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

Wayne Shorter Quartet: Without a Net

Read "Without a Net" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
February 7, 2013

It is now well over a decade since legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter formed this quartet with Danilo Pérez, John Patitucci and Brian Blade to tour and record Footprints Live! (Verve, 2001), an album which signaled the end of a period in the doldrums for Shorter and a cracking return to form. The energy and verve of the quartet's three younger players brought out the best of Shorter, a reminder why he deserved that “legendary" tag. A 2003 studio-recorded ...

Album Review

Wayne Shorter: Without a Net

Read "Without a Net" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
February 7, 2013

The cover art of Without a Net alone might raise a few eyebrows, but it's the music that proves saxophonist Wayne Shorter is still one of jazz's most ardent provocateurs. In his return to Blue Note after 43 years, Shorter--who turns 80 in 2013-- demonstrates his ongoing vitality and ingenuity as an extraordinary composer, improviser, and leader of one of today's strongest quartets. For over ten years, the seemingly telepathic and subliminal messages that Shorter, drummer Brian Blade, bassist John ...

Album Review

Charles Flores: Impressions Of Graffiti

Read "Impressions Of Graffiti" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 6, 2013

No album should ever serve as a debut and a posthumously-released pièce de résistance, but such is the case with bassist Charles Flores' Impressions Of Graffiti. At the age of 40, the Grammy Award-winning bassist, who spent time working with pianist Michel Camilo, trumpeter Brian Lynch, reed master Paquito D'Rivera, drummer Dafnis Prieto, and numerous other Latin jazz notables, finally found time to put himself first, but his time quickly ran out; cancer took his life in August of 2012, ...

Bailey's Bundles

Horn Soliloquy: Mort Weiss & Sam Newsome

by C. Michael Bailey
February 6, 2013

Solo horn recitals are nothing new. Both Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy produced several each. Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins released a sparking The Solo Album (Milestone, 1985), while Bobby Watson's alto wailed solo on This Little Light of Mine (Red Records, 1993). No other format allows the horn player more freedom than playing solo. Here are two fully-realized examples of this freedom in performance. Mort Weiss Raising The Bar: The Definitive Mort Weiss ...

Album Review

Celine Bonacina Trio: Open Heart

Read "Open Heart" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
February 6, 2013

The baritone saxophone is right at the heart of Céline Bonacina's Open Heart, her second album for ACT Music. This particular sax is too often consigned to the role of “rhythm saxophone," operating at the lower reaches of its register, with only a handful of players making full use of its potential. Bonacina, a French saxophonist and composer, is one of that handful. Her command of the instrument enables her to bring it to the forefront of her music, giving ...

Album Review

Aaron Neville: My True Story

Read "My True Story" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
February 6, 2013

My True Story is New Orleans royalty Aaron Neville's first recording in three years and his first for Blue Note Records. Most recently, Neville has been covering familiar territory with I Know I've Been Changed (EMI Gospel, 2010), Bring It On Home... The Soul Classics (Burgundy, 2006), Christmas Prayer (EMI Gospel, 2005) and Nature Boy: The Standards Album (Verve, 2003). He continues this trend with his sincere and heartfelt homage to doo-wop, My True Story. Like Ray Charles and Van ...

Album Review

Miles Davis Quintet: Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2

Read "Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
February 6, 2013

It's little surprise that the recordings comprising Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 were captured in the wake of the recording of the jazz icon's seminal album In A Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) and prior to the release of the even more significant followup, Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970), in the spring of the following year.Miles Davis never waited around for reaction to his groundbreaking music in any era of his career and at this juncture, ...

Hardly Strictly Jazz

Beyond The Blues

by Skip Heller
February 6, 2013

Back when I was a kid—I was born in 1965—the first comprehensive push for children's education about American Black History was on. Elementary school libraries suddenly included books about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and George Washington Carver, and there were even a few books about jazz and blues for young readers.I wish I could remember the title of the book about blues I found in my school library when I was in the fourth grade (about 1976). It ...

Album Review

Old Time Musketry: Different Times

Read "Different Times" reviewed by Dave Wayne

by Dave Wayne
February 5, 2013

Brooklyn-based Old Time Musketry is a band whose moniker foreshadows one aspect of the sound it's after, steeped in folk music and Americana. But the quartet's debut, Different Times, contains so much more. First and foremost, Old Time Musketry is a jazz quartet. Sure there's quite a bit of accordion and clarinet on this recording, but these guys are jazz guys. Mostly.The title track, with its rhapsodic tenor and piano melody sprawling over pattering free-ish rhythms, evokes memories ...

Live Review

Ninety Miles: Boulder, CO, January 17, 2013

by Geoff Anderson
February 5, 2013

Ninety MilesMacky AuditoriumBoulder, COJanuary 17, 2013Cuba has long held an allure for jazz musicians. The sounds and particularly the rhythms emanating from that country have influenced jazz nearly from the beginning. From early in the 20th Century, the Latin tinge, as Jelly Roll Morton called it, has seasoned the jazz sound. By the 1940s, through the work of musicians like Mario Bauza, Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie, Afro Cuban jazz became an important part of ...