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

Stefano Bollani / Hamilton de Holanda: O que sera

Read "O que sera" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
September 12, 2013

Intentional or not, ECM's simultaneously release of Iranian kamencheh master Kayhan Kalhor and Turkish baglama expert Erdal Erzincan's Kula Kulluk Yakişir Mi (2013) with O que será, which captures a positively electrifying 2012 performance by efferverscent Italian pianist Stefano Bollani and Brazilian bandolim virtuoso Hamilton de Holanda, does more than merely celebrate the intimate potential of the duo. Variants, they may be, but there are also timbral similarities between de Holanda's bandolim (mandolin) and Erzincan's baglama (saz) in their use ...

Album Review

Iro Haarla Sextet: Kolibri

Read "Kolibri" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
September 12, 2013

Finnish Pianist-composer Iro Haarla's compositions for her sextet emphasize her aim to reach a different, larger sound than the sound of her Finnish-Norwegian quintet (Northbound and Vespers, both on ECM, 2006 and 2011). This sextet is comprised of top Finnish musicians who collaborated closely with her in the past and began to work as the sextet in 2009. Its three-horn front line sound, as captured on Kolibri (the Finnish word for hummingbird), enables Haarla to use complex arrangements, rhythmic diversity ...

Album Review

Mary Halvorson Septet: Illusionary Sea

Read "Illusionary Sea" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
September 11, 2013

Guitarist Mary Halvorson's signature sound and methodologies have been making an impact within avant-garde and progressive-jazz circles on a global basis. Illusionary Sea marks the debut of her septet, comprised of impressionable players often residing at the forefront of the newer kindling of what may loosely be classified as jazz. Here, like minds coalesce for an album that crosses jazz, classical and avant-garde frontiers, via Halvorson's intriguing compositions and oscillating, wave-like arrangements that rarely inhabit a continuous plane.

Multiple Reviews

Tatsuya Nakatani / Harold Rubin / Barre Phillips / Assif Tsahar

by Eyal Hareuveni
September 11, 2013

Japanese percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani's last visit to Israel produced two albums. Both are totally different in their spirit. Both feature Nakatani's unique manner of shaping and extracting sounds from the cymbals and the skins of the drums that blossom as a memorable music. Harold Rubin / Barre Phillips / Tatsuya Nakatani3 On A Thin LineHopscotch Records2013 This live recording from April 2009 documents the first ...

Album Review

Lorraine Feather: Attachments

Read "Attachments" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
September 11, 2013

First, there is “who exactly is Billie Jane Lee Lorraine Feather?" Well, she is the daughter of jazz writer and impresario Leonard Feather (1914 -1994) and Jane Feather, a former big-band singer and ex-roommate of Peggy Lee (ergo “Lee"). The Billie in Feather's name is her godmother, Billie Holiday, and the Jane, well that is obvious. The Lorraine part is from the Cliff Burwell (music) and Mitchell Parish (lyrics) 1928 standard, “Sweet Lorraine." That is quite a pedigree by any ...

Extended Analysis

Dave Holland: Prism

by John Kelman
September 11, 2013

Two instruments that bassist Dave Holland has rarely incorporated into his projects have been piano and guitar, his only guitar-centric album coming sixteen years after his first release as a leader, Conference of the Birds (ECM, 1973), when he recruited Kevin Eubanks for a particularly powerful set on Extensions (ECM, 1989). It took Holland even longer--nearly a quarter- century, in fact--before piano first surfaced on Pass It On (Dare2, 2008), with the recently deceased Mulgrew Miller, though Holland would subsequently ...

Album Review

Jasper Lundgaard / Bob Rockwell / Doug Raney / Henrik Gunde, Aage Tanggaard: Love & Peace: The Music of Harold Parlan

Read "Love & Peace: The Music of Harold Parlan" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
September 11, 2013

Maybe it was the mournful sound of the foghorns belonging to the ships passing below the Great Belt Bridge. Or the music he'd just been listening to, and featured on this album. But Harold Parlan's thoughts strayed from the care home where he now lives in the small Danish coastal town of Korsør (pop. 14,501) to Rudy Van Gelder's studio at Englewood Cliffs on the New Jersey shoreline. “It was like recording in someone's living room," he ...

Album Review

Will Bernard: Just Like Downtown

Read "Just Like Downtown" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
September 11, 2013

Guitarist Will Bernard has been connected to a number of singular groups and individuals, from the Monk-to-funk outfit known as T.J. Kirk to New Orleans drumming giant Stanton Moore to multi-instrumentalist Peter Apfelbaum's boundary-pushing Hieroglyphics Ensemble, but a common denominator exists in his strongest work with each one: Bernard's best is always rooted in the groove. He has a no-fuss way of establishing and/or inhabiting the rhythmic currents of a song and he puts that skill to good use, once ...

Hardly Strictly Jazz

Back To... SOUL

by Skip Heller
September 11, 2013

While everyone else seems to have been attending jazz festivals, I've been flying under the radar with film and TV music jobs, so I haven't had the time to write about the summer's recorded music treasures, and it has been bountiful for record/CD fans. Not least of all because some really careful and wise music fans have made sure that round things with a hole in the middle deliver something digital downloads can't: a real package. Two come from Memphis, ...

Album Review

The Impossible Gentlemen: Internationally Recognisable Aliens

Read "Internationally Recognisable Aliens" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
September 10, 2013

When you come out of the gate as strongly as The Impossible Gentlemen (Basho, 2011), you create a pretty high set of expectations for the follow-up. Of course, when it's a quartet of musicians this accomplished--a transatlantic, trans-generational group consisting of a living legend (bassist Steve Swallow), a less-known but equally active American cohort (drummer Adam Nussbaum), a rising British star (pianist Gwilym Simcock and fellow Brit deserving far greater recognition (guitarist Mike Walker--there's an intrinsic recipe for a sophomore ...