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

Insub Meta Orchestra: Archive #1

Read "Archive #1" reviewed by Florence Wetzel

by Florence Wetzel
August 27, 2012

Founded in September 2010, the Insub Meta Orchestra (IMO) is an ensemble composed of several dozen improvisers from Switzerland and beyond. The group first explored its possibilities in seven separate concerts and then, in the summer of 2011, forty members hunkered down for a three-day musical marathon, which allowed it time and space to delve into a few pieces and explore the shifting line between orchestration and improvisation. The result of this group vision quest is Archive #1, a gripping ...

Album Review

Manhattan School of Music Chamber Jazz Ensemble and TACTUS feat. Dave Liebman: Sky Changes

Read "Sky Changes" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
August 27, 2012

Jazz and classical music have long been bedfellows. As far back as the 1920s, clarinetist/soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet was quoting Italian opera in solos, and in the 1950s/60s, notable composers/arrangers like Gil Evans and George Russell were, at least in part, driven to innovation through exposure/study of contemporary classical music, with Gunther Schuller even coining the phrase “Third Stream" to describe the two musics' meeting point. But, for the most part, all of this music bears some kind of connection ...

Live Review

Flow Festival: Helsinki, Finland, August 10-12, 2012

by Anthony Shaw
August 27, 2012

Flow Festival in FinlandSuvilahti, HelsinkiAugust 10-12, 2012 Every music festival worth its salt can boast something different from the others, where it's the performers, participants, legacy or location. Helsinki's Flow Festival, always held on the last official weekend of summer before schools restart, has established itself, in its nine years of existence, as the only truly urban festival in the country--a feature reinforced by Helsinki's role in 2012 as official Design Capital of the World. It is ...

Album Review

Theo Ceccaldi Trio: Carrousel

Read "Carrousel" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 27, 2012

This unique French string trio was recommended to Ayler Records by double bass master Joëlle Léandre. Léandre was right, of course. Carrousel, the debut from this trio, is an original set of sophisticated compositions delivered by mature musicians who found a sound of their own--a chamber-like quality but an adventurous one, intense but lyrical, light but profound. The trio's instrumentation is rare: violin played by leader Théo Ceccaldi (who composed most of the compositions here); cello, by ...

Album Review

Richie Vitale: Vitalogy

Read "Vitalogy" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
August 27, 2012

Richie Vitale is a fixture of the New York music scene, a veteran trumpeter with a resume that includes The Buddy Rich Big Band, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra. Vitalogy is not a big band recording, but features Vitale in a quintet format blowing through a short repertoire of power-packed bop, balladic and Latin-flavored originals. Each of the six tracks on this EP-length release is a keeper, offering rich melodies ...

Album Review

Phil Grenadier / Bruno Raberg Duo: Plunge

by Dan Bilawsky
August 27, 2012

Two men are responsible for every sound heard on the avant-leaning Plunge, but this record shouldn't be mistaken for a naked, take-me-as-I-am duo date. Bassist Bruno Råberg and trumpeter Phil Grenadier take full advantage of technology to create piquant aural landscapes that expand and expound on the very nature of man-to-man dialogue. This pair plunges into the abyss of the mind as they explore themselves, their surroundings, their instruments and their connection to one another, but this ...

Interview

Mike LeDonne: Where There’s Smoke

by Bob Kenselaar
August 27, 2012

Mike LeDonne has more than made his mark in jazz over the years, on both piano and organ. One of the New York jazz scene's premier instrumentalists, he's long been a favorite of fellow musicians. “He is incredible," said the late Oscar Peterson, who once described how he would rush to hear LeDonne play every night on a jazz-cruise gig that featured both musicians on the bill. First known mainly for his piano work, LeDonne has increased his profile as ...

Album Review

Ian Shaw: A Ghost In Every Bar

Read "A Ghost In Every Bar" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
August 26, 2012

Ian Shaw's warm and evocative voice, Fran Landesman's superb lyrics and music from some of her best collaborators: A Ghost In Every Bar has them all. Put it another way: on A Ghost In Every Bar one of the finest singers in contemporary music interprets some of the greatest songs of the last 50 years. If either--or both--of those descriptions sound like hype, that's OK; sometimes the hype hits the nail on the head.Landesman was born in New ...

Multiple Reviews

Los Lobos: Kiko @ 20 (x3)

by Doug Collette
August 26, 2012

In the twenty years since the release of Kiko, Los Lobos has made albums equally brilliant--The Town and The City (Mammoth, 2006) for instance--but it has never made one better. This eighth album from the East Los Angeles band, in fact, stands as a template for all subsequent Los Lobos albums (hear 2011's Tin Can Trust) in its seamless blend of eclectic musical styles, evocative lyrics, creative production and the savvy, seasoned musicianship.The album is a unified song cycle which ...

Album Review

Bradley Williams, Eric Hochberg, and Jim Widlowski: 3

by Chris Mosey
August 26, 2012

Bradley Williams is a talented, resourceful jazz musician who, for two years in the mid-1980s, was pianist/arranger with Woody Herman's Thundering Herd. He settled in Chicago, becoming house pianist at the legendary Gold Star Sardine Bar. They called it that because it could take only 50 people, though such was its reputation that stars such as Frank Sinatra and Liza Minnelli performed there. When the bar closed as a regular venue in 1997, Williams created The Original ...