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

Barry Altschul: The 3dom Factor

Read "The 3dom Factor" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
February 18, 2013

Drummer Barry Altschul is widely revered for his innovative work during the 1970s with the all-star quartet Circle and as a member of the influential trios of pianist Paul Bley and multi-instrumentalist Sam Rivers. Despite his avant-garde credentials, Altschul's purview also included sideman work with traditional jazz artists, including saxophonists Sonny Criss, Lee Konitz and Art Pepper.Revealing his fondness for all facets of the jazz continuum, Altschul led his own diverse groups in the succeeding decades, first documented ...

Album Review

David Weiss & Point Of Departure: Venture Inward

Read "Venture Inward" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 18, 2013

If music can be described as either masculine or feminine, then recordings by trumpeter David Weiss and his Point of Departure quintet are simply testosteronic. Built upon the legacy of trumpeter Miles Davis' second great quintet and saxophonist Billy Harper's Black Saint inheritance, Weiss presents dexterous arrangements of muscular, second wave hard bop music.This studio session, Venture Inward, was recorded in 2008, one day before the stunning live date at the Jazz Standard, released as Snuck In (Sunnyside, ...

Interview

John Daversa: Bursting Out of LA

by R.J. DeLuke
February 18, 2013

Seen in the hallways at California State University in Northridge, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he teaches big band arranging, jazz history and other music courses, John Daversa might be seen with his goatee, and dense, dark and curly hair, parted in the middle, and correctly sense he might be involved in one of the arts programs.What students at the university might not know is that Daversa is a man of immense compositional and arranging talents, who ...

Extended Analysis

Richard Thompson: Electric [Deluxe]

by John Kelman
February 17, 2013

The title may be Electric--and, to be sure, it contains no shortage of the unfettered Celtic quirkiness that's garnered Richard Thompson accolades like “the best electric guitarist since Jimi Hendrix" (Scott Timberg, L.A. Times)--but that doesn't mean there's a paradigm shift going on in the British singer/songwriter's overall modus operandi. Instead, what Thompson does, as he's largely been doing since he first went solo in 1971, is deliver another consistently fine set of original material, playing with a core trio ...

Album Review

Ellen Robinson: Don't Wait Too Long

Read "Don't Wait Too Long" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
February 17, 2013

Bay-Area vocalist Ellen Robinson is a study in jazz grace and elegance. Rather than a bright and shiny repertoire of specialized training (of which there is nothing wrong), Robinson sports a music education degree from Manhattanville college with a major in piano, and rides an experiential arc in to the heart of the Great American Songbook. Robinson readily stakes her claim on the rich melodies of the stage and Tin Pan Alley, demanding that the lyrics move her before she ...

Book Review

Barney Hoskyns: Trampled Under Foot - The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin

by Nenad Georgievski
February 17, 2013

Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin Barney Hoskyns 640 pages ISBN: 9780571259359 Faber and Faber 2012 It takes little for a band of such stature as Led Zeppelin to start a raging wildfire or to cause tsunami-like shockwaves every time this behemoth shakes its tail. Literally, in 2012, when the band announced the release of its momentous reunion gig at London's O2 Arena it ...

Album Review

Roscoe Mitchell: Three Compositions

Read "Three Compositions" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
February 17, 2013

On Three Compositions, veteran Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell's scores are interpreted by an established grouping with an AACM lineage, namesake flautist Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble, unlike his previous album of written material, Numbers (Rogue Art, 2011), which featured a varied cast of contemporary players. It makes all the difference. This performance was one of three by the flautist's band at the 2009 edition of Sardinia's Sant' Anna Arresi jazz festival, and is captured here in sparkling clarity. Mitchell's subtle ...

Album Review

Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Slippery Rock

Read "Slippery Rock" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 17, 2013

Strangely enough, bandleader and bassist Moppa Elliot derived inspiration for his compositions on Slippery Rock from smooth jazz albums of the late 1970s and '80s. However, it's more like smooth jazz under siege; with resonating rhythms, scorching and wily horns choruses, the program offers subliminal detections of commercial jazz fare as the band often breaks into complex and peppery free form jaunts. MOPDtK acutely tears down most of the melodic content, only to reassemble it into fractured and largely improvised ...

Album Review

Luis Muñoz: Luz

by Mark Corroto
February 17, 2013

Lessons in light--or, in Spanish, luz--lush arrangements need not be dense, as proven in Costa Rican-born Californian Luis Muñoz's compositions, orchestrations and arrangements on Luz, his sixth release for the Pelin label following the widely acclaimed Invisible (Pelin, 2010) and Of Soul And Shadow (Pelin, 2008).While his roots go back to Central America, this release bears a folkish Americana, one that absorbs influences and styles from every musician with whom Muñoz interacts. From the shortest, simplest melody of ...

The Mort Report

Mort Meets the Mob

by Mort Weiss
February 16, 2013

Hello again. This remembrance takes us back to the early 1960s when I went under the name of Mort Wise and my band's name was The Wisemen. Go ahead and Google Mort Wise And The Wisemen, and you'll probably come up with the recording we did (on a 45 rpm) called “Wild Boy." Also, you might read the AAJ article/profile Mort To Come, which takes one back to a literal “What Makes Morty Run" experience (knocked me out!). So, at ...