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

Giovanni di Domenico - Alexandra Grimal: Chergui

Read "Chergui" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 18, 2015

These duets by like-minded improvisers, Giovanni di Domenico (piano) and Alexandra Grimal (saxophones) were recorded over two-nights at a Paris theater, radiating classical recital hall-like sonic characteristics. Overall, these two-discs spotlight the artists' symmetrical encounters and intuitive dialogues, spanning core improvisational aspects, nouveau classical applications and jazzy choruses. Nonetheless, the musicians dig deep while interrogating each other's spur of the moment thoughts and supplying a collection of glistening contrasts, whether sublime or when they raise the energy level.

Album Review

Rudresh Mahanthappa: Bird Calls

Read "Bird Calls" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
January 17, 2015

Charlie Parker has been deified, his methods have been codified, and his recordings have been analyzed ad infinitum. Six decades have passed since he left this realm, yet he remains the lodestar for a significant portion of the jazz community, from the aspiring to the elite, and his influence hasn't waned one bit. Given all of that, it's astonishing to realize that so few players have taken chances by looking beyond the songs, the music theory, the recordings, and the ...

Film Review

Eric Clapton: Planes Trains and Eric

by Doug Collette
January 17, 2015

Eric Clapton Planes Trainsand Eric Eagle Vision 2014 Planes Trains and Eric represents a great concept brought to fruition. To follow Eric Clapton on tour and glean insight into the experience(s) on and off the stage is illuminating by definition, especially insofar that this man, the archetypal guitar hero, has the advantage of long-term perspective both wide and deep on the phenomenon of touring in a band. And in a brief interview segment, the main ...

Album Review

The Hollywood Blues Destroyers: Singles Drinking Doubles

Read "Singles Drinking Doubles" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
January 17, 2015

Avoid the intended seduction of the sexy and dangerous collective called The Hollywood Blues Destroyers for the Oz behind the curtain with his merry band of friends is one Fred Steven “Skip" Heller. AllMusic's Jana Pendragon calls Heller, “America's most confusing country singer." Whatever Heller might be, he is a defender of American Music...all of it. For Heller, music is mot the disposable commodity it has become since 2000. It remains that spiritual idea given life by those special people ...

Film Review

Bob Marley: Uprising Live!

by Doug Collette
January 17, 2015

Bob Marley Uprising Live! Eagle Vision 2014 Given Bob Marley's status as a cultural icon, it only makes sense that it's impossible not to engage in the truisms of 'what if' and/or 'if only' watching Uprising Live! By the time of his untimely death from cancer in May of 1981, the Jamaican musician had achieved almost as much politically as artistically in his relatively short career span. Marley was already ill and under ...

Album Review

William Hooker & Liudas Mockūnas: Live at Vilnius Jazz Festival

Read "Live at Vilnius Jazz Festival" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
January 17, 2015

Veteran drummer William Hooker continues to expand his varied discography on the No Business imprint, with the addition of Live At Vilnius Jazz Festival. Like Crossing Points (2011) with the late reedman Thomas Chapin, it's a meeting with a resourceful saxophonist -this time Liudas Mockūnas, a co-founder of the label. But unlike the former encounter, on this occasion Hooker avoids the all out aural assault which tested Chapin to the limits, settling instead for power exercised with restraint and precision. ...

Book Review

On Tour With Leonard Cohen

by Nenad Georgievski
January 17, 2015

On Tour With Leonard Cohen Sharon Robinson 221 pages ISBN: 1576877256 PowerHouse Books 2014 When singer and poet Leonard Cohen got back on the road in 2008 after years of absence and seclusion in a Zen monastery beset by management and financial woes, his comeback was universally greeted by audiences worldwide. Despite the age when most musicians of his generation are retired or about to it seems that the return to stage ...

Rediscovery

XTC: Drums and Wires

by John Kelman
January 17, 2015

XTCDrums and WiresPanegyric2014 (1979) Sometimes a little added TLC can make a good album great. I'll admit it: a self-proclaimed prog and jazzhead in the '70s, the emergence of first Punk and then New Wave was the closest I'd come to knowing what it was like to be boiled in oil. Even groups like XTC, that were clearly cut from something, well, more as early as “Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go!)," from its second 1978 ...

Album Review

Mihaly Borbely Quartet: Hungarian Jazz Rhapsody

Read "Hungarian Jazz Rhapsody" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 17, 2015

Hungarian jazz doesn't receive same the level of attention as Western Europe and Scandinavia. Other than acclaimed jazz guitar legends, Gabor Szabo and Attila Zoller, there haven't been many household names within this idiom. Yet the BMC Records label has been a catalyst by producing gifted progressive jazz artists, such as the Dresch Quartet, and here, saxophonist Mihaly Borbely who titles his album and performs Zoller's composition, Hungarian Rhapsody. The quartet bridges the outside realm with modern jazz ...

Record Label Profile

The Sophisticated World of Schema Records

by Jakob Baekgaard
January 16, 2015

Schema records was founded in the beginning of 1997 by Luciano Cantone and Davide Rosa. The label's aesthetic profile is described in the following way: “Although the roots of the label are mainly influenced by jazz and bossa nova, Schema has an appeal for all kinds of music and embraces true experimentation since it's the real knowledge of our past mixed with today's technologies that makes the true basis of music making." The result is music that ...