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.

Multiple Reviews

Dominic Lash and Ricardo Tejero together

by John Eyles
January 26, 2014

Among a host of other activities too numerous to catalogue, bassist Dominic Lash and saxophonist / clarinetist Ricardo Tejero are both long-standing stalwarts of the London Improvisers Orchestra, so it was almost inevitable that they would gravitate towards each other in a smaller grouping at some point, as had happened with other LIO regulars. But, as these recordings illustrate, they now collaborate not just in one grouping but two with similarly eclectic repertoires. Lash has history in jazz and free ...

Album Review

Dusan Jevtovic: Am I Walking Wrong?

Read "Am I Walking Wrong?" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 26, 2014

Serbian guitarist Dusan Jevtovic employs a broad playing field on his debut effort for Moonjune Records. He's certainly one to watch as he comingles progressive rock, progressive metal and shreds with the guileful impulsion, occasionally witnessed in New York City downtown- like fare. The guitarist's animated delivery, features mind-bending crunch chords and stinging single note lines as he bends his guitar into submission atop a first-rate rhythm section's largely, medium- tempo grooves. In demand session artists, drummer Marko ...

Album Review

Maria Faust Jazz Catastrophe: Maria Faust Jazz Catastrophe

Read "Maria Faust Jazz Catastrophe" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
January 26, 2014

Estonian saxophonist, composer and band leader Maria Faust, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, likes to blur the distinctions between genres and styles. With her 15-musicians big band that involves musicians from Scandinavian and the Baltic countries she juggles with modern big band elements, third stream jazz, free improvised music and alternative rock and electronica. Hardly a Jazz Catastrophe unless one has a pious perspective about what music-- including jazz--should be codified and played. This big band is ...

Live Review

JACK Quartet at The MAC, Belfast

by Ian Patterson
January 25, 2014

JACK Quartet The MAC Belfast January 18, 2013 “This is really weird," a woman said as she deliberated where to sit for the concert. With no stage in the windowless room and the two halves of the audience facing each other--an arrangement which naturally invited plenty of mutual, casual scrutiny--there was no obvious sweet spot in which to sit for the JACK Quartet's recital of Georg Freidrich Haas' String Quartet No. 3 In iij. ...

Album Review

Elton Dean / Paul Dunmall / Paul Rogers / Tony Bianco: Remembrance

Read "Remembrance" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
January 25, 2014

English saxophonist Elton Dean has inspired several memorials since his untimely demise in 2006. But there is always space for another when it is as vital as Remembrance, a two CD set from 2004 issued by the Lithuanian NoBusiness imprint. Best known for his seminal work with the jazz rock pioneers Soft Machine, Dean also amassed a substantial discography in the company of luminaries such as Keith Tippett,Kenny Wheeler, Roswell Rudd and Howard Riley. All the three other participants on ...

Book Review

Brian Eno: Visual Music

by Nenad Georgievski
January 25, 2014

Brian Eno: Visual Music Christopher Scoates 416 pages ISBN: 1452108498 Chronicle Books 2013 To say that polymath Brian Eno is one of the most influential figures of our time would be a severe understatement. Eno has been one of the pivotal figures of the 20th century music as he introduced a popular voice to a century of musical change, and he has continued to do so in the next one he has ...

Album Review

Tom Jones: Spirit in the Room, Deluxe Edition

Read "Spirit in the Room, Deluxe Edition" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
January 25, 2014

The Rolling Stones celebrate 50 years as a band, resting on their well earned laurels while British peer Tom Jones continues to reinvent himself with the edgy and soulful sequel to his successful 2010 release Praise and Blame (Island Records). “What's New Pussycat?" and “It's Not Unusual" seem as far away as the Hubble Telescope's deep space images. Jones, who mined much of the same American vernacular as the late Johnny Cash on his previous recording, spreads his musical net ...

Album Review

The Sixxis: The Sixxis

Read "The Sixxis" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
January 25, 2014

Founded in 2006, The Sixxis' experienced the trials and tribulations of breaking into the music business, while honing their craft along the way. They are now managed by an A-list team in Nashville, where this formidable album was also recorded. With influences and a soundstage reminiscent of Rush, Kings X and others of note, the trio's approach resides somewhere within a classic rock, progressive rock, and metal imprint. They're hard to rigidly classify, which of course is most always a ...

Album Review

Rudy Royston: 303

by Dan Bilawsky
January 24, 2014

Drummer Rudy Royston's actions speak louder than his words. Royston oozed modesty, comfort and a touch of humor when he addressed the audience at a pre-release show for 303 during New York's Winter Jazzfest, but he gave off a much different sense of himself when he put sticks to skins during that same set. One minute he was delivering low-key, in-the-pocket grooves that had heads bobbing in the affirmative, and the next he was creating a percussive maelstrom that tore ...

Album Review

Clare Fischer Orchestra: Extension

Read "Extension" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
January 24, 2014

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a change in the approach to big band arranging. Voicings and colorings became more luxuriant, and the palettes began to include more pastels; classical harmonies began to creep in to charts. Gil Evans brought the arranging prowess he developed in the Claude Thornhill Orchestra and the the Birth of the Cool recordings of 1949-50 (compiled and released on Columbia Records in 1957) to his partnership with trumpeter Miles Davis for three ...