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

Bob Aves: Out Of Tradition

Read "Out Of Tradition" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 1, 2014

Guitarist Bob Ave's long-awaited follow-up to the progressive and perhaps unprecedented fusion of gongs, world music and jazz on Translating The Gongs (Taomusic, 2006), is still framed on indigenous percussion and gongs, but highlights his artistry, using the 14-stringed octavina guitar. Armed with formidable chops, Aves also exudes finesse via his deft phrasings, tinted with Spanish romanticism and a world-jazz set of frameworks, including buoyant percussion that occasionally gestures a tribal-like aura. The guitarist seamlessly shapes the modalities ...

Album Review

TOTEM>: Voices of Grain

Read "Voices of Grain" reviewed by Budd Kopman

by Budd Kopman
February 1, 2014

For those that have heard TOTEM>'s Solar Forge, Voices of Grain will be familiar territory as guitarist Bruce Eisenbeil, bassist Tom Blancarte, and drummer Andrew Drury deepen and extend their intensity and group empathy while expanding their range of expression. While Solar Forge is white hot through and through, Voices of Grain has pacing of sorts, in that translucent, spacious, and at times beautiful tracks, separate the denser, more “frantic" tracks. It is in these tracks that TOTEM> ...

Interview

Michel Delville: Guitar, Improv & Electro

by Jean-Pierre Goffin
February 1, 2014

Besides teaching at the University of Liège, Michel Delville is widely regarded as one of the most original musicians and composers of the current jazz, rock and jazz-rock scenes. His latest offering, Machine Mass' INTI (2014), recorded with Dave Liebman and Tony Bianco, has just been released by New-York-based label MoonJune Records. Michel Delville: According to my parents, I was a compulsive listener of Mozart and Beethoven at the age of five or six. In my early teens ...

Album Review

Jeff Ballard Trio: Time's Tales

Read "Time's Tales" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 31, 2014

For several decades Jeff Ballard has been the first call drummer for a host of contemporary jazz's biggest names, notably pianist Brad Mehldau, with whom Ballard has played since 2005. Of late, however, Ballard has gone it alone. The 2013 debut shows of his quartet Fairgrounds, featuring electronics musician/bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Tigran Hamasyan and guitarist Lionel Loueke suggested Ballard's desire for greater compositional freedom and experimentation. The Jeff Ballard Trio's debut recording, on the other hand, is a fairly ...

Book Excerpts

Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist

by Heather Augustyn
January 31, 2014

The following is an excerpt from the “The Known and Unknown" chapter of Don Drummond: The Genius and Tragedy of the World's Greatest Trombonist by Heather Augustyn (Foreword by Delfeayo Marsalis) (McFarland, 2013). Late one evening in 1985, I was returning to the Brooklyn residence of my eldest brothers Branford and Wynton from a sojourn in Manhattan. As fate would have it, the Jamaican taxi driver recognized my slide trombone and proclaimed, “You know about Don Drummond and ...

Album Review

Melt Yourself Down: Melt Yourself Down

Read "Melt Yourself Down" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
January 31, 2014

Shouty, funky, groovy, heavy, punky, jazzy--the UK-based Melt Yourself Down is all of these things and more. Debut album Melt Yourself Down demonstrates all of these qualities, with a collection of songs that demands, and deserves, attention, respect, love and dancing in equal measure. Melt Yourself Down includes some of the UK's finest, most innovative, musicians. Most notably, from the jazz perspective, there's leader and saxophonist Pete Wareham (Acoustic Ladyland, Polar Bear), saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings (Sons Of Kemet), ...

Extended Analysis

Mike Bloomfield: From His Head to His Heart to His Hands

by John Kelman
January 31, 2014

While a proliferation of box sets continue to entice with career-spanning retrospectives-- sometimes entire discographies, like Legacy Recordings' recent Paul Simon: The Complete Albums Collection (2013)--few serve as aural biographies with the same degree of success as Mike Bloomfield's aptly titled From His Head to His Heart to His Hands, a three-CD/one-DVD long box produced by the only person who could truly do justice to the late bluesman, Bob Dylan compatriot, member of the seminal Paul Butterfield Blues Band and ...

Album Review

ZZ Quartet: Beyond the Lines

Read "Beyond the Lines" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
January 31, 2014

Croatian guitarist Ratko Zjaca and Italian accordionist Simone Zanchini hit artistic pay dirt when they teamed up for The Way We Talk (In + Out Records, 2010). They joined forces with Macedonian bassist Martin Gjakonovski and American drummer Adam Nussbaum for that album, creating a cross-cultural blend of music that speaks to specific musical idiosyncracies and universal truths in sound. Now, a few years after that initial encounter-on-record, this outfit returns with a follow-up that's just as pleasing and unique ...

Extended Analysis

Tarun Balani: Sacred World

by Dave Wayne
January 31, 2014

Jazz fans of a certain age were most likely introduced to the world of Indian music via the recordings of John McLaughlin who, with the group Shakti, introduced American listeners to the dazzling virtuosity of musicians such as violinist L. Shankar, and percussionist Zakir Hussain. Shakti's music extended the compositional style that characterized his previous group, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Ultra-fast tempos, and dizzying, rapid-fire unisons were thrown around with abandon, and odd rhythmic groupings were the norm. McLaughlin continues to ...

Album Review

Party Knüllers!: Party Knüllers!

Read "Party Knüllers!" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
January 31, 2014

Party Knüllers! is a collaboration between Chicago cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and Norwegian drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg. This intimate meeting of the two restless and adventurous musicians highlights their obsessive and playful need to explore and invent new sounds and new forms of musical communication. The duo's debut is a wild tour-de-force journey. They begin with the stormy “Erfolg" and never slow down. Lonberg-Holm's cello sound more as a tortured and distorted metallic guitar while Solberg is ...