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

Garth Knox: Saltarello

Read "Saltarello" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
August 16, 2012

Violist Garth Knox is certainly not a jazzman in the traditional sense of the word. Nevertheless, he is well adept at musical improvisation. He has worked with the revolutionary Ensemble Intercontemporain with its cross-genre experimentation, as well as pioneers of free jazz such as Joelle Léandre, George Lewis and Steve Lacy. Knox's “Fuga Libre," on the sublime Saltarello, amply demonstrates these skills in improvisation. This solo viola piece flirts with the avant-garde while keeping the classical canon ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Trevor Rabin

by AAJ Staff
August 16, 2012

Meet Trevor Rabin: Trevor Rabin is a South African-born composer, guitarist, songwriter and producer. Rabin learned guitar and piano as youth, and played in a couple of bands as a teenager. His involvement in his first serious band, Rabbitt, led them to become to this day South Africa's most successful band. He left the band to pursue a solo career in the UK in 1978. In tandem with performing, Rabin became increasingly involved in production, working ...

What is Jazz?

Freeform in the U.K.

by Sammy Stein
August 16, 2012

Freeform and improvised jazz is having a hard time at the moment. Venues have to make tough choices between pleasing what is a smaller cohort of customers and bringing new, maybe transient, but paying clients who are attracted by big names, standards and music they know. Customers have less cash in these difficult economic times, so they may come to fewer gigs. This means that, for a manager, though the venue may have once been able to support freeform jazz ...

Album Review

Trigger: The Fire Throws

Read "The Fire Throws" reviewed by Florence Wetzel

by Florence Wetzel
August 15, 2012

The Fire Throws is a stunning poetic soundscape by the Berlin-based wind trio Trigger, composed of Chris Heenan on contrabass clarinet, Matthias Müller on trombone, and Nils Ostendorf on trumpet. The instrumentation recalls the classic big band front line, but this group takes that tradition and turns it inside out and backwards. This is bold, courageous music--the musicians are free from the conventional parameters assigned to their instruments, and they're completely unfettered by any notions of what music is or ...

Extended Analysis

Jon Balke: Magnetic Works 1993-2001

by John Kelman
August 15, 2012

Jon Balke Magnetic Works 1993-2001 ECM Records 2012 As his flagship Magnetic North Orchestra nears its two-decade anniversary in 2013, Norwegian pianist/composer/bandleader Jon Balke has been performing occasional shows with Magnetic Book, taking a fresh look at the group's repertoire through an expanded edition where its core septet is augmented with an additional six baroque string players. Its 2011 performance, at the Oslo International Jazz Festival, was so compelling in its implementation of unorthodox compositional ...

Album Review

Rusconi: Revolution

Read "Revolution" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
August 15, 2012

Revolution is in the air, and Rusconi knows it. The Swiss trio's fifth album sees it break with major record labels-- following its memorable tribute to indie-rock band Sonic Youth on It's a Sonic Life (Sony, 2010)--and head out into the great unknown of self-promotion. It's a bold move, but one befitting of the sonic explorers its three members truly are. Following the likes of Radiohead and trumpeter Cuong Vu, the trio's music is available on a pay-what-you-feel-its-worth basis, and ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Guy Gardiner

by AAJ Staff
August 15, 2012

Meet Guy Gardner: I studied contemporary music at Dartington College of Arts. I always loved jazz, from the first time I heard this strange mumbling man and his amazing piano, but only later realizing this was Errol Garner. I recorded my first album in 2003 and have continued working in the UK and Europe as a jazz pianist and educator. Have appeared on several albums and recorded another one as a trio, which Donna McFee of LA Jazz ...

Album Review

Natalie Cressman and Secret Garden: Unfolding

Read "Unfolding" reviewed by Jeff Dayton-Johnson

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
August 15, 2012

Looking for antecedents for trombonist/vocalist Natalie Cressman? All About Jazz's C. Michael Bailey correctly points us to Jack Teagarden, the original singing trombonist. And, in fact, Cressman finds plenty of opportunity in the funkier passages of Unfolding, her debut album, to deploy a fluid and full Teagarden-like sound on the instrument.But Cressman--twenty years old and a student at the Manhattan School of Music at the time of Unfolding's release--also suggests a more contemporary reference: Esperanza Spalding, the superstar ...

Catching Up With

Lou Donaldson: Jazz Paths

by Josep Pedro
August 15, 2012

One of the few remaining musicians that defined the sound of jazz after the bebop musical revolution, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson illustrates the richness and ambiguities of jazz evolution during the crucial period between the late forties and early seventies. During these intense and fascinating times of contemporary United States history, jazz exploded into a variety of paths that ran parallel with different environments, artistic, social and political concerns.In coexistence with the upcoming Black Power movement and its ...

Album Review

Ballrogg: Cabin Music

Read "Cabin Music" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
August 14, 2012

If 2010's Insomnia (2010) was a significant shift away from the more decided jazz outlook of Ballrogg's self-titled 2008 debut (both on the Bolage imprint), then with Cabin Music, the departure is complete. In the Country bassist Roger Arntzen formed Ballrogg with saxophonist/clarinetist Klaus Ellerhusen Holm in 2006, and six years later the duo is now a trio, with the addition of Ivar Grydeland--guitarist, banjoist and overall employer of anything with steel strings in groups including drone-meisters Huntsville, last heard ...