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

John Medeski: A Different Time

Read "A Different Time" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
April 21, 2013

John Medeski's A Different Time certainly lives up to its title. It is both everything and nothing like what might be expected from a musician whose stock in trade is a concerted effort to avoid the predictable, as a charter member of Medeski Martin & Wood, in the course of his many live solo efforts and in group settings with guitarists Will Bernard and David Fuczynski or last year's tribute to Tony Williams, Spectrum Road.As such this solo ...

Album Review

Beegie Adair: Monica Ramey and the Beegie Adair Trio

Read "Monica Ramey and the Beegie Adair Trio" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
April 20, 2013

The true beauty of any Beegie Adair recording is that it will be straight down the middle mainstream jazz. It is money in the bank. Adair's 50-year career has found her leading her jazz trio, writing advertising jingles and accompanying vocalists, as she does on the present Monica Ramey and the Beegie Adair Trio. Ramey, a native of the midwest, take a predictably conservative approach to the Great American Songbook. Her doing so does us the favor of reminding us ...

Extended Analysis

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Live From Alabama

by C. Michael Bailey
April 20, 2013

The review of Blackberry Smoke's The Whippoorwill (Southern Ground, 2012) provoked the comment: “The review sets up a bit of a straw man, since southern rock is alive and well in the hands of bands like the Drive-by Truckers and Jason Isbell...These guys did not come out of a vast wasteland.". Well, indeed. And speaking of Jason Isbell, he and his new band The 400 Unit released the live recording, Live From Alabama which ...

Album Review

Norbert Stein: Pata On The Cadillac

Read "Pata On The Cadillac" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
April 20, 2013

German tenor saxophonist Norbert Stein is a distinguished composer and leader. He can prompt laughter, despair, and mesmerize the listener via regimented arrangements, sparked by difficult time signatures and multilayered sound mosaics. A self-described patamusician, inferring the Pataphysics movement started in 1948 by French playwright Alfred Jarry, Stein proffers an existential realm of thought, equated to Pata's science of imaginary solutions. The artist's long-running band essentially pulls out the stops throughout this affair, brimming with attractive melodies, ...

Album Review

Thomas Albaek Jakobsen's Flux: Relationships

Read "Relationships" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
April 20, 2013

The aptly-titled Relationships describes best the debut release of Danish drummer Thomas Albæk Jakobsen's quintet Flux. It is all about the relationships between the musicians, their emphatic interplay, how they inspire each other and the way comprising pieces are weaved together to form a distinctive whole. Jakobsen's well-crafted compositions have a strong melodic approach but with enough suggestive segments that invite the Flux members to expand and to draw these compositions to more open, poetic ends. The ...

Extended Analysis

U2: Achtung Baby 20th Anniversary edition

by Nenad Georgievski
April 20, 2013

Every once in a while, a record will appear that will change the way to which music is listened, which will expand concept of music and its essence and boundless potential. A record of such importance has the ability to disrupt and shake the space-time continuum of musical history, serving as a signpost to everything that will follow afterward. One such record was U2's Achtung Baby (Island, 1991), which was hailed upon its release as a rock 'n' roll blueprint ...

Highly Opinionated

The Led Zeppelin Papers: Sacred Cows, Led Zeppelin and Does the Song Remain the Same?

by C. Michael Bailey
April 20, 2013

"Sacred cows make the tastiest cheeseburgers" --after Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989) I have always said of popular culture, that like a McDonald's cheeseburger, it is to be consumed but never considered. Much of music is nothing more than a reflection of popular culture and certainly falls beneath that grand proclamation. A good deal of hip hop and all of dubstep, electro house, post-hardcore and what passes for R&B today will not be remembered, much less heard regularly, in fifty ...

Album Review

Osvaldo Coluccino: Oltreorme

by John Eyles
April 19, 2013

Osvaldo Coluccino's debut album on Another Timbre, Atto, was one of 2012's more pleasant surprises. Despite Coluccino's history of composing for conventional instruments--his release immediately preceding Atto was String Quartets (NEOS, 2012)--for the composition featured on Atto he opted to only employ (unspecified) acoustic objects which he struck, rubbed or blew into. Using no electronic manipulation, the end result was an intriguing overlap of ambient, electro-acoustic improvisation and modern composition in which it was impossible to identify the sources of ...

Album Review

Nouveau Stride: Fourteen by Nouveau Stride

Read "Fourteen by Nouveau Stride" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
April 19, 2013

Composing lyrics to established jazz standards--those jazz instrumental compositions that have become established in the canon, Thelonious Monk's “'Round Midnight" is the most famous example--is an artform all it own. Classic composers/interpreters include Eddie Jefferson, Babs Gonzales, King Pleasure (Clarence Beeks) and Jon Hendricks. There have been recent vocalese contributions made by a new generation that includes most recently Dorian Devins on The Procrastinator (Self Produced, 2013) Nouveau Stride is vocalist/lyricist Lorraine Feather and pianist Stephanie Trick. ...

Extended Analysis

Various Artists: Rework_ Philip Glass Remixes

by Nenad Georgievski
April 19, 2013

In these modern times, remixing is seen as merely another way of reinterpreting someone's work. Just like jazz or rock artists reworking old standards or classics in their own way, so, too, do remixers apply a modern method of interpreting people's songs, compositions--or, their entire oeuvre.According to Wikipedia “the remix is an alternative version of a song, different from the original version. A remixer uses audio mixing to compose an alternate master recording of a song, adding or ...