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.

Live Review

TD Ottawa Jazz Festival 2014, Days 1-2

by John Kelman
June 25, 2014

Days 1-2 | Days 4-6 | Days 7- 9 Joey DeFrancesco Trio / Sun Rooms / Harris Eisenstadt Golden StateTD Ottawa Jazz Festival Ottawa, Canada June 20-July 1, 2014 Another year, another TD Ottawa Jazz Festival, except to say so would sound dismissive of a festival that, year after year--now, in 2014, in presenting its 34th edition--has managed to address the challenges of festival programming for a musical genre where the majority of ...

Multiple Reviews

Laurence Crane: Composer of the Year?

by John Eyles
June 25, 2014

Laurence Crane is a contemporary composer who was born in Oxford in 1961. He has said of his music, “I use simple and basic musical objects-- common chords and intervals, arpeggios, drones, cadences, fragments of scales and melodies. The materials may seem familiar, perhaps even rather ordinary, but my aim is to find a fresh beauty in these objects by placing them in new structural and formal contexts." Crane's compositions have frequently been played in concert. Apart from ...

Album Review

Ted Rosenthal Trio: Rhapsody In Gershwin

Read "Rhapsody In Gershwin" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
June 25, 2014

The glories of George Gershwin have been well-documented in jazz settings. In fact, many would argue that Gershwin's music has been done to death. So does the world really need another tribute to this iconic tunesmith? In theory, it does not. Supply and demand, and the very nature of saturation, would say that a more-than-sufficient dose of Gershwin has been given to the world, so it's time to move on. However, these principles have never applied to this type of ...

Album Review

Dylan Howe: Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie's Berlin

Read "Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie's Berlin" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
June 25, 2014

Dylan Howe is one of the UK's most versatile drummers--a long-standing member of The Blockheads, part of Wilko Johnson and Roger Daltrey's band on the chart-topping Going Back Home (Chess Records, 2014) and (alongside keyboard player Ross Stanley) part of his father, Steve Howe's, guitar trio. He's also responsible, with Will Butterworth, for a critically-acclaimed duo recording of Igor Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring (Stravinsky--The Rite Of Spring, Motorik Records 2010). On Subterranean: New Designs On Bowie's Berlin Howe ...

Album Review

Horace Silver: The Hard Bop Grandpop

Read "The Hard Bop Grandpop" reviewed by Marc Davis

by Marc Davis
June 25, 2014

With musicians, and artists generally, there's a tendency to think the best work is the earliest. It's usually true. Paul McCartney was never better than when he recorded with the Beatles. Chuck Berry's best work was the early hits like “Johnny B. Goode" and “Roll Over Beethoven." Tom Wolfe hasn't written anything as good as “The Right Stuff" and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." So it is, too, with jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie's seminal work came ...

Album Review

Walt Weiskopf: Overdrive

Read "Overdrive" reviewed by David A. Orthmann

by David A. Orthmann
June 25, 2014

Here's a proposition for anyone who is about to plunk down their hard earned dollars on Steely Dan's Jamalot Ever After Tour. For a mere fraction of the cost of a ticket you can invest in a copy of Overdrive, the recently released set of original music by Walt Weiskopf, the band's longtime tenor saxophonist. A viable alternative to the pleasures of SD's warhorses, the disc has a “greatest hits" vibe of its own. It's a composite of the dozen ...

Album Review

Hélène Prévost: À la plage

Read "À la plage" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 25, 2014

Montreal-based Canadian radio presenter, producer and sound artist Hélène Prévost creates in her debut recording a play within play, made of words and manipulated sounds that blur the distinctions between reality and fiction, real and virtual time. À la plage ("at the beach" in French) has nothing to do with breezy, recreational, summer leisure time but actually is a word play on the word “plage," a track. The ten tracks distill Prévost's great experience of working ...

Album Review

David Binney: Anacapa

by John Kelman
June 24, 2014

Some artists move forward in great leaps and bounds, while others evolve more slowly, over longer periods of time. David Binney is one of those rare musicians who manage to do both. While a sampling of some of his recent albums, such as Bastion of Sanity (2005), Cities and Desire (2006) and Aliso (2010l, all on Criss Cross) paint a picture of the saxophonist as evolutionary, others, like 2009's Third Occasion and 2011's Graylen Epicenter (both on Binney's Mythology Records ...

116

Album Review

Christopher Parker: Full Circle

Read "Full Circle" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
June 24, 2014

Pianist Chris Parker's second CD release on OA2 Records, Full Circle, sounds like an exciting live set full of vigorous life, something that engages the crowd and gets them up out of their seat, dancing. It's a quintet--common enough in jazz--with the uncommon use of violin in the front line beside the saxophone, reeling out unison lines with the horn, or stepping out in sinuous solo slots. John Nastos is the alto sax guy who breaks out the ...

Album Review

Nils Petter Molvær: Switch

Read "Switch" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
June 24, 2014

From his first major recording date almost thirty years ago, Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær has been a unique innovator with a seemingly insatiable appetite for testing new waters. Beginning with Masquarelo's seminal ECM Records debut, Bande à Part (1985), Molvær joined with the already established bassist Arild Andersen and his long-time collaborator, drummer Jon Christensen. Along with Jon Balke on keyboards and saxophonist Tore Brunborg, the quintet represented a Nordic lineup whose individual members continue to make significant contributions ...