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

Randy Crawford and Joe Sample: Live

by Jeff Winbush
October 23, 2012

It's a slight exaggeration to say that keyboardist Joe Sample rescued Randy Crawford from pop music limbo, but it's not too far from the truth. Crawford is among the most distinct vocalists working, but her discography is riddled with over-arranged and over-produced disappointments. One of her finest moments remains when The Crusaders dropped all 11 minutes of “Street Life" on radio airwaves in 1979, featuring Crawford belting it out.Some 27 years would pass Sample and Crawford before they ...

Album Review

Wadada Leo Smith / Louis Moholo-Moholo: Ancestors

Read "Ancestors" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
October 23, 2012

There is a natural fit between drums and trumpet. It stretches back all the way into prehistory, with the shamanistic combination of animal horns and percussive devices, persisting up until the early twentieth century in military drum and bugle corps who passed signals and directed troop movement. That synergy continues to bear artistic fruit to the present day in jazz, nowhere more so than in the work of distinguished trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. He already numbers four such meetings in ...

Live Review

2012 Thelonious Monk International Drums Competition

by Franz A. Matzner
October 23, 2012

It can never be said that the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz does anything halfway. Held annually at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, this year's competition and gala concert was ambitious and extravagant--equal parts a celebration of jazz drumming, a salute to women's past and present contributions to the art form, and a promotion for the Institute's many programs.Lasting well over two hours, the event unfolded like a beautifully orchestrated tapas banquet. The feast covered not only ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Daniel Stawinski

by AAJ Staff
October 23, 2012

Meet Daniel Stawinski: Born in Berlin in 1979, Daniel Stawinski began his musical education at age six with classical piano. Some years later he started playing jazz under the guidance of Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase, two of Germany's main free jazz pianists. From 2001 till 2005 he studied jazz piano at the Musikhochschule Hanns Eisler and joined the Bujazzo (German Youth Jazz Orchestra), directed by Peter Herbolzheimer. During this time he was part of numerous jazz ...

Album Review

Chad McCullough & Bram Weijters: Urban Nightingale

Read "Urban Nightingale" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 23, 2012

Chad McCullough, with one CD under his own name--the outstanding Dark Wood, Dark Water (Origin Records, 2009)--has also contributed his distinctive voice to recordings by the Kora Band and Tunnel Six, all under the Origin Records banners. But the Seattle-based trumpeter must have a European sensibility; his finest work to date has been in teaming, as co-leader, with artists from the other side of the Atlantic--Slavakian pianist Michal Vanoucek, on The Sky Cries (Origin Records, 2010), and Antwerp-based pianist Bram ...

Album Review

Sleeping in Vilna: Why Waste Time

Read "Why Waste Time" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
October 23, 2012

This transnational quartet blends poetry with intriguing, all-improvised sonic textures. On the poetry side are vocalist and hip-hop artist Mike Ladd, who worked with pianist Vijay Iyer on the staged projects In What Language and Still Life with Commentator (Pi, 2004 and 2007), and clarinetist Carol Robinson, who has recorded music from such experimental composers as Giacinto Scelsi, Morton Feldman and Luigi Nono. Ladd also employs vintage synthesizers, while Robinson contributes spoken words. Drummer Dirk Rothbrust, who plays mainly new ...

Album Review

James Luther Dickinson/North Mississippi Allstars: I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone

Read "I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone" reviewed by Doug Collette

by Doug Collette
October 23, 2012

The music of I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone is as ghostly as the black and white cover photo of its principal. The North Mississippi Allstars provides appropriately earthy accompaniment to a front man who commands the spotlight in larger-than-life fashion.A little background helps enhance the focus on the portrait provided by this album, sufficiently vivid as it is. By the time of his death in 2009, James Luther Dickinson had become something of a griot of southern ...

Interview

Harold McMillan: Inspirational Commitment

by Josep Pedro
October 23, 2012

Deeply involved in Austin's music and art community, Harold McMillan has been providing access and exposure primarily to traditions derived from African American culture for more than twenty years. Initially he started the Blues Family Tree Project, a documentary collective first conceived as an oral history project, which ultimately contributed to the founding of Diverse Arts Culture Works in 1994, four years later.A non-profit multidisciplinary cultural arts organization dedicated to the long-term development of the African American Cultural ...

Album Review

William Parker Orchestra: Essence of Ellington

Read "Essence of Ellington" reviewed by John Sharpe

by John Sharpe
October 22, 2012

Talk to any member of the so-called avant-garde, and what is immediately apparent is a deep familiarity and love of the tradition. That's not to say that there is a desire to replicate: almost the opposite. New York City bass icon William Parker first began listening to Duke Ellington when he was seven years old. One thing he learned was not to imitate but to find his own way in music. And that comes through in spades on this double ...

Album Review

John McLaughlin & The 4th Dimension: Now Here This

Read "Now Here This" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
October 22, 2012

Guitarist John McLaughlin and his 4th Dimension group's studio debut, To The One (Abstract Logix, 2010), mined the past for inspiration. The spirit of saxophonist John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965) drove McLaughlin's most charged electric playing in years, proving he'd lost none of his fire. Two years on, and McLaughlin's 4th Dimension returns another energetic set of strong compositions, less specifically inspired than To The One, but inspired nonetheless. McLaughlin's electric guitar and guitar-synthesizer swing between biting edge ...