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

Chris Dundas / Arild Andersen / Bendik Hofseth / Patrice Heral: Oslo Odyssey

Read "Oslo Odyssey" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
September 19, 2014

What's up with Oslo, Norway? Two of the outstanding recordings by of 2014 have come out of the city: pianist Paul Bley's Play Blue (ECM Records), and now Los Angeles-based pianist Chris Dundas' Oslo Odyssey (BLM Records). Dundas' profile isn't exactly soaring through the stars. He has one previous recording as a leader to his name, a very good mainstream affair from the year 2000, featuring saxophonist Bob Sheppard. What Oslo Odyssey represents for Dundas is something of ...

Album Review

Tunto: Huvi

by Anthony Shaw
September 19, 2014

Tunto is a band providing what its Finnish name can be translated into -'a sense of feeling.' Although described disparagingly in one reviewer as veering towards New Age, this is music for a variety of moods. This is reflected in the song titles, on this their fourth to album to date, ranging from Stalking Music via Lice Picking Music to Sandcastle Music! The compositions are also again all by the driving force of the combo (on this ...

Album Review

Ernie Watts: A Simple Truth

Read "A Simple Truth" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
September 19, 2014

After sixteen albums as leader, two-time Grammy-Award-winning saxophonist Ernie Watts presents a concept album, a journey of sorts, a musical description of a “jazz day" beginning with a morning piece and ending with an evening song in declaration of A Simple Truth. Recorded in Cologne, Germany, with his touring European quartet--together for over fifteen years--Watts imagines the music as being “basics that connects people, going right past language, ethnicity, culture and even history, into direct feeling," which is the simple ...

Album Review

Jason Ajemian: Folklords

Read "Folklords" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
September 18, 2014

Folklords is one of the most adventurous albums to be issued by Delmark Records since Levels and Degrees of Light, the auspicious recording debut of pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams in 1967. Bassist Jason Ajemian's second effort for the venerable label, following 2008's The Art of Dying, conceptually surpasses his prior work by leaps and bounds. It shares significant similarities with Abrams' premiere, including the use of spoken word and expansive dynamics that veer from impressionistic balladry to rhapsodic ...

The Vinyl Post

Everything Old is Blue Again: Hank Mobley, McCoy Tyner, Grant Green and Horace Silver

by C. Andrew Hovan
September 18, 2014

If you are a Blue Note fan, you undoubtedly know that over the course of their 75th anniversary year Blue Note has been reissuing important titles from the catalog at a rate of about five albums per month. It is really a fast-paced program that will appeal to folks on many levels. Some might be starting out and looking for their first copies of these iconic albums, while more seasoned collectors might be looking to fill in gaps in their ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Endre Huszar

by AAJ Staff
September 18, 2014

Meet Endre Huszar: “Versatility" is probably the word that would describe best Endre Huszár's career: beside being a musician/composer, he is also known as a journalist and media expert. While playing with many leading Hungarian acts in a wide range of genres from pop, alternative rock to jazz and world music, he formed his jazz fusion project, the 9:30 Collective in 1995. Meanwhile, he also contributed to other projects as a sound engineer and arranger and composed music for ...

Album Review

Howard McGhee: Howard McGhee West Coast 1945-1947

Read "Howard McGhee West Coast 1945-1947" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
September 18, 2014

Bebop trumpet pioneer Howard McGhee has undergone a lengthy process of rediscovery and reassessment since his death in 1987. A one-time Downbeat Poll Winner (1947), it's probably not much of an exaggeration to say he had been largely forgotten, even by trumpet players. Yet Gunther Schuller (1989) and Scott DeVeaux (1997) soon published searching and sophisticated analyses of his contribution and playing. More recently, trumpet player Brian Lynch offers a terrific appreciation of McGhee in his “Unsung Heros of Jazz ...

Album Review

Afro Bop Alliance: Angel Eyes

Read "Angel Eyes" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
September 18, 2014

Latin Grammy Award-winning group Afro Bop Alliance lend their infectious hard-driving and percussive Latin-tinged sound to Angel Eyes, the group's fifth album staking one more claim for yet another future Latin Grammy nod. Known for their percolating percussion as well as dipping into straight ahead jazz, this Washington D.C. based octet lets the rumba rumble, the cha-cha churn and the samba simmer on another exciting energizing album of note. Led by drummer/percussionist and Afro Bop Alliance founder Joe McCarthy, the ...

Album Review

Blue-Eyed Hawk: Under The Moon

Read "Under The Moon" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
September 17, 2014

London-based quartet Blue-Eyed Hawk's debut recording has benefited from three years of gigging and the slow stewing of ideas. Collectively, singer Lauren Kinsella, trumpeter Laura Jurd, guitarist Alex Roth and drummer Corrie Dick sounds like the finished article, which whets the appetite for future chapters. With writing duties spread evenly, the quartet soars over wide stylistic terrain, from susurrus, folksy balladry and sophisticated pop to psychadelic rock and punkish struts. It all blends wonderfully, like a heady ...

Interview

Wil Blades: Groooooovin'

by R.J. DeLuke
September 17, 2014

"I love the blues," says Wil Blades, a Hammond B3 whiz who didn't come to the instrument until he left his hometown of Chicago and was going to college in California. He doesn't remember specific instances of being struck by a blues thunderbolt, but “I remember hearing it. It's part of the feeling I get when I play music." He started on drums at a young age and turned to guitar as a teenager--"I had those rock star ...