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

Joan Chamorro and Andrea Motis: Feeling Good

Read "Feeling Good" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
September 17, 2014

Feeling Good is well named: the feelgood vibe is strong and the love of music that reaches out from this album is pretty much guaranteed to leave listeners with a similarly good feeling. It's the second album from Joan Chamorro--bassist, saxophonist and director of Barcelona's Sant Andreu Jazz Band--and the band's star member, the teenage singer and instrumentalist Andrea Motis. Chamorro's name may come first, but it's Motis' personality that shines through most strongly on Feeling Good. Chamorro ...

Album Review

Steve Olson: Conversations

Read "Conversations" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
September 17, 2014

For his first recording as a leader, drummer/percussionist Steve Olson asked six of his friends to engage in completely unrehearsed and improvised duo “conversations." Olson states in the notes that in his opinion, “the best music has an element of dialogue in it, both between the musicians, and between the players and the listener who is hearing and reacting emotionally." The result of these encounters are fifteen tracks which strongly support his stance from both viewpoints, ...

One LP

Kenny Burrell: Duke Ellington, The Great Paris Concert

by William Ellis
September 17, 2014

Kenny Burrell: University of California, Los Angeles, 7th May 2013 The record the maestro recorded in Paris in 1963; there are many great things on this recording. One that I particularly like—it's one of my favorite pieces in all of Ellingtonia and all music—is “Tone Parallel To Harlem," known as “Harlem Suite." This was commissioned in 1950 by Arturo Toscanini of The NBC Symphony Orchestra of New York. Duke Ellington at that point was pretty popular ...

Album Review

Elizabeth Shepherd: Signal

Read "Signal" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
September 16, 2014

Montreal-based singer Elizabeth Shepherd gently stirs jazz with an underground pop aesthetic in Signal. Similar to the fresh styles of contemporaries such as Esperanza Spalding and Gretchen Parlato, Shepherd's appeal is heard in her multifaceted gifts as a songwriter, musician, and composer; attributes which garnered her a Juno Award nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album for her 2012 release Rewind (Linus Entertainment). Signal takes a soulful groove-centric stance with tight rhythmic hooks and beats that would fit ...

Multiple Reviews

Kyle Shepherd: Where Dream States Meet Reality

by Dan Bilawsky
September 16, 2014

The Standard Bank Young Artist Awards program has been shining a light on some of the best and brightest South African up-and-comers in music, drama, dance, film, and other art forms since 1984. Almost from the start, and for the two decades that followed, music was simply represented with one umbrella category when these awards were given out, but jazz finally earned its own place at the table in 2006. Since that time, rising stars like drummer Kesivan Naidoo, pianist ...

My Blue Note Obsession

Jutta Hipp at the Hickory House, Vol. 2 – Blue Note 1516

by Marc Davis
September 16, 2014

Raise your hand if you've never heard of Jutta Hipp. Yeah, me either. And yet, there she is, brooding and shadowy on the cover of her first Blue Note album. Yes, she--a female rarity in the almost-all-male world of 1950s Blue Note. And not American, either. Like Becks and Volkswagen, Jutta Hipp is a German import, but unlike Volkswagen, Hipp is not so very different from her male American counterparts. First, a word about finding Jutta ...

Album Review

Emil Strandberg: More music for trumpet, guitar and bass

Read "More music for trumpet, guitar and bass" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
September 16, 2014

Swedish trumpeter Emil Strandberg continues to explore the format of an intimate, acoustic trio. He began in 2012 with a self-titled trio of double bassist Pär-Ola Landin and drummer Sebastian Voegler (Self Produced, 2012) that covered standards, continued in 2013 with pianist Sten Sandell and double bassist Patric Thorman in It Is Night and I am Lost (found You Recordings, 2013), a set of free improvisations, and again in the same year with a Ola-Landin and guitarist David Stackenäs in ...

Album Review

The Cellar and Point: The Cellar and Point: Ambit

Read "The Cellar and Point: Ambit" reviewed by Paul Naser

by Paul Naser
September 16, 2014

The unique atmosphere of The Cellar and Point's newest record Ambit (Cuneiform, 2014) is difficult to pin down in words, let alone to classify as a particular genre. Drummer Joe Branciforte and guitarist Chris Botta's brainchild, the result of years of absorbing influences as diverse as the Wu Tang Clan and Anton Webern, is an intriguing mix of contemporary straight-eighth, mixed-meter grooves and textural, atmospheric harmonies and accompaniment, with some electric guitar mixed in for good measure. Branciforte ...

Interview

Avishai Cohen: From Darkness, a new trio studio album

by Marta Ramon
September 15, 2014

Avishai Cohen is prolific in music and words, a creative volcano who finds his raison d'être melting with the heart of his wooden instrument. Cohen, who arrived at the forefront of the jazz scene being part of the Chick Corea Sextet “Origin" (from 1996 to 2003), has developed a unique voice and personality as a bassist, but also as a composer and singer. Internationally renowned because of his Trio, accompanied by the pianist Shai Maestro and the drummer Mark Guiliana, ...

Live Review

Salif Keita at Yoshi's San Francisco

by Harry S. Pariser
September 15, 2014

Salif KeitaYoshi'sSan Francisco, CA September 7, 2014 Any opportunity to see Salif Keita, the 65-year-old “Golden Voice of Africa" is a special occasion indeed. Keita, a 40-year-plus veteran of the music scene, is one of Africa's top musical stars, one who travels all over the world. He sings in Malinké, a dialect of the Manding group of languages--prevalent but not predominant in many West African nations including Mali, Guinea, Senegal and the ...