the difference. That's the case with Johnny Griffin's A Blowin' Session. If you're a sax fan, this one's for you--not one, not two, but three red-hot tenors, plus one scorching trumpet, and the legendary Art Blakey smashing the drums behind them. Three tenors? How did that happen? Pure serendipity. Johnny Griffin, the young, new, super-fast saxman, was on his way to record at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey one ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith: The Great Lakes Suites

Read "The Great Lakes Suites" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
January 27, 2015

The intrepid composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith's creative energy continues unabated after a career spanning over four decades. His artistry has crystalized and matured without losing its progressive edge and The Great Lakes Suites is the fruit of this sophisticated ingenuity. For these six imaginative pieces, inspired by the bodies of water of the title, Smith has brought together three of the most original improvisers in a perfect and sublime balance of bold spontaneity and intuitive discipline. ...

Rediscovery

Piacentini-Bonati-McCandless-Moreno: Circles

by John Kelman
January 27, 2015

Piacentini-Bonati-McCandless-Moreno CirclesNueva1991 Today's Rediscovery will be a challenge for most; few will have heard of the record, and of those that have, even fewer will actually own it. Circles' biggest draw may be Paul McCandless--the reed and woodwind multi-instrumentalist who has, with Ralph Towner and Glen Moore, performed with the genre-busting Oregon since its inception 45 years ago. But the balance of the album's quartet--a trio of Italian musicians including keyboardist Mario Piacentini, bassist Roberto ...

Album Review

De Beren Gieren & Susana Santos Silva: The Detour Fish - Live In Ljubljana

Read "The Detour Fish - Live In Ljubljana" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 27, 2015

Youthful concepts and treatments are highlighted on this live set, where the award-winning Belgian piano trio De Beren Gieren invites burgeoning Portuguese trumpeter, improviser Susana Santos Silva to join the band for this largely captivating performance at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival in Slovenia. The musicians' collective synergy becomes apparent rather quickly. Their inventive faculties are propagated via budding, minimalist phrasings and rolling wave-like rhythmic progressions, as the free form improvisational element is a recurring process. And when considering the outside ...

Album Review

New Jazz Orchestra: Camden '70

Read "Camden '70" reviewed by Duncan Heining

by Duncan Heining
January 27, 2015

Colosseum toured with theNew Jazz Orchestra in 1970 but this is the first time that any records of that tour have surfaced. Jon Hiseman, Dick Heckstall-Smith and Tony Reeves featured in both bands. The New Jazz Orchestra recorded so little, that anything new is welcome. That it should be this good is an embarrassment of riches. True the sound is far from perfect, occasionally the ensembles seem a little ragged (Monitors! What monitors?) and some of the woodwind solos are ...