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

Frank Wess: Magic 101

Read "Magic 101" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
July 31, 2013

In 2007, saxophonist and flutist Frank Wess was named NEA Jazz Master, and Magic 101 amply demonstrates why. This mellow session covers six standards and a Wess original, with a candid and unadorned style that is nevertheless powerful in its apparent simplicity.Like a wise raconteur, the 89 year-old (at the time of the recording) icon embellishes the melodies with wit and erudition. His cool, big-toned tenor weaves flowing lines in muted color around the rhythm section's languid beats ...

Live Review

Sligo Jazz Project 2013: Days 1-3

by Ian Patterson
July 31, 2013

Sligo Jazz ProjectVarious VenuesSligo, IrelandJuly 16-21, 2013 For such a small country, perched on the Western extreme of Europe, Ireland has created a disproportionate amount of history, and had more than its fair share thrust upon it. Everywhere, history informs the landscape and the collective memory. Sligo, home to the Sligo Jazz Project is no exception. Megalithic stones--tombs of the ancients--dot the land, and the tombs of Spanish Armada ships and their ghosts lie at ...

Album Review

Ben Monder: Hydra

by Troy Collins
July 30, 2013

New York-based guitarist Ben Monder has been an active member of the contemporary jazz scene for more than two decades, appearing on over 100 sessions as a sideman for such luminaries as Paul Motian, Maria Schneider and Kenny Wheeler. Despite such prestigious collaborations, Monder has maintained a relatively low profile as a solo artist, with less than half a dozen records as a leader or co-leader to his credit; Oceana, the last release under his own name, was issued by ...

Catching Up With

Leo Blanco: Haiku for Bells

by Bruce Lindsay
July 30, 2013

Leo Blanco is a musician who's immersed in the music of his South American homeland of Venezuela. The pianist may live in the USA--he teaches piano at Berklee--but his Venezuelan upbringing remains central to his work. It's a little surprising, then, to discover that Blanco isn't solely a product of Latin American culture. In conversation backstage at the Apex in Bury St Edmunds, just before the final concert of his first UK solo tour, he recalled that some of his ...

Album Review

Candi Staton: Evidence - The Complete Fame Records Masters

Read "Evidence - The Complete Fame Records Masters" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
July 30, 2013

American roots musician Jason Isbell, on his live recording Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit Live in Alabama (Lightning Rod Records), performed a potent cover of Candi Staton's “Heart on a String," recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals in 1970. In that performance rests an entire history of American music of the period. Muscle Shoals and FAME Studios were, in their heyday, making music--and a lot of it--of a quality not heard since. The key operative ...

Live Review

North Sea Jazz Festival 2013

by R.J. DeLuke
July 30, 2013

North Sea Jazz FestivalAhoyRotterdam, the NetherlandsJuly 12-14, 2013The North Sea Jazz Festival is firmly entrenched as one of the best events anywhere for jazz lovers, and also for the music-makers themselves, who relish the atmosphere and the appreciative audiences that typically jam the thirteen venues running simultaneously in the mammoth Ahoy building in Rotterdam. The 2013 edition did nothing but enhance its reputation, presenting a wide variety of jazz styles represented by musicians from a ...

Album Review

Deborah Shulman: Get Your Kicks

Read "Get Your Kicks" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
July 30, 2013

Vocalist Deborah Shulman wanted Get Your Kicks to be “a jazz album with a party vibe," which is something far different from her previous record--the wonderful (and weightier) Lost In The Stars: The Music Of Bernstein, Weill & Sondheim (Summit Records, 2012). The differing moods of each album, ultimately, reflect the musical nature of the composer(s) being covered; Bernstein, Weill, and Sondheim have “serious" written over much of their respective work while Troup's tunes belong to a cooler school.

Album Review

Alberto Pinton: Nascent

Read "Nascent" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
July 30, 2013

Italian multi-woodwind specialist Alberto Pinton earns his living in Stockholm. Spanning the past several years, and via the level of band support he receives, it reaffirms that there's no shortage of world-class talent in Sweden. Pinton's muscular and hard-driving presence on clarinet and baritone saxophone signals a program that largely smokes, other than when he tempers the modalities with raspy flute work, evidenced on the buoyant jazz-waltz vamp, “Clean Slate." The leader bridges boisterous levels of ultra- modern jazz with ...

Interview

Etienne Charles: Trumpet's First Chantwell

by DanMichael Reyes
July 29, 2013

Trinidadian-born trumpeter Etienne Charles has made it a point to share the culture of his native homeland with the world through music, whether it is writing songs on cuatro or steel pan, incorporating Kweyol chants on the opening track to his latest album Creole Soul (Culture Shock, 2013), or playing with an undeniable Caribbean bounce that caused the audience of Dizzy's Club Coca Cola to form a conga line through the venue during his album release show for Kaiso (Culture ...

Album Review

Peter Sprague String Consort: Dr. Einstein's Spin

Read "Dr. Einstein's Spin" reviewed by Robert Bush

by Robert Bush
July 29, 2013

Composer/guitarist Peter Sprague isn't well-known, but there are few musicians operating at his level; he counts pianist Chick Corea, bassist Charlie Haden and fellow six-stringer Pat Metheny among his enthusiastic supporters.One of his ongoing projects, The Peter Sprague String Consort, represents a true marriage of jazz trio with string quartet, and the ensemble is back after 2009's The Wild Blue (SBE, 2010) with Dr. Einstein's Spin, which was in part commissioned by Chamber Music America's New Jazz Works ...