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.

Take Five With...

Take Five With Alexi David

by AAJ Staff
August 14, 2013

Meet Alexi David:Cypriot-American composer and bassist Alexi David grew up in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood. His group, Alexi David's Patriot Act, has created the first fusion with jazz and the Greek sounds of rembetika. David is also adept on bouzouki, baglama and piano. He is a scholar on the music of the late Charles Mingus, and has worked extensively with Terry Waldo, Jose James, The Fat Cat Big Band, Junior Mance and many others. Being Nellie McKay's regular ...

Album Review

Tom Kennedy: Just Play!

Read "Just Play!" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
August 14, 2013

An accomplished musician known for his prowess on electric bass, Tom Kennedy fronts a nine-piece ensemble of top-notch players delivering engaging new interpretations of well-known jazz standards on Just Play!, his fourth album as leader. While much of his experience performing progressive and mainstream jazz has been on the electric bass, Kennedy's first experience began on double bass at the age of eleven. Here, the bassist leads the performance on his vintage St. Louis legend Jerry Cherry Bohemian upright bass.

Interview

Billy Childs: Pushing Past Preconceptions

by George Colligan
August 13, 2013

[ Editor's Note: The following interview is reprinted from George Colligan's blog, Jazztruth]Billy Childs is simply one of the baddest musicians on the planet. He's a brilliant jazz pianist, having received much acclaim as a sideman with legends as well as from being a bandleader. His Windham Hill recordings--Take For Example, This....., His April Touch and Portrait Of A Player--were a big influence on my musical tendencies.Childs has been busy for the past two decades as ...

Album Review

The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore: The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore

Read "The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
August 13, 2013

According to Philip Larkin, poet and jazz fan, sexual intercourse began in 1963 “Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban and the Beatles' first LP." Many other commentators suggest that the British jazz scene died at about the same time, steamrollered out of the way by the emerging behemoth that was the British Beat Boom. It didn't die. As The Ronnie Scott Quintet Featuring Alan Skidmore proves, players like Alan Skidmore and his fellow tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott had plenty ...

Live From New York

Ensemble musikFabrik, Etienne Charles, Pulverize The Sound & Ahmed Abdullah's Diaspora

by Martin Longley
August 13, 2013

Ensemble musikFabrik Avery Fisher Hall July 20, 2013 Karlheinz Stockhausen and Sun Ra must surely vie for the stellar position of most cosmically attuned composer within the bounds of the omniverse. Stockhausen's Licht is arguably his major work, at least in terms of sheer scale. It's a seven-day-long operatic cycle that its composer must have been relieved to complete before his demise. This performance of “Michael's Reise Um Die Erde (Michael's Journey Around ...

Album Review

Rotem Sivan: Enchanted Sun

Read "Enchanted Sun" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
August 13, 2013

Guitarist Rotem Sivan, who made the move from his native Israel to New York City in 2008, chose the trio format for his debut, Enchanted Sun. Working with just bass and drums accompanying--whether the “lead" is a piano, a horn or a guitar---is one of the most intimate ways to make music; since pianist Bill Evans' groundbreaking trio of the late fifties and early sixties, it's also one of the most potentially interactive. And, with drummer Rajiv Jayaweera and bassist ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Kristin Korb

by AAJ Staff
August 13, 2013

Meet Kristin Korb: A singing double bassist with a deep sense of swing, Kristin Korb combines the instrumental influence of Ray Brown and Charles Mingus with the vocal styling of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald to create a sound all herown. Exhilarating to watch live, she sings and plays the bass as effortlessly as she breathes.Instrument(s): Bass, voice. Teachers and/or influences? Bass: Bertram Turetzky, Ray Brown, John Clayton, Rufus Reid.Voice: Carol Plantemura, Sue Rainey ...

Album Review

Henri Roger: Exsurgences (Solo Piano Improvisations)

Read "Exsurgences (Solo Piano Improvisations)" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 13, 2013

Self-taught French pianist Henri Roger's set of solo piano free improvisations is spread across a DVD directed by video artist Anne Pesce, and also on vinyl. These nine improvisations, all numbered as “Exurgences 1" to “9," have a similar dense and restless character. Roger explores the sonic possibilities of piano keyboard, stressing the lower range as he sustains these sounds and forms a dramatic and intense, string of continuously colliding overtones. The first and longest improvisation, the ...

710

Genius Guide to Jazz

Down Pat

by Jeff Fitzgerald, Genius
August 12, 2013

It has been said of Pat Metheny that if Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and Charlie Christian had somehow all been involved in fathering a single child, that child would grow up to be pursuing her master's in developmental psychology at Stanford while working as an assistant manager at Border's. Where they sell Pat Metheny CD's. How ironic is that? Not ironic enough, according to Microsoft Word's irony check, which rated this paragraph as only 34.7% as ironic as it could ...

Album Review

Asaf Sirkis Trio: Shepherd's Stories

Read "Shepherd's Stories" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
August 12, 2013

Maybe it's the unfashionably hot weather that's hit the UK in recent summers, but there's something almost cheery about drummer Asaf Sirkis' Shepherd Stories. Sirkis' church organ/guitar based Inner Noise recordings wove a jazz-gothic tale, while The Monk (SAM Productions, 2008)--with guitarist Tassos Spiliotopoulos and bassist Yaron Stavi--balanced tantalizingly between pretty melancholy and a slightly dark aesthetic. That said, a lyrical vein has always permeated Sirkis' music Letting Go (Stonebird Productions, 2010) signaled the trio's move toward less introspective and ...