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.

Catching Up With

David Boulter: Thinking Differently

by Nenad Georgievski
June 5, 2012

The best music in the world is that which suggests there is no other music in the world. Twenty years on from its humble beginnings, Tindersticks makes music that is so seductive and gripping that it feels just like that. Tindersticks is one of the most brilliant and original bands to emerge from Britain in the early '90s, when the UK charts were dominated by the guitar-driven pop indie scene. Its music is a beautiful mélange of subtle touches of ...

The Mort Report

Getting Ready For Showtime – When You’re The Show

by Mort Weiss
June 5, 2012

This time out, I'd like to delineate how it is for me when I go somewhere to appear as a guest artist. Specifically, I'm thinking about the time I headlined the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival in Portland, Oregon.The phone rings, and it's Joe Beeler, the artistic director and producer of said festival. We had talked before about my appearing at the festival, but now Joe had a problem: Jack Sheldon and Ernestine Anderson were to appear, but a ...

Album Review

Bill Evans: Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top of the Gate

Read "Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top of the Gate" reviewed by Larry Taylor

by Larry Taylor
June 5, 2012

The two-CD Bill Evans Live at Art D'Lugoff's Top of The Gate--a never-before-released recording of the Bill Evans Trio made over 50 years ago--consists of two sets recorded by then-college student George Klabin in the New York City club, October, 1968. Until now, the music has only been heard on a Columbia University radio show; now, Klabin has taken the tape out of the closet and released it on Resonance Records, the label he heads. Crisp and clear, the sound ...

Album Review

Thinking Plague: Decline and Fall

Read "Decline and Fall" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
June 5, 2012

Thinking Plague cofounder/guitarist Mike Johnson penned the lyrics and composed the music for the group's meticulously engineered sixth album. Considered one of the premiere Rock in Opposition units, Johnson's lyrics presage an anarchistic domain with offbeat allusions to life's injustices. As band newcomer, vocalist Elaine Di Falco summons notions of an angel in despair throughout these complex pieces, spiced with dour implications and contrasting thematic flows, modeled with odd-metered cadences. Di Falco harmonizes with the instrumentation amid some ...

Album Review

Lorenzo Feliciati: Frequent Flyer

Read "Frequent Flyer" reviewed by Franz A. Matzner

by Franz A. Matzner
June 4, 2012

Lorenzo Feliciati's Frequent Flyer, is a lush mixture of tunes that provides the Italian bassist, composer, and bandleader ample opportunity to display his Jaco Pastorius-inspired prowess on the electric bass, as well as his abilities as a leader.Clearly placing himself in the Pastorius lineage in both style and ambition, Feliciati delivers a collection of diverse offerings on which he consistently reaches an impressive degree of musicianship. It's often a fine line, however, between homage and derivativeness, and Frequent ...

Live Review

Victoriaville 2012

by Kurt Gottschalk
June 4, 2012

Festival International Musique Actuelle VictoriavilleVictoriaville, CanadaMay 17-20, 2012There are many ways to weigh a music festival, but one method that sets a fairly reasonable standard for excellence is whether or not there was at least one point that elicited feelings of good fortune. Not just if it was enjoyable or if highly respected artists appeared, or if it was like a month in Berlin or London or New York compressed into a long weekend, but that there ...

Album Review

Neneh Cherry & The Thing: The Cherry Thing

Read "The Cherry Thing" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
June 4, 2012

The Scandinavian power trio of saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love named their band The Thing in 2000, after the Don Cherry composition from Where's Brooklyn (Blue Note, 1966). In their subsequent dozen or so albums, they have covered Cherry's music and that of Albert Ayler, Joe McPhee, and Duke Ellington. The Thing has also ventured outside the jazz idiom to perform music by The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeah, PJ Harvey, and Cato Salsa ...

Big Band Report

Caution: Brief Column Ahead...

by Jack Bowers
June 4, 2012

This may be one of the shortest columns I've written in fourteen-plus years at All About Jazz. The fact is, not much has happened this month in our little corner of big band jazz, and there is almost nothing to report. About all we can do is look forward to events on the horizon: Jazz Under the Stars here in Albuquerque in June, July and August; the twelfth annual Prescott (AZ) Jazz Summit, also in August; and the next Los ...

Album Review

The Black Butterflies: Rainbows For Ramon

Read "Rainbows For Ramon" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
June 4, 2012

The Black Butterflies' debut, 1 De Mayo (Self Produced, 2010), introduced an ensemble that found beauty in brashness and an all-inclusive recipe for musical creation. The group found its way by liberally mixing free jazz, Latin music, blues, John Coltrane-like spiritualism, primal urges and strong rhythmic elements, giving their music a sense of raw immediacy that's lacking in so many of today's shiny, overly-polished bands. The architect of this ensemble is Mercedes Figueras, an Argentinean-born saxophonist who ...

The Mort Report

There Were Big Stars At This LA Party, But I Didn’t Shine So Brightly

by Mort Weiss
June 4, 2012

Let's set the scene: Actress Polly Bergen's Malibu Beach house, 1965. The cast of participants includes Jack Lemmon and his wife Felicia Farr, Kirk Douglas, Jackie Gleason, Steve Allen and his wife Jayne Meadows, Sandra Dee, Cary Grant, William Powell, a bevy of young starlets and many more show folks. And the bands! A Guy Lombardo mini combo had been flown in from New York City, just to play this gig. When they took their break, the other band--get this!--was ...