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.

Rediscovery

Oregon: In Performance

by John Kelman
December 29, 2014

Oregon In Performance Elektra 1980 Sometimes it's a great experience to hear a live recording where you were actually at the show and can recall some of its most exhilarating moments. In the case of today's Rediscovery, Oregon's In Performance, I was at only one of the dates from which this original double-LP (reissued on a single CD by Wounded Bird in 2003) was culled--Montreal, which was recorded along with shows in Quebec City and ...

Book Review

Neil Young: Special Deluxe A Memoir of Life & Cars

by Doug Collette
December 28, 2014

Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars Neil Young 384 Pages ISBN: # 0399172084 Blue Rider Press 2014 It's hard to believe Special Deluxe is written by the same man who wrote Waging Heavy Peace (Blue Rider Press, 2012). Neil Young sounded so selectively obsessive on that glibly titled and not so well-edited autobiography, his focused and conversational writing here, from the very preface on, is the proverbial breath of ...

Album Review

Rob Mazurek and Black Cube SP: Return the Tides: Ascension Suite and Holy Ghost

Read "Return the Tides: Ascension Suite and Holy Ghost" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 28, 2014

Cornetist and electronics ace Rob Mazurek leads several prominent bands. Yet Return The Tides projects special significance since the album by his Black Cube SP unit was recorded in Brazil two-weeks after his mother passed away. In the album notes, his earnest and spiritually composed eulogy may have provided an added boost to the ensemble' unrelenting force field. At times, the program's shadowy audio sound may be the output of the recording studio's limitations or was intentional, because ...

Rediscovery

Hatfield and The North: The Rotter's Club

by John Kelman
December 28, 2014

Hatfield and The North The Rotter's Club Esoteric Recordings 2009 (1975) Today's Rediscovery is a bit of a lie, because Hatfield and the North's second album, The Rotter's Club, is rarely far from some kind of media player for long. A group that never received the acclaim it deserved back in the day, the core group of keyboardist Dave Stewart, guitarist Phil Miller, bassist/vocalist Richard Sinclair and drummer Pip Pyle were accompanied, at least ...

Album Review

Shawn Maxwell's Alliance: Bridge

by Dan Bilawsky
December 27, 2014

The eponymous debut from Shawn Maxwell's Alliance was a giant step forward for the saxophonist/composer; his previous albums all had musical merit, but all were built with limited color schemes, hewing, for the most part, to jazz norms. With Shawn Maxwell's Alliance (Chicago Sessions, 2014), Maxwell stepped way outside the box, writing music for a dectet that was anything but formulaic or commonplace. Now, less than a year later, Shawn Maxwell's Alliance returns with the shorter, but no less intriguing, ...

Book Review

School For Cool

by David A. Orthmann
December 27, 2014

School For Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity Eitan Y. Wilf 268 pages ISBN: #978-0-226-12519-0 The University of Chicago Press 2014 Anthropologist/trumpeter Eitan Y. Wilf's School for Cool is an ethnographic study of institutionalized creativity in two highly regarded academic jazz programs: the Berklee College of Music and the New School. Influenced by the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and political science, as well as by interviews ...

Album Review

Yoni Kretzmer: This Is Our Very First Album Together

Read "This Is Our Very First Album Together" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 27, 2014

Distinguished Israeli improvising, avant-jazz saxophonist Yoni Kretzmer has several albums to his credit with fellow countrymen and American notables, such as drummers Mike Pride, Andrew Drury and bassist Jason Ajemian. Since he's recently moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., the artist ingratiates his faculties into the region's intensely fertile improvising scene, where almost anything goes when the studio tapes roll. The album moniker is rather humorously integrated into the actual song titles on a per-track basis, but the trio's focus ...

Album Review

Lyn Stanley: Potions: From the ‘50s

Read "Potions: From the ‘50s" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
December 27, 2014

We Baby Boomers are a persnickety bunch. We revel in our nostalgia while keeping a jaundiced eye on current trends and how derivative they are compared with those we experienced when they were really new. Critics dismiss this nostalgia as wasted pathos, pining away for what can never be again. That is missing the point. Memory and reminiscence are powerful comforts much like a cat's purr. They help us recall and allow us to put the past into perspective in ...

Book Review

Il Suono Del Nord: La Norvegia protagonista della scena jazz europea

by Ian Patterson
December 27, 2014

Il Suono Del Nord: La Norvegia protagonista della scena jazz euorpea Luca Vitali 320 pages ISBN:9788886784979 Auditorium Edizioni 2014 Inspite of having a population of only five million inhabitants, Norway, contests author Luca Vitali, produces and consumes more jazz than almost any other country in Europe. The growth of jazz festivals, jazz courses and a seemingly never-ending supply of strikingly original groups and individual voices has, with generous government funding for the ...

Rediscovery

Bill Frisell: This Land

by John Kelman
December 27, 2014

Bill Frisell This Land Elektra Nonesuch 1994 Today's Rediscovery? This Land, guitarist Bill Frisell's landmark 1994 album with Don Byron, Curtis Fowlkes, Billy Drewes, Kermit Driscoll & Joey Baron. Coming on the heels of 1993's eclectic covers record Have a Little Faith (Elektra Nonesuch), This Land is as much about Frisell the writer of distinctly American music—informed in equal parts by Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Julius Hemphill and Robert Johnson, all filtered through the ...