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

Jason Moran: All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller

Read "All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
October 3, 2014

Jason Moran is an artist who is not afraid to look back while constantly pressing forward. The 2010 MacArthur Fellow is a leading jazz pianist with moments of kinetic energy, agility, and sensitivity, the likes of his one-time teacher, the great Jaki Byard. Whether performing with varied ensembles and musicians, bringing new perspectives as the Artistic Director for Jazz at The Kennedy Center or combining freestyle jazz with live skateboarders in San Francisco, Moran's passion and capacity is having an ...

Album Review

Michelle Lordi: Michelle Lordi Sings

Read "Michelle Lordi Sings" reviewed by Victor L. Schermer

by Victor L. Schermer
October 3, 2014

Michelle Lordi sings in a way that is uncommon today: simple, straightforward, direct, and conveying the emotions in the way we all do: in our voice inflections. No gimmicks. This is a style that emerged in the swing and cool jazz eras, a strict adherence to the tune that virtually vanished as singers began to add embellishments, scat, and too often a hysterical emotionality where personality crowded out the melody. In particular, Lordi owes something special to Chet Baker and ...

Live Review

Punkt Festival 2014

by Henning Bolte
October 3, 2014

Punkt Festival Kristiansand, Norway September, 4-6, 2014 Kristiansand, home of the Annual Punkt Festival for the past decade, is a municipality situated on the southernmost point of Norway at the Skagerrag strait. It has a population of 86,000 (the greater urban area, 155,000) and is the county capital of Vest- Agder. Crystallization of new concepts and development often take place and are given a push from the periphery, with Punkt a good and prominent ...

Album Review

Avishai Cohen - Trumpet: Dark Nights

Read "Dark Nights" reviewed by Franz A. Matzner

by Franz A. Matzner
October 2, 2014

From the brooding opening title track to the closing Chet Baker homage, “I Fall in Love Too Easily," Dark Nights unapologetically embraces the heart of jazz. Every aspect of the album--from the cover photo, to Cohen's precise trumpet inflections, to the trio's dedication to immediacy and collective improvisation (and even the album's forays into electronic affects)--is saturated with the emblematic textures, rhythms, and imagery of jazz. This is achieved with professionalism, creativity, and skill, without a wit of irony or ...

Interview

Kris Bowers: A Deeper Look into Heroes + Misfits

by K. Shackelford
October 2, 2014

Kris Bowers is a pristine example of what the term prodigy embodies. In 2011, at the tender age of 22, he became the winner of the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. Bowers also received an astute musical education at Julliard School of Music in New York--receiving a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree in Film Scoring and Jazz Performance before reaching the age of 25. Yet Bowers' style is not limited to traditional jazz. It is also shaped by ...

Album Review

Paragon: Cerca

by Bruce Lindsay
October 2, 2014

It's been a decade since Anglo-German quartet Paragon formed. Cerca, recorded on an unspecified two days in Cologne, is the band's third release. The sax and Rhodes frontline, backed up by Matthias Nowak's bass and Jon Scott's drums, creates an elegant repertoire of tunes that draws on influences as diverse as '60s spiritual jazz and hip-hop grooves. Although the band's been around for ten years, Paragon's members can still be classed as part of the younger generation of ...

What is Jazz?

A Look Back At Robert Glasper's Enoch's "Inaugural" Meditation

by K. Shackelford
October 2, 2014

One of the most powerful jazz documentation of a Presidential Inauguration was a YouTube presentation of Robert Glasper's “Enoch's Meditation," a piece from his 2005 album entitled Canvas. Glasper, a Blue Note artist and Grammy Award winning jazz piano star, has received critical acclaim for his trio style that weaves together a tapestry of diverse musical genres from rock, hip hop, gospel to even country, staying within the jazz aesthetic in a way that is mind-blowing. Through the ...

Album Review

Michael Anthony Natural Instincts Trio: Nostalgia

Read "Nostalgia" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 2, 2014

Guitarist Michael Anthony, whose warm salute to mentor and friend Howard Roberts, Recollections, was reviewed here in June, recorded another tribute album seven years earlier (2007), this one dedicated to another longtime friend and colleague, the late Al Viola, who passed away in February of that year. Anthony says he was fortunate to have met Roberts and Viola during his formative years on the West Coast, forming friendships that helped point him toward a long and successful career as a ...

Extended Analysis

Vinnie Sperrazza: Apocryphal

by Dave Wayne
October 2, 2014

An understated but highly-skilled and insanely versatile drummer in the vein of Kenny Wolleson, Jeff Hirshfield, and Paul Motian, Vinnie Sperrazza has been turning up on all sorts of interesting recordings over the past half-decade or so. Co-leader of 40Twenty with Jacob Sacks, Jacob Garchik, and Dave Ambrosio, Sperrazza is also in a trio with Sacks and bassist Masa Kamaguchi, and is one fourth of Hush Point; a brainy collaboration with veteran trumpeter John McNeil and alto saxophonist Jeremy Udden. ...

Album Review

Sketches: Volume 2

Read "Volume 2" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
October 2, 2014

Same musicians, same winning concept, great new songs: that's what awaits on the second volume of music from the quintet collective known as Sketches. This Brooklyn-based outfit works a unique angle with its own brand of cross-pollinated composition, whereby one musician brings in a tidbit of music that serves as the seed for a piece from the pen of another band member. It's a form of collaborative writing that allows both parties to work alone together.