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

The Harris Group: Choices

Read "Choices" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
June 20, 2012

Issues of health are a fact we will all deal with at some point in life, though the nature of a particular affliction may, for some, affect their lives, derail dreams and change their journey. For Chicago-based guitarist Ric Harris, a battle with a seizure disorder that began in his youth led to brain surgery thirty years later and forced him to make personal choices that would change the course of his life. Memory loss and the need to relearn ...

Album Review

John Surman: Saltash Bells

Read "Saltash Bells" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
June 19, 2012

There's no denying the “the sound of surprise" of group recordings; working solo, however, provides its own possibilities, despite meaning different things to different people. Pianist Keith Jarrett views it as a means for pulling form from the ether: one man, one piano, in real time. Multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus, on the other hand, considers it a blank slate where it's one man but a multitude of instruments layered one upon the other, through multi-tracking, over the course of days, months...even ...

Album Review

Henry Threadgill: Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp

Read "Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
June 19, 2012

Henry Threadgill's music is best served neither cold nor hot, but with an open mind. The 68 year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist has endured as one of contemporary music's foremost innovators--a cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a bandleader with over thirty releases, and works with a number of eclectic bands including Zooid, currently his longest running band which includes likeminded acolytes--guitarist Liberty Ellman and tuba/trombone player Jose Davila, among others. Zooid's Tomorrow Sunny ...

Album Review

Sumi Tonooka: Now

by Dan McClenaghan
June 19, 2012

Sumi Tonooka is a resourceful jazz pianist who, along with alto saxophonist Chris Burnett and tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay, started the Artists Recording Collective, offering up Initiation (2010), an excellent quartet outing which Tonooka co-led with Lindsay, and a more intimate Tonooka-led trio effort, Long Ago Today (2008). A former student of piano legend Mary Lou Williams and an alum of drummer Philly Joe Jones' band, the pianist knows how to work in an ensemble. But going it alone is ...

Extended Analysis

The Thing with Barry Guy: Metal!

by John Sharpe
June 19, 2012

The Thing with Barry GuyMetal!No Business Records2012In science, a substance which causes an increase in the rate of a chemical reaction is called a catalyst. In musical combinations, the inclusion (or sometimes even subtraction) of one player can have a similar result, often completely altering the regular dynamic. So it proves on Metal! where Scandinavian power trio The Thing are transformed by the addition of English bass maestro Barry Guy. However the ...

Album Review

Kate Williams Septet: Made Up

Read "Made Up" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
June 19, 2012

Made Up is the fourth album from British composer/pianist Kate Williams. Her previous albums have featured trio, quartet and quintet lineups; Made Up leapfrogs the sextet setup to feature a seven-piece group of top flight UK musicians who prove to be superb interpreters of Williams' brightly original compositions.Made Up was released in the UK at the end of 2011: a few months later the group was nominated for a 2012 Parliamentary Jazz Award for Ensemble Of The Year, ...

Catching Up With

Christian Scott: Shining a Light

by Chris May
June 19, 2012

Trumpeter/bandleader Christian Scott's aTunde Adjuah (Concord, 2012), like its immediate predecessor, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow (Concord, 2010), delivers on two fronts. Musically, it retains what is precious in the jazz tradition, while drawing in ideas from hip hop, rock, funk, ambient and Afrorock. Extra-musically, it reaffirms jazz as protest music.Born and brought up in New Orleans, Scott has lived in New York City since graduating from Boston's Berklee College of Music in 2003. In New Orleans, he was ...

Extended Analysis

The Mothership Returns

by John Kelman
June 19, 2012

When keyboardist Chick Corea announced--following a successful world tour of his reunited 1970s-era fusion juggernaut Return to Forever, which, featuring guitarist Al Di Meola, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White, included a high octane 2008 performance that was one of the best-attended in the Ottawa International Jazz Festival's three-decade history--that he'd be reuniting the earlier incarnation of the group responsible for Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy (Polydor, 1973), there was plenty of buzz. He ultimately became the ...

Album Review

Christine Tobin: Sailing To Byzantium

Read "Sailing To Byzantium" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
June 18, 2012

On Sailing To Byzantium singer/songwriter Christine Tobin adds music to the poems of Ireland's much-loved William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). Get this wrong, and an entire nation might well demand answers: get it right and a richly imaginative and beautiful recording is promised. Tobin gets it right.Tobin's love of Yeats goes back to her teens in Dublin, when her first boyfriend would read her two of the poems: the beautiful “When You Are Old" and the mysterious “The Song ...

Album Review

Keith Pray: Confluence

Read "Confluence" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
June 18, 2012

When most people discuss the jazz scene in New York, they're referring to the music that's made in Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs, but the Empire State stretches far beyond the city that never sleeps and jazz is made in many a locale within. The Capital region, for example, has its own burgeoning jazz scene that's worth noting and saxophonist Keith Pray is a key part of it. Pray has become a force for furthering jazz through ...