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

Sara Gazarek and Josh Nelson at Jazz at Kitano

by Dan Bilawsky
April 23, 2014

Sara Gazarek and Josh Nelson Jazz at Kitano New York, NY April 19, 2014 Some relationships are beyond close, bordering on the sacred. There's the strong bond between husband and wife, the high level of trust between friend and confidant, and, perhaps most interestingly, the intimate connection between singer and pianist. That last pairing may seem out of place and trivial in nature to some, but anybody who's ever encountered such a combination knows ...

Multiple Reviews

Smoke Sessions: A Threesome from Herring, Jackson, & Hazeltine

by C. Andrew Hovan
April 23, 2014

With the launch of their own label at the start of 2014, Smoke Jazz Club widened their circle by committing to tape performances by some of New York's finest musicians and dispersing this music via downloads and discs. A decidedly bare bones operation, the in-house production team has done a great job of capturing the ambiance of the room and everything from mastering to graphic design is dedicated to establishing an identity of quality and craftsmanship. ...

Album Review

Niclas Knudsen: Radio Timbuktu

Read "Radio Timbuktu" reviewed by Jakob Baekgaard

by Jakob Baekgaard
April 23, 2014

Imagine a radio in the middle of a desert playing music that is a mixture of tribal rituals, dusty blues and rock, Afrobeat and New Orleans jazz. This radio exists and it is located on Danish guitarist Niclas Knudsen's album Radio Timbuktu. Many people will know Knudsen from his involvement with the funk group Ibrahim Electric, but Knudsen is a restless musical explorer and this is reflected on an album where he enlists many of his favorite ...

Album Review

Ravi Rajani: Mass Production

Read "Mass Production" reviewed by Roger Farbey

by Roger Farbey
April 23, 2014

Despite the raucous opening rocky bluesy riff of “Weekend Blues" which seems to portend a set dominated by an electric guitar trio with the volume firmly fixed at eleven, beginnings can be deceptive. The second track “Snowball" starts to display some subtleties in composition and execution, especially in the quieter sections. By track three the listener expecting a session of Stratocaster blasters is confounded by Rajani's excellent take on Miles Davis' all-too rarely recorded “Nardis," here re-titled “Sidran" ...

Extended Analysis

Natsuki Tamura: Dragon Nat

by Dave Wayne
April 23, 2014

The instrumentalist begins his career as, essentially, a solo artist. Whether is practicing long tones or scales or drum rudiments, nearly everyone who plays a musical instrument starts out unaccompanied. On the road to mastery, most musicians spend thousands of hours playing alone. In jazz, solo recordings by musicians other than pianists or guitarists are a relatively recent phenomenon, and the prospect of listening to a horn or drum soloist playing unaccompanied for an hour or more may seem daunting, ...

Album Review

Billy Bottle & The Multiple: Unrecorded Beam

Read "Unrecorded Beam" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
April 23, 2014

Multi-instrumentalist, vocalist Billy Bottle is the pianist for renowned big band leader Mike Westbrook and has performed with British progressive rock luminaries. His octet and guest artists incorporate jazz rock and folk with a splash of Indie pop on this beguiling set. It's outlined on eminent American author and transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau's poems, also providing the lyrical content for these vigorous and unequivocally hip compositions. The band spins an inspiring outlook with solid backbeats, wistful horns and ...

Album Review

The VJE: East End Sojourn

Read "East End Sojourn" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 23, 2014

In April of 2013, the Verve Jazz Ensemble released their first album It's About Time (CD Baby, 2012) to rave reviews from critics and jazz lovers everywhere. Exactly one year later, the group follows up on their amazing debut by unveiling East End Sojourn, an exciting second effort featuring new creative arrangements, more reimagined standards, a couple of original statements and the inclusion of guitarist luminary Peter Bernstein as special guest. The bop and post-bop grooves of the first recording ...

Live Review

Vossa Jazz 2014

by Bruce Lindsay
April 22, 2014

Vossa Jazz Voss, Norway April 11-14, 2014 Vossa Jazz: a jazz festival that's about more than just jazz, an event that takes place at the same point in the calendar every year but not on the same days, a place to celebrate hundreds of years of musical tradition and to encourage music's future with highly-prestigious annual commissions of new work. All of those things, in a small town tucked away among the mountains and ...

Album Review

Joe Beck Trio: Get Me Joe Beck

Read "Get Me Joe Beck" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 22, 2014

The jazz world, it seems, has always been awash in talented guitarists, from Reinhardt and Christian through Montgomery, Pass, Farlow, Hall and their like to the present day. This is both a blessing and a curse, as only a handful of such splendid musicians are able to rise above the throng and become household names or even widely known. Joe Beck, who was one week shy of his sixty-third birthday when he died in July 2008, was one of those ...

Live Review

Diana Krall Sextet at Mesa Arts Center

by Patricia Myers
April 22, 2014

Diana Krall Sextet Mesa Arts Center Mesa, Arizona April 8, 2014 Diana Krall applied her sultry voice and dynamic piano style to a captivating if surprising concert that combined jazz with tender childhood memories, silent-film clips and Seinfeld-style mischievous humor. In a stage setting that resembled an old-time theater, Krall mostly performed music from the 1920s and 1930s, saying she loved old music and silent movies,and that she had heard many of the songs on ...