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

Deborah Winters: Lovers After All

Read "Lovers After All" reviewed by Nicholas F. Mondello

by Nicholas F. Mondello
March 10, 2012

In his entertaining and impeccably researched book, Sessions with Sinatra (Chicago Review Press, 2004), author Charles Granata details the intricate in-studio mechanics and all-important chemistry behind some of the greatest recorded vocal performances of our time. The unique balance of Frank Sinatra's talent, sophisticated arrangements, great tunes and phenomenal musicians made those recordings classics.On her third CD, Lovers After All, vocalist Deborah Winters surrounds herself with 11 standards from The Great American Songbook and a group of fine ...

Album Review

Kate Reid: The Love I’m In

Read "The Love I’m In" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 10, 2012

Dr. Kate Reid is a faculty member of the Fine Arts department of Cypress College in Southern California. However, Reid is no stuffed shirt, ivory tower type. No, she is a living, breathing, practicing jazz singer, one who holds on to tradition loosely, having fun with the music she performs. She belongs to that treasured group of jazz singers who also plays piano, a group that includes the likes of Shirley Horn, Blossom Dearie, Nina Simone, Patti Wicks, Patricia Barber, ...

Album Review

Floratone (Frisell / Chamberlain / Townsend / Martine): Floratone II

Read "Floratone II" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
March 9, 2012

Plenty of artists treat their music as egalitarian, but some projects are more collaborative than others. Guitarist Bill Frisell has long considered his work to be about the greater whole, going so far as to credit the arrangements on Sign of Life (Savoy, 2011), as “(on the spot and subject to change) by Bill Frisell, Eyvind Kang, Hank Roberts and Jenny Scheinman." But Floratone (Blue Note, 2007) was more collaborative still, beginning life as a series of jams with drummer ...

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Extended Analysis

Gary Husband: Dirty & Beautiful Volume 2

by John Kelman
March 9, 2012

Gary Husband Dirty & Beautiful Volume 2 Abstract Logix 2012 If ever there was a musician whose efforts to redefine and reestablish himself are both worthy of attention and working, it's Gary Husband. Emerging as a powerhouse drummer with Allan Holdsworth in the guitarist's I.O.U. band of the early 1980s, Husband has striven to raise his profile as a keyboardist since the turn of the millennium, turning in two overlooked (and stunning) solo piano tributes ...

Extended Analysis

Neil Cowley Trio: The Face of Mount Molehill

by Dave Sumner
March 9, 2012

Neil Cowley TrioThe Face of Mount MolehillNaim2012The danger of composing tunes with catchy hooks and enthusiastic infusions of a string ensemble for a jazz album is that it gets dismissed as gussied up pop music; not jazz, just jazzy. Either unaware or unconcerned with the risk, pianist Neil Cowley presents a series of warm tunes that wear their heart on their sleeve. It's not the first time that unguarded sincerity overcame risk ...

Album Review

Borislove & Noizepunk: Cello Lounge

Read "Cello Lounge" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
March 9, 2012

There are so few composers of contemporary music who have expanded its idiom and its language that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among those few, the shape-shifting guitarist/electronics manipulator Gene Pritsker is one of the only composers who continues to break down the barriers that still exist in the sometimes water-tight compartments that industry marketers revel in. On Cello Lounge, with the equally fearless cellist Borislav Strulev, the iconoclast in Pritsker once more comes to ...

Take Five With...

Take Five With Alan Blackman

by AAJ Staff
March 9, 2012

Meet Alan Blackman: Baltimore-based pianist and award-winning composer Alan Blackman and his ensembles have performed at Blues Alley, the Kennedy Center, and many festivals and venues from San Francisco to New York. Recent performances have been with Donny McCaslin, Vardan Ovsepian, Ferenc Nemeth, Mike Pope, Warren Wolf, Tim Green, Alex Norris, and Sunna Gunnlaugs, among others. He was selected to be part of the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center and has received grants from ...

Album Review

Vitor Pereira Quintet: Doors

by Bruce Lindsay
March 9, 2012

Music produced by London's F-IRE Collective is almost guaranteed to be intriguing and innovative. Doors, the debut from Portuguese guitarist Vitor Pereira's Quintet, is a worthy addition to the Collective's output. The quintet contains some of the UK's finest young players, including alto saxophonist Chris Williams, from Led Bib, and drummer Eddie Hick, from Gilad Atzmon's Orient House Ensemble. Pereira--who composed all of the tunes--favors a pure, warm guitar tone but isn't averse to some occasional heavier chordal playing.

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Album Review

Yair Yona: World Behind Curtains

Read "World Behind Curtains" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
March 9, 2012

Like his debut, Remember (Anova, 2010), this sophomore release from Yair Yona still features the Israeli as a guitarist paying his debts to the American Primitive and British finger-picking traditions. But the ambitious World Behind Curtains focuses, first and foremost, on Yona the composer. His compositions for an acoustic chamber ensemble move the finger-picking schools into new timeless avenues, spicing the folksy melodies with motives from jazz, Middle-Eastern scales and post-rock. Yona's eight short compositions tell an ...

Album Review

Tommy Igoe and the Birdland Big Band: Eleven

Read "Eleven" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 9, 2012

Like many other corners in that amorphous room called jazz, big band jazz has grown more abstract and experimental since its heyday in the 1930s. This process is necessary for the creative evolution of the art, but often produces music that is as unlistenable as it is creative--or brilliant. Abstract growth may be considered horizontal evolution, but there is also vertical evolution; evolution that values working within the parameters of the conventional--using arrangements of ever- increasing intricacy, but not at ...