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

Tatvamasi: Parts Of The Entirety

Read "Parts Of The Entirety" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
December 21, 2013

Admirers of fellow Cuneiform Records artists, Gutbucket and Led Bib or other groups embracing the jazz-rock and progressive rock genres may find a lot to get revved up about with the Polish quartet, Tatvamasi. No doubt, it's an aggressive unit, armed with a vibrant demeanor as they tread across the jazz and rock terrains with polyrhythmic grooves, accentuated by the frontline's high-impact mode of delivery. The musicians' agility amid a throng of sub-motifs and variable pulses are often framed on ...

Year in Review

Ian Patterson's Best Releases of 2013

by Ian Patterson
December 21, 2013

The following list represents my personal favorites of those CDs I reviewed this year. I am convinced that we live in a great age for jazz/creative music. You can only ever listen to a very small percentage of what's out there, but it's still a privilege to able to access this much terrific music. Kenny Wheeler, Norma Winstone and the London Vocal Project Mirrors (Edition Records) Yuhan Su Flying Alone

Album Review

Jeremy Steig: Flute Fever

Read "Flute Fever" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
December 21, 2013

Flute Fever, the 1963 Columbia Records debut by flutist Jeremy Steig, has somehow, until now, avoided release on CD. Thanks to reissue producer Jonathan Horwich, Steig's beautifully remastered and packaged freshman recording is now available. And it's not only Steig's premier as a recording artist, it's also a recording first for pianist Denny Zeitlin, on a quartet that's rounded out by veterans Ben Riley on drums, and Ben Tucker on bass. It's a blowing session--no group rehearsal, just ...

Live Review

2013 Jazztopad Festival

by John Kelman
December 20, 2013

Jazztopad FestivalWrocĺaw, Poland November 18-24, 2013 It's always a treat to be invited somewhere new, especially somewhere with a strong jazz scene that remains, for the most part, hidden from the rest of the world. But when the country is Poland and the city Wrocĺaw, there are even greater treats awaiting, as a young festival that has, in just 10 short years, not only established itself as a premiere jazz destination within its own country, but ...

Album Review

The Bill McBirnie Trio: Find Your Place

Read "Find Your Place" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
December 20, 2013

The standard organ trio doesn't usually include a flute. On paper, it sounds like a bad idea. It seems as if the cool breeze aspects of the airy blowing of the flute would get lost in the organ's electric woosh. As it turns out, flutist Bill McBirnie's Find Your Place, proves those seemingly similar sounds to be quite complimentary. The genesis for the project lies in the recording of a previous McBirnie set, Paco Paco (Extreme Flute, 2005). ...

Year in Review

Troy Collins' Best Releases of 2013

by Troy Collins
December 20, 2013

Considering the sheer quantity of recordings issued in a year's time, attempting to mention every notable session would result in a list of epic proportions. These ten records represent a fertile cross-section of some of the most compelling modern jazz issued in 2013, highlighting sophisticated new developments in composition and improvisation with an unintended (but entirely justified) focus on inexorable pan-global fusions. Barry Altschul The 3dom Factor TUM Records Legendary drummer Barry Altschul's ...

Album Review

The Trophies: You Wait To Publish

Read "You Wait To Publish" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
December 20, 2013

Alessandro Bosetti reshuffles the distinctions between speech and song with his repeating texts. His scripts of found words, nonsense passages, or snippets of conversations, when presented as a loop, take on new and disparate meanings. With his trio Trophies, the repetitive speech loops expand as drummer Tony Buck (The Necks) and guitarist Kenta Nagai (Laura Andel Orchestra) 'speak' instrumental lines into the vortex of Bosetti's loops. You Wait To Publish follows A Color Of A Horse (D.S. al ...

Extended Analysis

John Escreet: Sabotage and Celebration

by Phil Barnes
December 20, 2013

Doncaster born pianist John Escreet recorded this exhilarating modern jazz record in his adopted home of New York on 7 November 2012 informed, he has said in a recent interview, by two events. The first, Hurricane Sandy, was responsible for his incarceration in his Brooklyn apartment for long enough to write and fine tune the material for this collection, while the second was the increasingly polarised US political situation in the lead up to the 2012 Presidential election itself held ...

Album Review

Jack Mouse Group: Range of Motion

Read "Range of Motion" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
December 20, 2013

Drummer and educator Jack Mouse has a versatile and prolific career. In addition to playing, among many others, with trumpeter Clark Terry, saxophonist James Moody and pianist Stan Kenton he has been actively involved in education as a faculty member at various institutions and as a writer for percussion magazines. His debut album Range of Motion comprises ten of his originals that exhibit a variety of influences and are in a number of different subgenres. There is, for ...

Album Review

Matt White: The Super Villain Jazz Band

Read "The Super Villain Jazz Band" reviewed by Jeffrey Uhrich

by Jeffrey Uhrich
December 20, 2013

In the midst of its long tradition as home of country music, Nashville is also home to a burgeoning and very vibrant jazz scene. Matt White and the musicians that comprise White's debut, The Super Villain Jazz Band, are proof that Nashville is generating world-class jazz musicians that can contend with any challengers from the east or west coast of the United States (and beyond). The Super Villain Jazz Band, is a collection of imaginative and deceptively complex compositions that ...