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

Franz Hautzinger / Julo Fujak / Zsolt Sörés: Live in Brussels

Read "Live in Brussels" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 6, 2014

This meeting of three distinct European sound sculptors--Austrian Franz Hautzinger on quarter-tone trumpet, Slovakian Julo Fujak on prepared piano, bowed bass guitar and objects, and Hungarian Zsolt Sörés on viola and electronics--was recorded live at Studio Odeon 120 in Brussels in November 2011. It features this occasional trio searching for fresh, intuitive codes of making music. The highly original manners of producing and shaping sounds of these three musicians and their different conceptions of time, space ...

Album Review

Doc Stewart Big Band Resuscitation: Code Blue!

Read "Code Blue!" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 5, 2014

"Doc" is much more than a nickname to Chris Stewart: it's a profession. And straight-ahead jazz is far more than a pastime: it's a passion. For the past sixteen years, Doc Stewart's day gig has been ER physician at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Scottsdale, AZ. Long before that, however, Stewart was a working musician who played alto sax with a number of big bands including those led by Tom Kubis, Ladd McIntosh, Matt Catingub, Louie Bellson, Toshiko Akiyoshi / ...

Interview

Maud Hixson: Studying Scores and Moving Forward

by David Bittinger
June 5, 2014

Maud Hixson has built an accomplished career as a performer and recording artist out of unlikely circumstances. She grew up far from the capitals of jazz and vocal music, in the Twin Cities area. Doris Day's performance in the Ruth Etting biopic “Love Me Or Leave Me" served as a primary inspiration for a young Maud to become a performer. In her twenties, waiting tables at a diner, she met another future jazz singer, Nichola Miller. With no glamour and ...

Live Review

Live From Bilston, England: Coco Montoya, Terry Reid & BJ Cole

by Martin Longley
June 5, 2014

Coco Montoya The Robin 2 May 18, 2014 A touch of the sniffles didn't prevent California bluesman Coco Montoya from delivering a sterling set, easing out around 90 minutes of diversely faceted material. This southpaw singer-guitarist implied that most of his four-piece band had been slumping under the weight of a bad infection. Not so good for a touring situation, but we wouldn't have noticed if Montoya hadn't given us a health alert. ...

Album Review

Steve Khan: Subtext

by Dan Bilawsky
June 5, 2014

Guitarist Steve Khan's latter day work has been increasingly focused on Latin jazz fusion of various shapes, so the scope and direction of Subtext should come as no surprise to his longtime followers. This album arrives three years after Parting Shot (Tone Center, 2011) and runs along similar lines. That one was an originals-heavy, percussively-coated session that dipped into the songbooks of Thelonious Monk ("Bye-Ya") and Ornette Coleman ("Blues Connotation" and “Chronology"); this one is a mostly covers companion piece ...

Extended Analysis

JC Sanford Orchestra: Views from the Inside

by Dan Bilawsky
June 5, 2014

Views From The Inside is a study in contrasts and opposing forces. It's a work of compression and expansion, sonic saturation and sparsity, and consonance and dissonance. It's music that's alternately grandiloquent and direct, pointing to a place where high art and simple emotional expression aren't at odds with one another. In short, it's everything that's glorious and right about the state of the large ensemble in jazz. JC Sanford, the composer-conductor-trombonist at the helm of this ...

Album Review

Western Michigan University Jazz Orchestra: Travel Notes

Read "Travel Notes" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
June 5, 2014

Travel Notes, the seventh album by the Western Michigan University Jazz Orchestra, is much like the first half-dozen: big-band jazz whose design and performance are as consistently strong and artistic as one can envision at any level. Tom Knific, WMU's director of Jazz Studies since 2000, has a keen ear for engaging songs, one of which is his own sunny composition, “That Day in May," sandwiched nicely between a pair of themes by bassist John Clayton-- the tasteful, well-grooved opener, ...

Album Review

Michael Musillami Trio: Pride

by Karl Ackermann
June 5, 2014

With ten albums as a leader in his portfolio, guitarist and composer, Michael Musillami remains disproportionately under the radar in the public domain. Working in formats from duo to octet and inspired by classic artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Musillami has a gifted touch for arranging the traditional and highly improvisational together in accessible ways. Pride features Musillami's decade-long established trio of bassist Joe Fonda and drummer George Schuller, a rhythm section made for this kind of versatility.

Album Review

Jason Roebke: Combination

Read "Combination" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 5, 2014

Chicagoan double bassist Jason Roebke has developed a distinct sound of his own, intensely physical, audacious and highly rhythmical. He leads and plays in bands on both sides of the Atlantic, including the trans-Atlantic The Whammies dedicated to the music of Steve Lacy, and drummer Mike Reed's People, Places and Things. Roebke's debut recording of his new quartet Combination introduces an alien sonic variable into the well-tested equation of the post-bop, free jazz trio. Roebke, who ...

Live Review

Martin Wind Quartet at Kitano

by Victor L. Schermer
June 4, 2014

Martin Wind Quartet Jazz at Kitano New York, NY May 31, 2014 It was a clear, warm late spring evening in Manhattan, and Jazz at Kitano, by now a familiar part of the New York nightclub scene, provided a perfect setting for a CD release event, a place with great acoustics, ambience, menu, and a coterie of dedicated fans. Bassist Martin Wind had recently come out with an album dedicated to legendary pianist Bill ...