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

Compassionate Dictatorship: Entertaining Tyrants

Read "Entertaining Tyrants" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
June 30, 2013

Six years after its debut album, Coup D'Etat (FMR Records, 2007), and three years after its follow-up, Cash Cows (FMR Records, 2010), Compassionate Dictatorship returns with Entertaining Tyrants. Album number three finds the London-based quartet moving away from the influence of progressive rock, which shaped some of Cash Cows, and into a sound that is much more focused on contemporary jazz. The band's musicianship and accessibility remain high, though, ensuring that Entertaining Tyrants is highly enjoyable.But first, the ...

Album Review

The Caravan: The Caravan

Read "The Caravan" reviewed by Jeff Dayton-Johnson

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
June 30, 2013

The Caravan, the self-titled second album from a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based hybrid hip hop trio, has attracted attention for the track “What Up Steve?." It's a new kind of political protest record for Canada, a reaction to the new kind of conservative politics practiced by the Stephen Harper administration. But “What Up Steve?," whatever its effectiveness, only partially represents the musical breadth of the record. The album merges the easy-going collective sensibility of the Maritime Canadian kitchen party ...

Live Review

Depeche Mode: Belgrade, Serbia, May 19, 2013

by Nenad Georgievski
June 30, 2013

Depeche ModeUšće ParkBelgrade, SerbiaMay 19, 2013British electro-pop behemoth Depeche Mode is as grand live spectacle as is ever likely to be seen. Over the years the band has achieved enormous success, with millions of records sold and, despite personnel changes and close to being casualties to either a rock lifestyle or severe illness, it has managed to stay on top of its game for nearly three decades. During that time, Depeche Mode has cemented its ...

Album Review

Jonathan Finlayson: Moment and the Message

Read "Moment and the Message" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 30, 2013

The final scene from the 1998 cult classic movie, The Big Lebowski, has the cowboy narrator telling the audience: “Then, I happen to know that there's a little Lebowski on the way. I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands a time."In jazz, musical knowledge also perpetuates itself through the generations, keeping its wagons rolling. Case in point: trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, who joined ...

Book Review

Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic

by Nenad Georgievski
June 29, 2013

Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock CriticJim DeRogatis352 PagesISBN: 0767905091Crown Publishing2000If anyone ever writes a history on rock criticism and music journalism, certain names--like Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, Simon Frith and especially Lester Bangs--will surely lead off the chapters on rock music and American vernacular music writing. Until his death in 1982, Lester Bangs had carved himself a formidable reputation as ...

Album Review

Petr Cancura: Down Home

Read "Down Home" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 29, 2013

Once jazz migrated from New Orleans and the Deep South to Chicago and New York, a favorite put-down for those making music that wasn't urban, cool or modern was to call the musicians “country." It was as if all things of jazz consequence outside of urban centers was required to be imported from said cities.Of late, jazz artist have latched onto the 'slow food,' buy-local movement, taking ingredients found in the country to build upon this thing called ...

Live Review

Chicago: Westbury, NY, May 26, 2013

by Mike Perciaccante
June 29, 2013

Chicago NYCB Theatre at Westbury Westbury, NY May 26, 2013During the initial phase of its career, Chicago was considered the preeminent Jazz-rock fusion outfit, its musical mix considered quite revolutionary for its time. By the late 1970s, its music had become iconic. Tragedy struck, however, with the death of guitarist Terry Kath in 1978. Though it took a little while for the band to again find its way, in the 1980s Chicago cemented its place ...

Album Review

Nicola Milan: Forbidden Moments

Read "Forbidden Moments" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
June 29, 2013

It should be no wonder that Australia produces musicians whose art reflects a broad blend of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Perth native Nicola Milan refers to the genre to which her brand of music belongs, Australasian jazz, and her own pedigree as Welsh/Anglo-Indian. That is every bit as exotic and humidly appealing as the self-description of another Aussie national, Alisha Pattillo (Along For The Ride (Self Produced, 2012)), who refers to herself as “A half-Australian/half-English/raised-in-Singapore saxophonist." Beat that melting ...

Album Review

Emil Strandberg / Sten Sandell / Patric Thorman: It Is Night And I Am Lost

Read "It Is Night And I Am Lost" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 29, 2013

The Swedish improvising trio of trumpeter Emil Strandberg, pianist Sten Sandell and bassist Patric Thorman has played together since 2006. Its first recording, Stockholm Sweden Polyphony (Found You Recording, 2009), signaled the many directions that these experienced and resourceful improvisers were beginning to explore. The trio kept performing while Strandberg and Thorman also collaborated with American cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm's quintet, Seval. The trio's sophomore recording features only the title piece, a 33-minute sonic journey into the unknown. ...

Bailey's Bundles

The Little and Big of Florian Ross

by C. Michael Bailey
June 28, 2013

German pianist/composer Florian Ross has been making provocative music since his early Naxos Jazz recordings. He is a rolling stone, moving from one format to the next, always bringing something new and leaving something newer. Florian Ross Elektrio Wheels and Wires Fuhrwerk- Musik 2013 The organ trio, specifically that of the organ-guitar-drums variety, has proven to be as durable an instrument format as it has a fertile ground from the whole ...