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

Cactus Truck with Jeb Bishop and Roy Campbell: Live in USA

Read "Live in USA" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
April 28, 2013

In the end of 2012 the Dutch power jazz trio Cactus Trio did a 37 gigs tour in the USA. The trio played in record stores, independent labels offices and small clubs, encountered cancellations due to hurricane Sandy, found last minute alternative spaces and hosted like- minded forward thinking improvisers. The limited edition recording chronicles this tour, highlighting three complete performances, from the beginning of the tour with trombonist Jeb Bishop, close to the end of the tour of the ...

Book Review

Idris Muhammad with Britt Alexander: Inside The Music – The Life of Idris Muhammad

by Dave Wayne
April 27, 2013

Inside the Music: The Life of Idris Muhammad Idris Muhammad with Britt Alexander 235 pages ISBN: 978-1-4691-9216-1 XLibris Corporation 2012 In popular music, particularly before musicians' credit listings became the norm on records, drummers --and really all rhythm section stalwarts--worked in obscurity no matter how brilliant their playing was. A case in point is the legendary New Orleans funk/soul/jazz drummer Idris Muhammad (or Leo Morris prior to his conversion to Islam). Known more ...

Album Review

Vincent Peirani: Thrill Box

Read "Thrill Box" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
April 27, 2013

Thrill Box is Vincent Peirani's debut release on the ACT Music label. Its title refers to Peirani's instrument of choice, the accordion. For many, the accordion springs most readily to mind as an East European folk instrument, for others it evokes images of Morris dancers on warm English spring evenings (although that's more usually the concertina) or summers at a French pavement cafe, for others still it's part of the musical culture of South America. On this mixture of original ...

Album Review

Pierre Sward Organ Jazz 'n' Soul Group: Slow But Fast

Read "Slow But Fast" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
April 27, 2013

This album poses two problems. First: the electric organ. Even when played by a master like Jimmy Smith, monotony can easily set in. It's something to do with the way the instrument dominates so completely, leaving no space. Problem No.2: funk, the dominant genre on Slow But Fast. The idea is to hit a groove, preferably--as US DJ Pete Fallico explains in his sleeve note, one of the “in-the-pocket" variety--and then do it to death. Again, monotony ...

Book Review

Alan Light: The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

by Nenad Georgievski
April 27, 2013

The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujah" Alan Light pp. 288 ISBN: 1451657846 2012 For ages musicologists, psychologists, producers and people alike have tried to decipher or unravel the secret of what makes certain songs so likeable and popular, even to give them a scientific explanation. What they have found out so far, from a scientific point of view, is that each musical hit is reliant ...

Album Review

The VJE: It's About Time

Read "It's About Time" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
April 27, 2013

In 2006 drummer Josh Feldstein established the Verve Jazz Ensemble, a contemporary jazz group playing standards and straight ahead material in the finest venues throughout the Connecticut area without having an album to their credit until this appropriately-titled recording debut It's About Time. On tap are an array of jazz standards featuring new arrangements and dynamic interpretations of music from the likes of Tad Dameron, Miles Davis, Henry Mancini and Oscar Hammerstein. From bebop rhythms to sweet melodic ballads and ...

Meet the Staff

Meet Dan McClenaghan

by AAJ Staff
April 26, 2013

I currently live in: Oceanside, CA I joined All About Jazz in: 2002 What made you decide to contribute to All About Jazz? I'd always sought out the reviews in the print magazines. Cruising the web, I found All About Jazz and liked it. I contacted Michael Ricci to see if he could use another reviewer. He said yes. How do you contribute to All About Jazz? I write CD reviews, edit CD reviews, ...

Jazz Emerges

Part 4: Trumpeter Percy and Clarinetist Willie Humphrey On Tour and At Home

by William Carter
April 26, 2013

Listen to “St. Louis Blues" class="meta-date"> In a long caption in my book, Preservation Hall (W.W. Norton, 1991), I told the story, quoted below, of the Humphreys' long lives and distinguished lineage. I never met their trombonist brother, Earl, who died relatively young. Their father, Willie Humphrey, Sr., was a clarinetist who spent much of his life on road tours; in a surviving publicity shot ...

Album Review

Stirrup: Sewn

by Troy Collins
April 26, 2013

The collective trio Stirrup is a salient example of the genre-defying cooperative spirit that defines Chicago's creative improvised music scene. Accustomed to collaborating with a wide variety of artists, these three musicians seamlessly incorporate an array of influences and approaches on Sewn, their debut recording as a trio.Drawing upon the folksy lyricism that underpins their ensemble work as the rhythm section of the Horse's Ha (a band that also features vocalist Janet Bean of Freakwater and Eleventh Dream ...

Bailey's Bundles

Transcription Prescription: Michele Campanella and Jon Kimura Parker

by C. Michael Bailey
April 26, 2013

Piano reductions of orchestral and vocal scores are a tradition meeting two ends. First, for the transcriber to show off his arrangement and performance abilities. Franz Liszt made a cottage industry of this. Second, to produce sheet music that could be played by the amateur in their perfectly appointed parlor before tea time (queue Beethoven's Symphony Number 6 and open the windows). Artistically, what the piano transcription offers the listener is an x-ray of musical composition. The more intelligent and ...