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

The Clayton Brothers: The Gathering

Read "The Gathering" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
December 20, 2012

The Clayton Brothers' prior ArtistShare albums were high quality, thematically driven outings that highlighted their respect for notable jazz siblings on Brother To Brother (ArtistShare, 2008), and honored the relationship between the art forms of dance and jazz with The New Song And Dance (ArtistShare, 2010). For the group's third effort on this fan-funded imprint, The Claytons loosen the self-imposed thematic mandate, simply inviting a pair of high profile friends to join them and wrote some music to suit the ...

Year in Review

Chris May's Best Releases of 2012

by Chris May
December 20, 2012

Christian ScottaTunde AdjuahConcord RecordsIn 1959, when Whitney Balliett, the New Yorker's jazz critic, published a collection of his columns, he titled the book The Sound of Surprise. The promise of the unexpected, wrote Balliett, was jazz's most precious quality. In a year which went on to include the release of trumpeter Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (Columbia), saxophonist John Coltrane's Giant Steps (Atlantic), pianist Dave Brubeck's Time Out (Columbia)...continue.Ahmad JamalBlue ...

Album Review

Nat Birchall: World Without Form

Read "World Without Form" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
December 20, 2012

In a world that often seems bereft of any sense of spirituality it's good to know that performers like saxophonist Nat Birchall are still true to the spirituality of music. Birchall, based in the northeast of England, continues to create beautiful, soulful, music on his fifth album as leader, World Without Form, in the company of some of the UK's finest young players.Birchall's avowed love of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders remains clear in his playing, such as ...

Year in Review

C. Michael Bailey's Best Releases of 2012

by C. Michael Bailey
December 20, 2012

Cat ConnerCat TalesOne of the greatest jazz performance challenges is playing and singing ballads slow...sometimes called “calendar slow." The trick is playing slowly without dragging or stalling. It is simple physics, the difference between velocity and momentum. Simple tempo may be understood in terms of speed (or velocity) but swing, swing has the added element of musical weight about it, ensuring that once motion is started, no matter how slow, it is properly maintained by the ...

Album Review

Pacific Mambo Orchestra: Pacific Mambo Orchestra

Read "Pacific Mambo Orchestra" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
December 20, 2012

San Francisco's premier Latin big band launches its self-titled Pacific Mambo Orchestra (PMO) debut barely two years after pianist Christian Tumalan and trumpeter Steffen Kuehn founded the 19-piece ensemble. A festival favorite and fixture in the Bay Area, the PMO is a sizzling modern day Latin salsa jazz orchestra built to revisit the big band sounds of '40s through the '60s as they perform dynamite arrangements of music from such Latin giants as Tito Puente, Machito, Celia Cruz and others. ...

Album Review

Hendrik Meurkens: Live at Bird's Eye

Read "Live at Bird's Eye" reviewed by Chris M. Slawecki

by Chris M. Slawecki
December 20, 2012

Live at Bird's Eye embodies the truly global nature of modern jazz: Meurkens' fourth ZOHO release was recorded at two concerts performed at the Bird's Eye Jazz Club in Basel (Switzerland) by his Samba Jazz Quartet, which features this German-born vibes and harmonica player with Russian pianist Misha Tsiganov and the rhythm section of bassist Gustavo Amarante and drummer Adriano Santos, who demonstrate a deep intellectual and emotional familiarity with sambas and other forms from their native Brazil.Tsiganov's ...

Opinion

Jazz, Politics, Edward Kennedy and the Ghosts of Richard Nixon: Our American Dialogue and the Hatfields and McCoys

by Carl L. Hager
December 20, 2012

To get into heaven, don't snap for a seven Live clean, don't have no fault Oh, I take the gospel, whenever it's possible But with a grain of salt --"It Ain't Necessarily So," from Porgy & Bess by George and Ira Gershwin Edward Kennedy Ellington celebrated his 70th birthday at the White House, where he received the first Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by the newly inaugurated chief ...

Opinion

Jazz, Baseball, Politics and the Beltway Blues: Our American Dialogue, Part II

by Carl L. Hager
December 20, 2012

Ref: How Life Imitates the World Series (Penguin, 1983) by Thomas Boswell Well, that's over. $2.6 billion later, the U.S. presidential election is history. No more polls, no more red state / blue state electoral maps, no more trash-talking. Right on its heels, the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) announced the results of their voting for the league MVPs, Cy Young and other annual awards, and then issued the list of 2013's Hall of Fame ...

Album Review

Stuart McCallum: Distilled Live

Read "Distilled Live" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
December 19, 2012

Emerging from the interzone inhabited by post-Pat Metheny guitar jazz, electronica, minimalism and ambient, Manchester guitarist Stuart McCallum's music combines the lush, the layered and the looped with real-time emotional engagement and vigor. Made with a large ensemble including acoustic string and woodwind sections alongside the electronica, Distilled Live sounds rather like an orchestrated version of Steve Reich's shimmeringly beautiful “Electric Counterpoint," written for Metheny and recorded by him in 1987 (and also available in a brilliantly articulated concert recording ...

Jazz That Scratches, Swings and Pops

How (Not) To Listen To Early Jazz

by Andrew J. Sammut
December 19, 2012

Jazz listeners may admit that early music got things to where they are now, similar to how the Model T made the Lamborghini possible. Most just prefer not to drive anything too old. For most listeners, early jazz remains an esoteric and even a strange experience. Perhaps it's all that monochromatic footage of tuxedoed fox trotters. Maybe it's those parades of straw-hatted, red suspendered and often white-haired Dixieland groups at amusement parks. It might be the kick ...