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.

Extended Analysis

Bern Nix Quartet: Negative Capability

by Florence Wetzel
July 14, 2013

Guitarist Bern Nix has participated in many fine groups over the course of his career, most notably saxophonist Ornette Coleman's historic Prime Time, where Nix became one of the foremost interpreters of Coleman's groundbreaking harmolodic approach. These days Nix has created a quartet that's exploding onto the jazz scene in a big way. After a fiery set at the 18th Vision Festival, musician-blogger John Pietaro declared, “The Bern Nix Quartet is everywhere and exactly-where, and the overall effect is dizzying ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith & TUMO: Occupy The World

Read "Occupy The World" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
July 14, 2013

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith continues to challenge preconceptions. With Occupy The World, he exposes another facet of his orchestral music; more expansive than his stunning Ten Freedom Summers (Cuneiform, 2012) and less earthy than Hearts Reflection (Cuneiform, 2011), it's still part of a long lineage of large group works stretching back to Budding Of A Rose (Moers Music, 1978) and Lake Biwa (Tzadik, 2004). Finland's TUM Records invited Smith to present five of his works in the capital of Helsinki, ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Luka Veselinovic

by AAJ Staff
July 14, 2013

Meet Luka Veselinovic:Luka Veselinovic was born in Rijeka, Croatia. His father was a guitarist and his grandmother, a piano teacher. He is a professional musician, bassist, and composer who has been in jazz music for the past 10 years. He began playing bass at 21, and soon after became a professional. Luka has attended numerous Croatian and international jazz workshops and received a scholarship for Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2011. He has worked and collaborated ...

Album Review

Chip Stephens Trio: Relevancy

Read "Relevancy" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
July 14, 2013

Pianist Chip Stephens' self-penned liner notes to Relevancy are both reflective and pragmatic, dissecting life, touching on the bond between parents and their children, and sussing out the meaning of relevancy in several contexts. This writing reveals a rare balance between the down-to-earth everyman's insight and the profound, so it should come as no surprise then that his playing possesses that same even-handedness. Stephens' second album for the Capri label, Relevancy is a trio album worth treasuring. ...

Album Review

Deborah Shulman & The Ted Howe Trio: Get Your Kicks: The Music and Lyrics of Bobby Troup

Read "Get Your Kicks: The Music and Lyrics of Bobby Troup" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
July 14, 2013

Songwriter Bobby Troup was a master at composing conversational lyrics, and vocalist Deborah Shulman is a master at interpreting such lyrics. That the two come together on Get Your Kicks: The Music and Lyrics of Bobby Troup should be no surprise; also, it is about time that Troup received an homage treatment like this. His lyrics were always 1950s chic, written in a day before political correctness ended the evolution and expansion of the Great American Songbook. What Shulman does ...

Album Review

Three Fall: Realize!

Read "Realize!" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
July 13, 2013

Sometimes it seems like every jazz ensemble with a hint of funk, or a desire to re-create a soulful New Orleans sound, has to be an octet or a nonet at the very least. After all, a full-scale horn section is a must, isn't it? Three Fall buck the trend--the clue is in the name. On Realize! the German trio of saxophonist Lutz Streun, trombonist Til Schneider and drummer Sebastian Winne creates a full, rich and groove-laden sound without recourse ...

Album Review

Eric Alexander: Touching

by Jack Bowers
July 13, 2013

Tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander has chosen an intriguing title for his latest recording on HighNote Records, as Touching can not only be used as a verb or an adjective, whose meanings differ widely, but in this case is also a blues (by pianist Bobby Lyle), the opening salvo in an album of ballads and blues that lays bare Alexander's warmer side. For those who've grown accustomed to the tenor virtuoso's formidable technique and quicksilver phrases, this may come as a ...

Extended Analysis

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Push the Sky Away

by Nenad Georgievski
July 13, 2013

Strangely beautiful, lush and stately, the Bad Seeds' Push the Sky Away is an absolute wonder of a record. It is bold, emotionally charged, beautiful, baffling and gorgeously intimate. After the fired-up extravaganza in the form of the Grinderman juggernaut, surprisingly there comes a record that is totally devoid of that volcanic noise and menace that eventually influenced another Bad Seeds record, released between the two Grinderman records, the magnificent and raucous Dig Lazarus Dig (Mute, 2008). But three records ...

Live Review

Calixto Oviedo: New York, NY. July 9, 2013

by Ernest Barteldes
July 13, 2013

Calixto Oviedo, “Calixto's Way" New Dimensions of Latin Jazz: Cuban Drum SeriesJazz StandardNew York, NYJuly 9, 2013Master drummer Calixto Oviedo's quintet--pianist Carlos Averhoff, Jr., electric bassist Nestor Del Prado, percussionist Mauricio Herrera and tenor saxophonist Gustavo Ramirez--set off its early set at New York's Jazz Standard with a contemporary, American jazz-influenced groove that moved, half-way, into Afro-Cuban territory, allowing for Averhoff, Jr. and Ramirez to explore the melody with free improvisation. A very ...

Album Review

Mansur Scott Harlem Quartet: Sometimes Forgotten, Sometimes Remembered

Read "Sometimes Forgotten, Sometimes Remembered" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
July 13, 2013

Male jazz singers are a rare breed and most fashion themselves after the quintessential crooner Frank Sinatra. It is, therefore, intriguing to discover one with as singular, bold and blues-based as Mansur Scott. His intimate and intensely personal Sometimes Forgotten, Sometimes Remembered was released after a brush with death due to a heart attack and stroke, and is an affirmative celebration of life, with a strong spiritual and mystical bent.“Nature Boy," opens with bassist Wayne Batchelor's atmospheric, reverberating ...