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

Jax Jazz Collective: Lotus Blossom: The Music of Billy Strayhorn

Read "Lotus Blossom: The Music of Billy Strayhorn" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 1, 2014

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)--Americas's finest bandleader, America's finest composer--released his own tribute to Billy Strayhorn, his partner in music and tune smithing. It was called ...And His Mother Called Him Bill (RCA, 1967). Ellington and Strayhorn's music was so intertwined that the Duke's less that fanatic fans might think that “Lush Life," “Take the A Train" and “Lotus Blossom" are Ellington tunes. But those classics, and many more, came from the prolific and always elegant pen of Strayhorn. Now ...

Mr. P.C.'s Guide to Jazz Etiquette and Bandstand Decorum

October 2014

by Mr. P.C.
October 1, 2014

Dear Mr. P.C.: I was playing piano in a building lobby where I perform regularly. A woman walked past the piano and discreetly left something at the far end (it's a grand piano). When I finished the song, I walked around the piano to see what she'd left. Turned out it was her trash! I'm a little old and out of touch so I'm wondering: Is that okay nowadays? --Don't Understand Selfish Treatment ...

Album Review

Frank Kimbrough: Quartet

by Dan Bilawsky
October 1, 2014

The majority of pianist Frank Kimbrough's albums have focused on the piano trio format, but he's certainly willing to try other things; he made that clear by recording in a duo with vibraphonist Joe Locke on more than one occasion, putting together a bass-less quartet for Noumena (Soul Note, 2000), and going it alone on Air (Palmetto, 2007). Now, with the plainly-titled Quartet, Kimbrough does it again. This time he's at the helm of a foursome that includes a pair ...

Extended Analysis

Charles Lloyd: Manhattan Stories

by Dan Bilawsky
October 1, 2014

Manhattan Stories is a trip back in time, a journey to a long gone and long-missed era. It's a window into the great Charles Lloyd's art at a period of transition. The shows presented on this beautifully packaged two-disc set--one recorded at the infamous Slugs' Saloon in the summer of 1965, the other recorded at Judson Hall in September of the same year--took place shortly after Lloyd left the employ of Cannonball Adderley and before he became a cross-over sensation ...

Album Review

Steve Heckman Quintet: Search for Peace

Read "Search for Peace" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
October 1, 2014

Steve Heckman says he was inspired to play the tenor saxophone after hearing John Coltrane, especially Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Luckily, Heckman did not follow his mentor completely off the deep end but remained instead true to his bop-bred roots while developing a singular voice of his own on the tenor. On Search for Peace (a title Coltrane would no doubt have endorsed), San Francisco-based Heckman's fourth album as leader, Trane's impact is never far away but has been tempered ...

Multiple Reviews

Horace Tapscott: The Tapscott Sessions, Volumes 1-8

by Frank Rubolino
October 1, 2014

Horace Tapscott began his musical career as a trombonist, and during the early part of the 1950s played in the Gerald Wilson big band. It wasn't until his US Army tour of duty in the late 1950s that he studied piano. He subsequently gave up the trombone due to an automobile accident while on tour with Lionel Hampton and settled in 1961 in Los Angeles to concentrate on piano. Tapscott came to an obscure form of prominence in that period ...

Album Review

Louis Sclavis Quartet: Silk and Salt Melodies

Read "Silk and Salt Melodies" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
September 30, 2014

After reinventing himself with a completely revamped ensemble on Sources (ECM, 2012), reed multi-instrumentalist Louis Sclavis expands the purviews and possibilities of his Atlas Trio by adding percussionist Keyvan Chemirani to the mix for Silk and Salt Melodies. Sclavis has, in his 33-year career as a leader--and since coming to ECM Records in 1991 with the recording of Rouge (1992)--made a life's work of regular reinvention, both contextually in terms of lineup and stylistically through a broad cross-section of projects ...

Live Review

Live From Birmingham: The Pedigree Jazz Band, Tony Bennett, The Fat Chops Big Band

by Martin Longley
September 30, 2014

The Pedigree Jazz Band Solihull British Legion September 7, 2014 It's a curious sensation when tributes are paid to revivals of revivals. Down the decades since the original jazz repertoire was established in the 1920s, '30s, and even earlier, there have been a multitude of responses, counter-responses, exhumations and celebrations. The Pedigree Jazz Band is currently presenting A Tribute to Trad Jazz, a show that's culled from their two albums of the same ...

Album Review

Adam Meckler Orchestra: When The Clouds Look Like This

Read "When The Clouds Look Like This" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
September 30, 2014

The image that adorns the cover of When The Clouds Look Like This--three weathered valves rising from the mist, a finger button inexplicably missing from the middle valve--is something of a mystery. Is it a riddle? A metaphor of some sort? Or is it simply an image that appealed to these musicians? Only those involved with the project can answer those questions, but the cover is certainly thought provoking, just like the music that sits beneath it. ...

Extended Analysis

Marcin Wasilewski Trio w/ Joakim Milder: Spark of Life

by John Kelman
September 30, 2014

What do you do when you've released three albums as a trio (more, if you include albums released in Poland, prior to coming to the label) for a producer who traditionally seems to like shaking things up after that magic number? For Polish pianist Marcin Wasilewski and his longstanding trio--first coming together in their teens, they've been together more than two decades, and first recorded for ECM with trumpeter Tomasz Stanko for a triptych of evolutionary albums that began with ...