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

Lisa Hilton: Getaway

by Dan Bilawsky
April 2, 2013

Pianist Lisa Hilton has made an art out of balancing the simple and complex. Her work speaks with extreme clarity and serves as a benchmark for a less-is-more style of piano playing that appeals to a wide swath of listeners, but it isn't plain-Jane jazz. Hilton has a way of taking a basic idea and stretching its conceptual fabric to the breaking point. Singsong ideals are twisted, contorted and distorted, and rhythmic ideas are pulled out of focus, blurring the ...

We Travel the Spaceways

Jazz: A Blessed Obsession

by Mark Corroto
April 2, 2013

Jazz listeners travel some strange and beautiful paths. It might have all begun with collectors trying to find a legendary Edison cylinder that New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden--some believe to be the very first jazz musician--may (or may not) have recorded in 1904. Fast forward to modern times, a quick scan of eBay and the exorbitant prices bid for long out-of-print Free Music Production (FMP) LPs or alternative releases. $150 for Peter Brötzmann's first solo recording and $175, for the ...

Album Review

Luciano Mosetti & Anders Fardal with friends: Ela

by Chris Mosey
April 2, 2013

Music that is as light and airy as a midsummer night on Södermalm, Stockholm's south island. The feeling is summed up in Mikael Silkeberg's superb cover photo in which Luciano Mosetti and Anders Färdal are pictured stopping for a chat in the early hours on their way home from a gig. The sky behind them, which has never truly darkened, glows with the coming of the dawn. Mosetti, who plays trumpet and harmonica, is from Italy but ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Randy Simon

by AAJ Staff
April 2, 2013

Meet Randy Simon:Randy Simon had piano lessons for a year as a child, and took classical piano lessons for a period while in graduate school, but music took a back seat for many years as he built up a successful career as a physicist. “I did not return to the piano until I inherited the grand piano that I grew up with and started taking jazz piano lessons," says Simon. “After several years of study with jazz pianist ...

Album Review

Sudo Quartet: Live at Banlieue Bleue

Read "Live at Banlieue Bleue" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
April 2, 2013

The master improvisers on this live set convey a relaxed, yet thoroughly experimental dynamic amid dips, spikes, intricate sub-group dialogues and some mimicking along a course that may suggest an oscillating loop, countered by splintering soundscapes. Hence, the organic nature of the all-acoustic format offers additional insights and subtleties as the musicians scurry across non-linear frameworks, largely based on asymmetrical pulses. Violinist Carlos Zingaro and bassist Joelle Leandre spawn a multitude of intriguing contrasts. Whether it's Zingaro's streaming ...

Album Review

Michael Burks: Show of Strength

Read "Show of Strength" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
April 2, 2013

Michael “Iron Man" Burks grew up playing guitar. A quick study, he soon began leading the blues, rhythm and blues and soul house bands that backed O.V. Wright, Johnnie Taylor and other stars as they passed through the R&B circuit near his Arkansas hometown. Then, Burks put his own career aside for two decades to make sure his daughter had an attentive, responsive father.Burks resurfaced as a “40 year old newcomer" with his self-produced debut From the Inside ...

Mr. P.C.'s Guide to Jazz Etiquette and Bandstand Decorum

April 2013

by Mr. P.C.
April 1, 2013

Dear Mr. P.C.:I hate it when people add all those extra chromatic chord changes on “I Can't Get Started," like in bar three starting on a B minor seventh. What a pointless pain in the ass! I Can't Keep Going

Dear ICKG:You know those speed bumps they put on some roads? Sure they're annoying, but they keep traffic at a safe speed and prevent possible injury. Well, the chromatic changes on “I Can't Get ...

Album Review

Ches Smith and These Arches: Hammered

Read "Hammered" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
April 1, 2013

Drummer, composer, and bandleader Ches Smith is an artist with indisputable abilities who thrives on the fringes whether supplying tight rhythms for notable musicians such as guitarist Marc Ribot, saxophonist Darius Jones, and the indie rock band Xiu Xiu, or creating self-produced works like his solo multi-instrumental electronic project Psycho Predictions (Preposterous Bee,2012). One of Smith's working bands is These Arches, a group of like-minded artists that provide plenty of forward thinking music in Hammered, the appropriately ...

Album Review

Matthew Sheens: Every Eight Seconds

Read "Every Eight Seconds" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
April 1, 2013

Debut recordings can sometimes suffer from a little too much subservience to the jazz cannon, as musicians perhaps wish to stamp their jazz credentials from the get go, or as is the case with Australian-born, New York-based pianist Matthew Sheens' Every Eight Seconds they can announce a refreshingly personal voice. Sheen--a former student of pianists Fred Hersch and Jason Moran--exhibits a flair for melody and a broad vocabulary that leans towards the contemporary. There's also strong rhythmic heart, both in ...

Profile

Gunter Baby Sommer: Kommeno - A Threnody

by Duncan Heining
April 1, 2013

Seventy years ago, the small village of Kommeno in Greece experienced a tragedy from which it has never really recovered. What happened there on August 16, 1943 was not unusual in the context of a war pursued by an enemy determined to stamp out all opposition. Other towns in Greece and its islands, such as Distomon and Kalavrita, had suffered similar fates--just as other towns and villages far beyond Europe would endure comparable evils in later wars. But one thing ...