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

Orbit Stern: Ude i Skoven, Inde i Byen

Read "Ude i Skoven, Inde i Byen" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
February 27, 2014

Orbit Stern is the duo of Swedish, Copenhagen-based guitarist Samuel Hällkvist (known from his association with King Crimson members in his band Variety of Loud), and Danish drummer Frederik Hauch (who played in many local alternative rock bands). Both nursed a longtime affinity for an Appalachian twang but decided to take this mythic, relatively strictly defined genre and transform it into futuristic, multi-layered sonic textures, as if the Wild West banjo players and square dancers just retired from a tour ...

Album Review

Fernando Ulibarri: Transform

Read "Transform" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 27, 2014

Fernando Ulibarri is a guitarist, composer and prominent educator at various institutions in the Miami area. His debut album with his working quartet is framed on aspirations that aim to establish compositional unity but also produce comps that stand on their own. He launches the production with spacey inferences to Miles Davis' early jazz-fusion aura, yet many of these works are cushioned within mainstream jazz persuasions, containing blithe themes and an assortment of cool and breezy swing vamps. Ulibarri speckles ...

Album Review

Alexander Hawkins: Song Singular

Read "Song Singular" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
February 27, 2014

The concurrent releases of pianist/composer Alexander Hawkins solo and ensemble recordings demonstrate the up-and-coming artist's exceptional range of compositional skills across dissimilar formats. The young Oxford, UK native has been a much sought after sideman, working with free jazz sax legend Evan Parker, saxophonist Joe McPhee and renowned South African drummer, Louis Moholo-Moholo. Hawkins is also a co-leader of the Convergence Quartet featuring cornet virtuoso Taylor Ho Bynum, drummer Harris Eisenstadt, and double bassist Dominic Lash. Hawkins' solo ...

Live Review

Porgy and Bess Broadway Production at Academy of Music

by Victor L. Schermer
February 26, 2014

Porgy and Bess Broadway Musical Production The Academy of Music Philadelphia, PA February 18, 2014 Following its multi-Tony Award-winning run on Broadway, an electrifying stage revival of George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy and Bess came to Philadelphia as part of an original cast national tour. For jazz aficionados, this timeless masterpiece, which debuted in Boston in 1935, is a quintessential opera in the jazz idiom, the purest and most potent illustration of why jazz ...

Album Review

Dojo: Road Trip

Read "Road Trip" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
February 26, 2014

Fusion--long a dirty word in jazz circles--has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade. In part it's due to the advocacy of lables such as Abstract Logix but the root cause is surely the fact that cross-pollination is increasingly the norm. And whilst fusion mightn't mean quite the same thing it did in the 1970s, these days there's a healthy to-heck-with-it environment whereby jazz, rock, funk and progressive rock can all co-exist in exciting hybrid forms. Dojo is a case ...

Album Review

Rebecca DuMaine & The Dave Miller Trio: Better Than Anything

Read "Better Than Anything" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 26, 2014

Better Than Anything is about past and present, songs and singers, influences and memories, and father-and-daughter chemistry. It's the second album, following Deed I Do (Summit Records, 2012), that finds vocalist Rebecca DuMaine joining forces with her father, pianist Dave Miller. DuMaine and Miller share more than genetic code, as they both seem to thrive in customized, straightforward settings. They don't really try to do anything out of the ordinary, but they aren't about mundane music making ...

Extended Analysis

Roland Kirk: Four Classic Albums

by David Rickert
February 26, 2014

Roland Kirk was arguably the most exciting soloist the jazz world has ever seen. Blind since childhood, Kirk developed a unique sensitivity to sound that he parlayed into all sorts of interesting ideas, most notably the ability to play two or three instruments simultaneously. For a while the vaudeville nature of this trick overshadowed his prodigious talents as a soloist. He was capable of great tenderness as well as bursts of aggressive lines and knew how to construct a solo ...

Album Review

Vince Lewis & Barbara Martin: Fresh Air

Read "Fresh Air" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
February 26, 2014

Guitarist Vince Lewis and vocalist Barbara Martin, longtime friends and musicians, join forces for an intimate trio recording of staid standards and compelling originals on Fresh Air. Joined by bassist Paul Langosch, who lends a solid and unobtrusive foundation, Lewis and Martin deliver a program this is as well crafted as it is spontaneous and crisply presented.. Lewis is an accomplished and precise guitarist, using all five right-hand fingers, eschewing a plectrum. This method of playing frees ...

Album Review

Spinifex: Hipsters Gone Ballistic

Read "Hipsters Gone Ballistic" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
February 26, 2014

The Amsterdam-based group Spinifex--named after a tough Australian species of grass--is a modular collective of Dutch musicians. The Spinifex quintet that released its debut, the aptly titled Hipsters Gone Ballistic, is a part of a collective that includes the Spinifex Orchestra (that released its debut Triodia back in 2008 on Karnatic Lab Records), Spinifex Tuba Band and Spinifex Indian Spin. The quintet distills elements from all the above mentioned outfits, contrasting extremely tight, irregular structures and ...

Album Review

M13: 1 Human, Too Human

Read "1 Human, Too Human" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 26, 2014

Chicago-based M13 is a thirteen-piece ensemble that projects a hip, little big band attack featuring many of the region's finest musicians. Led by saxophonist Aaron McEvers whose sprightly horns arrangements are often given a jazz-rock uplift by guitarist Chris Siebold, as the band invokes numerous shades of the jazz vernacular. They lash out into bracing swing vamps, streaked with melodic overtones and triumphant choruses, occasionally injected with moody interludes amid garrulous soloing sprees. McEvers even melds tricky, Zappa-esque time signatures ...