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

Shawnn Monteiro: To Carmen with Love

Read "To Carmen with Love" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
June 23, 2012

Tributes to legendary jazz greats of the past dot the landscape of today's music, but few can actually boast a direct connection to the artist of homage. Singer Shawnn Monteiro--long influenced by the beautiful voice of pianist and vocalist Carmen McRae--is an exception. Her father and godfather, bassist Jimmy Woode and trumpeter Clark Terry, respectively, both performed with McRae, and Monteiro grew up listening to stories of their experiences. With To Carmen with Love, Monteiro pays tribute to a great ...

Album Review

Jazz Arts Trio: Swing of Many Colors

Read "Swing of Many Colors" reviewed by Franz A. Matzner

by Franz A. Matzner
June 23, 2012

For the most part Jazz Arts Trio's Swing of Many Colors presents relatively sedate recreations of recordings by some of jazz's most famous piano trio greats, including Ahmad Jamal, Red Garland, Oscar Peterson, and Keith Jarrett.Clearly a labor of love, each tune is meticulously reproduced with the fine attention to detail only a pet project can achieve. All three players are astute practitioners and their devotion to the trio form bleeds through, especially on pieces like “Night Train," ...

Album Review

Avishai Cohen: Duende

by Bruce Lindsay
June 22, 2012

Avishai Cohen is a distinctive player: his raw energy, deft and fluid fretting style and tough, forceful right hand combine in one of the most readily recognizable double bass sounds in contemporary music. He's brought this sound to collaborations with many leading musicians including pianists Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau, and drummer Mark Guiliana, and has produced a dozen albums as leader. Duende, Cohen's third album for Blue Note, is something of a new departure: a duo record with up-and-coming ...

Album Review

Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis & Johnny Griffin Quintet: Tough Tenors Again 'N' Again

Read "Tough Tenors Again 'N' Again" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
June 22, 2012

It's been over a year since Promising Music's last series of lovingly remastered and repackaged titles from the classic MPS catalog of the 1960s/70s, but they're back with two 2012 reissues that, once again, demonstrate the breadth and depth of a German label that ran the gamut from straight-ahead to fusion, and from down-and-dirty blues to the freest of the free. First up is Tough Tenors Again 'N' Again, truly a lost 1970 classic of muscular and unrepentantly down-the-middle jazz ...

Book Excerpts

Dave Liebman: What It Is - The Life of a Jazz Artist

by Lewis Porter
June 22, 2012

[The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of What It Is: The Life of a Jazz Artist (Scarecrow Press, 2012), by saxophonist Dave Liebman, in conversation with Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press, 2000). In it, Liebman and Porter discuss the saxophonist's involvement in the loft scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s in New York City, and creation Free Life Communication with a group of like-minded musicians.This excerpt appears ...

Album Review

Ravi Coltrane: Spirit Fiction

Read "Spirit Fiction" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
June 22, 2012

The second son of John and Alice Coltrane, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane was born two years before his father's death in 1967. Despite his imposing lineage, Coltrane's steady rise to prominence in the jazz world has been anything but conspicuous; notable stints as a sideman with Steve Coleman, Elvin Jones and Wallace Roney in the mid-1990s eventually led to a series of recording sessions for RCA, Columbia and Savoy in the new millennium.Spirit Fiction, his sixth album as a ...

Album Review

Ferner/ Juliusson: Undertowed

Read "Undertowed" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
June 22, 2012

The duo of Norwegian guitarist Per-Arner Ferner and Swedish pianist Per Gunnar Juliusson was established in 2008 and already in 2010 was awarded the title Young Jazz Musicians of the Year in the JazzIntro competition in Molde Jazz Festival. This award led to a series of promoted performances in the next two years, culminated in this debut recording. Ferner and Juliusson refer to themselves as the “Nordic school of ECM"-- lyrical, melodic and often introspective music. Their ...

Book Review

Dave Liebman: What It Is - The Life of a Jazz Artist

by John Kelman
June 22, 2012

What It Is: The Life of a Jazz Artist Dave Liebman In Conversation with Lewis Porter 386 Pages ISBN: 978-0810882034 Scarecrow Press 2012 In life, there's them that are aware and them's that ain't. Them's that are aware are not necessarily better than them's that ain't; but in being aware, they're able to assess their own lives in a broader context and, perhaps, as they reach the later stages of life, truly comprehend ...

Album Review

Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio: Sources

by John Kelman
June 21, 2012

It's not uncommon for artists to shake things up by changing personnel to explore roads previously untraveled, but few push themselves so relentlessly into new territory through revamped instrumentation as Louis Sclavis. Still, since coming to ECM with the auspicious Rouge (1992), the French clarinetist/saxophonist has always maintained continuity between recordings--cellist Vincent Courtois carried over from Dans La Nuit (2002) to Napoli's Walls (2003), and percussionist François Merville showing up on L'imparfait des langues (2007) and Lost Along the Way ...

Live Review

Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue

by Wade Luquet
June 21, 2012

Trombone Shorty and Orleans AvenueKeswick TheatreGlenside, PAJune 2, 2012In his introduction at the Keswick Theatre in the Philadelphia suburbs, Philadelphia Folk Festival director Michael Cloeren stated, “Musicians like this come along once in a generation." By the end of the concert, no one at the packed theater could argue with this bold statement, as Troy “Trombone Shorty" Andrews astounded those in attendance with his multiple talents. At twenty-six years old it would seem unlikely that ...