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

Birds

by Ian Patterson
March 21, 2013

Norwegian saxophonist/composer Marius Neset's prowess as a powerful, inventive saxophonist is well noted, yet his trajectory as a composer has been equally fascinating to behold. His debut as leader, the impressive Suite for the Seven Mountains (Calibrated, 2008), demonstrated early compositional ambition with the use of violin, viola and cello. Neset's ongoing involvement in Jazz Kamikaze meant a follow-up solo recording would have to wait, but Jazz Kamikaze's oddly pop-centric, anthemic Supersonic Revolutions (Seven Seas Music, 2010) was also bolstered ...

Album Review

Steve Coleman and Five Elements: Functional Arrhythmias

Read "Functional Arrhythmias" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
March 21, 2013

Ever the thinker, saxophonist Steve Coleman now delves into the connection between human biology and music with Functional Arrhythmias, perhaps his most accessible release in recent memory. With a vast discography that has covered everything from unadulterated funk in 1988's Sine Die (Pegasus) to advanced concepts in 2011's The Mancy of Sound (Pi), his curiosity and influence continue to expand.Coleman reenlists the kinetic rhythm-section of Anthony Tidd (electric bass) and Sean Rickman (drums) who appeared on The Sonic ...

Album Review

Sex Mob: Cinema, Circus & Spaghetti (Sex Mob Plays Fellini: The Music of Nino Rota)

Read "Cinema, Circus & Spaghetti (Sex Mob Plays Fellini: The Music of Nino Rota)" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
March 21, 2013

Founded 17 years ago as a showcase for leader Steven Bernstein's unique slide trumpet, Sex Mob has since embraced a far more ambitious mission: to revive the adventurous spirit of prewar jazz. Bernstein realized early on that playing radically altered covers was the best way to lure an audience into his roguish sound world. Since then the group has deconstructed and reworked everything from ABBA's “Fernando" to the “Macarena," while 2001's Sex Mob Does Bond (Ropeadope) was dedicated solely to ...

Extended Analysis

Tommy Flanagan / Jaki Byard: The Magic Of 2

by Dan Bilawsky
March 21, 2013

San Francisco's famed Keystone Korner shuttered its doors in 1983, but it's getting more press today than plenty of clubs that are still serving up jazz. In the past two years alone, a previously unreleased live recording of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard--Pinnacle (Resonance, 2011)--launched Resonance Records' Keystone Korner Live Discoveries series, photographer Kathy Sloane released Keystone Korner: Portrait Of A Jazz Club (IU Press, 2011) to great acclaim, and the club's owner--tireless jazz advocate Todd Barkan--started hosting/curating “Keystone Korner Nights" at ...

Album Review

Lucien Dubuis Trio: Future Rock

Read "Future Rock" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 21, 2013

The entire debate that bids one to take sides regarding art being either made by conservatory trained artistes or original primitives is quite the red herring. Sure, punk rock favored emotion over skill, but nobody would argue against Television guitarist Tom Verlaine's talent or the folk music of guitarist Bill Frisell. If you can play and you have not shed you primal unpretentious sound, then we have the recipe for a moving experience.Saxophonist Lucien Dubuis's trio has both ...

Album Review

Stephan Micus: Panagia

by John Kelman
March 21, 2013

Almost like clockwork since 1983 (though he began his association with the label, on its subsidiary JAPO label, in 1977 with Implosions), multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus has been delivering albums to ECM every one-to-three years. His modus operandi is largely the same: continue to scour the world for rarely exposed ethnic instruments and use them in contexts different than those for which, perhaps, they were originally intended and, over the course of decades, create a body of work as profound in ...

Take Five With...

Take Five with Mark Zandveld

by AAJ Staff
March 21, 2013

Meet Mark Zandveld: Bassist, producer, and composer Mark Zandveld was born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is the director/ coordinator of the jazz quartet of the American singer/composer, Deborah Carter, to whom he is married. They produced five CDs together. They tour often abroad for concerts, jazz festivals, jazz club tours, and seminars in many countries like The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, USA, Azerbaijan, Tunisia, Russia, Lithuania, Colombia, Austria, Canada, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, Switzerland, UK, Malta, Turkey, France.

Album Review

Goran Strandberg Nonet: Monks Mood

Read "Monks Mood" reviewed by Florence Wetzel

by Florence Wetzel
March 20, 2013

Twentieth-century jazz offered bountiful gifts that musicians will continue to mine for, well, as long as people play jazz. One gift is pianist Thelonious Monk's compositions, which are surely among the music's most original and appealing; as Past Daily states, you can never get too much Monk in your diet. Another gift is the nonet format on Birth of the Cool (Capitol, 1957); Monk himself had a nonet at one point, but the Birth of the Cool sessions are unique ...

Extended Analysis

Charles Lloyd: Quartets

by John Kelman
March 20, 2013

ECM's Old & New Masters Edition series was not just created to bring material back into print. Some has been available on CD before, but an even bigger carrot for fans of the label is material that has never been on compact disc, like bassist Arild Andersen's three 1970s recordings, collected on Green in Blue (2010), or first-time full two-CD reissues of double albums like guitarist Terje Rypdal's Odyssey (1975), which also includes a previously unreleased live set, or pianist ...

Album Review

Billy Martin's Wicked Knee: Heels Over Head

Read "Heels Over Head" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
March 20, 2013

After a long series of way under-the radar solo projects, drummer Billy Martin has chosen a more accessible route in the last couple of years, beginning with his duo collaboration with keyboardist Wil Blades, Shimmy (The Royal Potato Family, 2012).The followup to the eponymous seven-track EP, Heels Over Head is equally easy to digest, perhaps more so, even if the instrumental lineup of Wicked Knee is somewhat unconventional. Martin has enlisted longtime kindred spirit and master horn man ...