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

David Murray Infinity Quartet: Be My Monster Love

Read "Be My Monster Love" reviewed by Phil Barnes

by Phil Barnes
November 29, 2013

If jazz is ever to escape from the “specialist" ghetto in which it finds itself in 2013 the simple truth is that we need more people with the vision of David Murray and more records as good as this one. Murray has a long and distinguished jazz career on tenor sax that began in the NYC Loft Scene of the 1970s--taking in my personal favourite octet recordings of the likes of Ming and Home on Black Saint in ...

Album Review

Sarpay Ozcagatay: Unexpectable

Read "Unexpectable" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
November 29, 2013

Born in Ankara, Turkey, Sarpay Ozcagatay is a flautist and EWI player who feels that the flute does not have the respect in the jazz world that it should. Accordingly, Ozcagatay is on a mission to change the perception of the flute as an accompanying instrument and believes the flute is as much a lead instrument as the jazz saxophone or trumpet. His first album as leader, Unexpectable (perhaps a reference to the correct spelling of “unacceptable"), is an unexpectedly ...

Album Review

Imer Santiago: Hidden Journey

Read "Hidden Journey" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
November 29, 2013

Nashville based trumpeter Imer Santiago's debut album Hidden Journey is an engaging, diverse set of nine originals and two standards, that maintains its momentum from the first note to the last. Santiago's compositions sometimes in collaboration with saxophonist and label founder Rahsaan Barber are primarily hard bop vehicles with a variety of flavors that allow the individual musicians space for short yet crisp and elegant expressions of spontaneity. The opening tune “Girls' Night Out" harks back to the ...

Film Review

Victor Wooten and Carter Beauford: Making Music

by Anton Rasmussen
November 29, 2013

Victor Wooten & Carter Beauford Making Music Hudson Music 2002 One of my favorite VHS tapes in High School around 14 years ago was the Hudson Music recording called Making Music, featuring Carter Beauford and Victor Wooten. This recording is still available from Hudson Music and, as of 2002, the film contains over 90 minutes of bonus footage. When Carter Beauford was two, he started playing drums. He was so young that when ...

Live Review

Nation Time Concert at the Guggenheim Museum

by Kurt Gottschalk
November 28, 2013

Richard Hell, Arto Lindsay, The Thing Guggenheim Museum Nation Time New York, NY November 20, 2013 Over the course of three forms of media and four decades, Amiri Baraka stretched his way into New York's Guggenheim Museum. A poem he penned more than 40 years ago found its path into the venerable visual arts institution via the music of Joe McPhee, which in turn inspired a response from painter Christopher Wool. In a roundabout ...

Album Review

The Jost Project: Can't Find My Way Home

Read "Can't Find My Way Home" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
November 28, 2013

Rock 'n' roll and The Beatles created serious challenges for jazz. Soul funk, folk and the rock explosion of the 1960s and 1970s left jazz with an even smaller slice of the pie. Many jazz artists jumped to cover pop tunes of the day, often falling ungraciously between two stools. In recent years contemporary jazz artists have increasingly eschewed traditional standards, instead looking to the songs of Paul Simon, Nik Drake, Tom Waits and Radiohead, for example, for new inspiration. ...

Book Review

No Beethoven: An Autobiography and Chronicle of Weather Report

by C. Michael Bailey
November 28, 2013

No Beethoven: An Autobiography and Chronicle of Weather Report Peter Erskine 320 pages ISBN: 978-0316194754 Fuzzy Music 2013 Drummer Peter Erskine's No Beethoven reads like the random travelogue of a touring band. Quotes, letters, personal vignettes interspersed with many photographs, the book is a stream-of-conscience wave of memory and analysis. Written thus, it may be read in fits and starts with no loss of story. Pick this book up, turn anywhere, read, lay ...

Album Review

Shauli Einav: Generations

Read "Generations" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
November 28, 2013

The title of saxophonist Shauli Einav's third album, Generations, hints at the breadth of source material the young Israeli-born musician has explored in assembling this collection. Einav contributes two original tunes, “Thermo Blues" and “Renewal," but the bulk of the set comes from the pens of some of the finest writers and players in the history of jazz--with John Coltrane, Harold Land and Don Byas all contributing to this admirable and enjoyable album. Einav's previous album, Opus One ...

Extended Analysis

Jorge Sylvester Ace Collective: Spirit Driven

by Florence Wetzel
November 28, 2013

In a 1967 interview with Jazz & Pop magazine, John Coltrane stated: “I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the force which is truly for the good." In his lifetime and beyond, Coltrane has inspired artists to infuse their work with this mission, and certainly alto saxophonist and composer Jorge Sylvester can be counted as one of Coltrane's heirs. Spirit Driven is ...

Album Review

Greg Lewis: Organ Monk: American Standard

Read "Organ Monk: American Standard" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
November 28, 2013

Dan Bilawsky was mightily impressed with Greg Lewis' two previous Organ Monk offerings, Two in the Black (Self Produced, 2012) and Organ Monk (Self Produced, 2010), where he notes the challenges to non-piano surveys of Thelonious Monk's canon. Greatly in absence is the element of Monk's percussive pianism. But Bilawsky notes that Lewis compensates for this with color and timing, revealing other, hidden aspects of Monk rarely considered. American Standard is cleverly programmed to include those “Great ...