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.

Extended Analysis

Sleeper

by John Kelman
August 6, 2012

While ECM has, in recent years, been in the process of getting some of its older titles back in print through its Old & New Masters Edition series of box sets--some, like the music on Norwegian bassist Arild Andersen's Green Into Blue--Early Quartets (2010), seeing release on CD for the first time--the German label has avoided adopting the habit of so many others by steering clear of including previously unissued music from the sessions. Nor has the label fallen into ...

Big Band Report

Ladder Is High, Women Keep Climbing

by Jack Bowers
August 5, 2012

Unlike college sports, there is no Title IX program for women in jazz. Those who wish to pursue that line of endeavor have to elbow their way into what remains essentially a male-dominated profession (or art) and keep climbing the ladder one rung at a time. True, women have made notable inroads in recent years and are no longer looked upon as simply “band singers," as they once were; but their numbers remain woefully small, even though their talent on ...

Album Review

Anna Estrada: Volando

Read "Volando" reviewed by Jeff Dayton-Johnson

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
August 5, 2012

Vocalist Anna Estrada's Volando can be comfortably shelved in the Latin Jazz section of your record library, but Estrada herself more fancifully--and more accurately-- describes it as an exercise in crossing borders. Given the record's title ("volando" means “flying"), it's perhaps more a matter of flying over those boundaries. There are at least four such frontiers across which Estrada and her ensemble blissfully soar back and forth.The key dividing line is that one that separates Latin American from ...

Album Review

Nina de Heney: Three

by Eyal Hareuveni
August 5, 2012

Three is the third solo double bass recording of by underrated Swedish double bassist Nina de Heney, known for her collaborations with pianists (and fellow countrymen) Sten Sandell and Lisa Ullén. The title refers also to the connection between de Heney, the player ("the dancer behind the bass," as she calls it), the intimate connection with the instrument (her “extended body"), and the room (a “vibrating and dancing entity, guiding the music"). On this double album, de ...

Live Review

Juan de Marcos: Skopje, Macedonia, June 1, 2012

by Nenad Georgievski
August 5, 2012

Juan de Marcos and the Afro-Cuban All StarsUniversal HallOFFestSkopje, MacedoniaJune 1,2012“It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." That old line may not mean anything these days but it still vibrates with truth for singer Juan de Marcos and his Afro-Cuban All Stars, whose explosive cocktail of Cuban music is so full of it. In the band's two-hour set as part of the OFFest, the Afro-Cuban All Stars had a ...

Album Review

Peter Appleyard: Sophisticated Ladies

Read "Sophisticated Ladies" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
August 5, 2012

Celebrated Canadian vibraphonist Peter Appleyard made some waves on his last instrumental album, revisiting the past in a previously unreleased recording that captured a select group of jazz giants on the historic The Lost 1974 Session (Linus, 2011). Now, this 84 year-old jazz legend focuses on the present and surrounds himself with a phenomenal group of talented ladies who voice time-honored classic standards on Sophisticated Ladies. Though not the first album boasting this particular conceptual approach, it is the first ...

Album Review

Carol Saboya: Belezas: The Music of Ivan Lins and Milton Nascimento

Read "Belezas: The Music of Ivan Lins and Milton Nascimento" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
August 5, 2012

Brazilian vocalist Carol Saboya's previous recording with her father, pianist Antonio Adolfo--La e Ca: Here and There (AAM Music) --was one of the highlights of 2010. She returns as headliner on Belezas: The Music of Ivan Lins and Milton Nascimento again, supported by Adolfo and his very fine quartet. Composers Lins and Nascimento represent a late '60s answer to bossa nova, which had dominated Brazilian (and a good bit of American jazz) in the late 1950s and early '60s. Called ...

Extended Analysis

Yuri Honing Acoustic Quartet: True

by Ian Patterson
August 5, 2012

Yuri Honing Acoustic Quartet True Challenge Records 2012 If the dust of jazz history ever settles, saxophonist Yuri Honing may well be looked upon as one of today's trailblazers. As the debate limps/rages on (take your pick) as to what jazz is or should be, it seems clear that more and more young musicians with a deep respect for and knowledge of the tradition and its language, feel nevertheless unbound by convention, and open to all music as ...

Album Review

Interstate Buffalo: One Step Away

Read "One Step Away" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
August 4, 2012

"Little Rock to Memphis be a long stretch of road..." and in the Arkansas summer, that road is oppressive and unforgiving. What does it take to make diamond? Heat and pressure; two things in great abundance on the 276 interstate miles separating Texarkana and Memphis, both physically and figuratively. It is from this environment that the quartet Interstate Buffalo arises. From a regional perspective, this is Southern rock, specifically from Arkansas. In spades. Arkansas the is Deep South's hillbilly stepchild. ...

Live Review

Pori Jazz Festival: Pori, Finland, July 19-21, 2012

by Anthony Shaw
August 4, 2012

Pori Jazz Festival uLTRA mUSIC nIGHTSPori, FinlandJuly 19-21, 2012 On a scale of 1-10, summertime activity in the capital of this northerly European nation barely registers a “1," whilst in the normally sleepy western coastal town of Pori it is topping out for the penultimate week of July. It's the annual Pori Jazz Festival. Along with over 1,000 local voluntary helpers, there were about 140,000 visitors this year attending about 120 concerts, of which ...