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

The Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: The L.A. Treasures Project:Live at Alvas Showroom

Read "The L.A. Treasures Project:Live at Alvas Showroom" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 15, 2014

The “L.A. Treasures" heralded herein are singers Ernie Andrews (eighty-six years young when the album was recorded in September 2013) and Barbara Morrison (a relative novice at sixty-one). The idea to record sprang from rehearsals earlier that year by the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra in which Andrews and Morrison were invited to sit in. Afterward, co-leader John Clayton writes, it was decided that “we need to document these artists . . . these treasures!" What a splendid idea! An idea, in ...

Extended Analysis

Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: American Adventure

by John Kelman
April 15, 2014

Sometimes an idea seems great on paper, but in execution doesn't exactly work out as planned. Other times, that same idea doesn't just look great, it actually exceeds already high expectations. When saxophonist Tommy Smith--almost single-handedly responsible for rebuilding a modern jazz scene in his home country of Scotland, where he returned after studying at Boston's Berklee College of Music in the 1980s and releasing a couple of well-regarded albums on Blue Note--brought his Scottish National Jazz Orchestra to the ...

Album Review

Gene Ludwig / Pat Martino Trio: Young Guns

Read "Young Guns" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
April 15, 2014

The name Young Guns seems ironically amiss until one learns that this recording dates from 1968-69 when organist Gene Ludwig was thirty years old, guitarist Pat Martino twenty-three and drummer Randy Gelispie somewhere in that neighborhood, long before he became fondly known as “Uncle G." The organ trio was in its heyday then, and this one was caught on tape during an exciting live date at Club 118 in Louisville, KY. How many other such performances have been lost forever ...

Album Review

Jamie Alexander Smith: Kinesis

by Dan Bilawsky
April 15, 2014

"Kinesis," when defined as simply as possible, means “movement." When the definition is expanded, or given a biological reading, it references the idea of movement that takes place in response to external stimuli. Without knowing the circumstances surrounding the recording of this oh-so-brief solo piano EP, it's hard to know which one Scottish pianist Jamie Smith is citing in the title, but it's irrelevant. Smith's music, whether influenced by external or internal forces, is ever-mobile. This five ...

Catching Up With

Barb Jungr: Loving Living Life

by Sammy Stein
April 15, 2014

Barb Jungr brings her infectious enthusiasm to even the most mundane of things. A stroll in the park is turned into a gleeful discovery as she finds a stand of daffodils; a walk home is turned into delight as Jungr snaps a picture of London by night from a bridge. She has that knack of spotting something you never realized was there and making you look at ordinary things differently. She plays with phrases and words--like 'polyglot,' or 'loop of ...

Album Review

Pat Metheny Unity Group: Kin (<-->)

Read "Kin (<-->)" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
April 15, 2014

Pat Metheny's Unity Group is perfectly named because, in its quintet lineup even more so than the original quartet, the group's approach brings together every musical element the famed guitarist has pursued during the course of his career. Acoustic guitars of the solo projects, dense high-tech arrangements à la Pat Metheny Group, traditional jazz horns recalling 80/81 (ECM, 1980) and vigorous ensemble improvisation hearkening to his various trios all mix on Kin ()'s very first track, “On Day One," and ...

Album Review

Stein Urheim: Stein Urheim

Read "Stein Urheim" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
April 15, 2014

Norwegian, Bergen-based guitarist Stein Urheim, known for his duo with vocalist Mari Kvien Brunvoll and his own drone band The Last Hurrah, released an impressive, limited edition album two years ago, Kosmolodi (Hubro Music, 2012), where he began to explore his breadth of musical vocabulary on guitars and other acoustic stringed instruments. Urheim melts organically exotic elements of blues and jazz, West-African, Middle-Eastern, Indian, and East-Asian traditional legacies with Nordic folk music and even compositional ideas of seminal American composers ...

Extended Analysis

Anne Mette Iversen's Double Life: So Many Roads

by Dan Bilawsky
April 15, 2014

Music making, like life itself, is all about balance. In both worlds, highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, harmony and melody, chaos and order, the clinical and the emotional, the simple and complex, and so much more are constantly being balanced on the scales. Rarely are things in perfect equilibrium, yet so many people strive to reach that place; bassist Anne Mette Iversen is one of those people, and So Many Roads is her musical treatise on the art of ...

Album Review

David White Jazz Orchestra: The Chase

Read "The Chase" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
April 14, 2014

The Chase is one heck of a wild ride. Trombonist David White has followed up his Jazz Orchestra's debut--Flashpoint (Mister Shepherd Records, 2011)--with an album that's short on material but rich in content. A scant thirty-four minutes of music can be found on this one, with all but one of the six tracks falling in the four-to-six minute range, but better to focus on what White does with the time than the time itself. White's greatest achievement ...

Interview

Brian Blade: Fellowship - More Than Just a Word

by John Kelman
April 14, 2014

In the 21st century, few drummers have managed Brian Blade's kind of crossover success. Beyond playing in saxophonist Wayne Shorter's quartet for nearly 15 years, beyond being a first-call drummer for producer/singer/songwriter Daniel Lanois--whether it's for his own projects like Black Dub or working with everyone from Bob Dylan to EmmyLou Harris--and beyond also being on-call with some of the most important names in modern music (not just jazz, but music) like Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, John Scofield and Kenny ...