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.

Big Band Report

The AJO: Alive and Swinging at Thirty

by Jack Bowers
March 4, 2012

The Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra, which had been missing in action for the past several months, returned to combat with a flourish to open its thirtieth year as a unit on February 18, 2012, crowning the annual two-day Albuquerque Jazz Festival with a spellbinding concert performance that featured guest artist Alan Pasqua, an excellent pianist who doubles as chairman of the Jazz Studies Department at the University of Southern California. Even before Pasqua was invited onstage, the AJO galvanized the near-capacity ...

Album Review

AYCH / Jim Hobbs / Mary Halvorson / Taylor Ho Bynum: As The Crow Flies

Read "As The Crow Flies" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 4, 2012

Improvising confederates agree to collaborate to create music out of thin air, right? Well, yes. Except when they don't. AYCH features three of the finest improvisers working today: saxophonist Jim Hobbs; guitarist Mary Halvorson; and cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. All three come with stellar pedigrees and experience in guitarist/bassist Joe Morris' ensembles, plus Halvorson and Bynum were schooled at the knee of Anthony Braxton. Their previous recording together was last year's Bynum Sextet session, Apparent Distance (Firehouse 12, ...

Opinion

Great Jazz Deserves To Be Heard And Seen At It's Best

by Toby Gleason
March 4, 2012

Why I'm filing a mass take-down notice on YouTubeFor several decades, my father committed himself to championing the popular emergence of jazz, and engendering proper respect for the musicians who devoted their careers and lives to the music that had long been dismissed to the sidelines of main stream American culture. Ralph J. Gleason is known by many as the long-running jazz critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, co-founder of Rolling Stone Magazine and the Monterey Jazz Festival, ...

Album Review

Bill McHenry: Ghosts Of The Sun

Read "Ghosts Of The Sun" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
March 4, 2012

If the musical evidence on Ghosts Of The Sun is to be believed, Bill McHenry is looking to become a composer of new American Songs. The saxophonist has a distinctive flair for this type of writing, and with this delightful album he could easily begin a path to assembling a songbook not unlike what songwriters like Stephen Sondheim must have done decades ago. However, McHenry is not a librettist--at least not yet--nor has he looked for one, at least for ...

Opinion

Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual

by Toby Gleason
March 4, 2012

(This article was first published at All About Jazz in May 1999) Various ArtistsJazz CasualRhino / WEA1999In 1959, Ralph Gleason had made his reputation as one of the leading Jazz critics of his generation; writing out of his Berkeley home for the San Francisco Chronicle and syndicated in as many as sixty-five papers around the U.S. and Europe. He was the author of liner notes for dozens of Jazz ...

Album Review

John Raymond: Strength & Song

Read "Strength & Song" reviewed by David A. Orthmann

by David A. Orthmann
March 4, 2012

"Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid; For the Lord God is my strength and song. And he has become my salvation." These words, taken from Isaiah 12:2, are quoted on the inside jacket of trumpeter John Raymond's Strength & Song and serve as the inspiration for its title, as well as the name of Raymond's record label.Two of the project's tracks reference religion in different ways. Raymond's arrangement of the popular hymn ...

Album Review

Pat Martino Quartet: Undeniable

Read "Undeniable" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 4, 2012

Learning to play guitar once is hard enough. Having to do it twice is truly mind-boggling. Pat Martino, who has done that and more during a career with more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel, has vanquished adversity time and again and remains, at age sixty-seven, one of the world's preeminent jazz guitarists. This point of view is Undeniable on Martino's latest album, recorded live in June 2009 with his working group at Blues Alley in Washington, DC. ...

Album Review

Josh Levinson: Chauncey Street

Read "Chauncey Street" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
March 4, 2012

In Chauncey Street Brooklyn-based trumpeter/educator, Josh Levinson and his sextet return to the tight camaraderie, inventive soloing and captivating themes that characterized the Blue Note sound of the 1950s and '60s.That Levinson is greatly influenced by Freddie Hubbard is evident throughout, the record even containing the intricate and memorable “For Freddie." On this and other hard bop tracks like the nostalgic" “F-It," Levinson's muscular staccato and gritty intonation are an homage to Hubbard rather than slavish mimicry. He ...

New York Beat

Tadd Dameron Birthday Celebration at Smoke

by Nick Catalano
March 3, 2012

Tadd Dameron was born on Feb. 21 in 1917, and for the past few years, Smoke has celebrated his birthday over President's weekend. This year the tribute featured tenor saxophonists George Coleman and Eric Alexander on alternating nights, with a rhythm section of drummer Joe Farnsworth, bassist John Webber and pianist Rich Wyands. Tadley Ewing Peake Dameron hailed from Cleveland and began his arranging work with swing bands, writing for Harlan Leonard, Jimmie Lunceford, Coleman Hawkins, Count ...

Album Review

Lukas Hein: Lukas Hein & Dialeto Brasileiro

Read "Lukas Hein & Dialeto Brasileiro" reviewed by Jack Bowers

by Jack Bowers
March 3, 2012

In the early 1960s, bright new rhythms traveled northward from Brazil, kindling a “bossa nova craze" that swept through the jazz world and spilled over into the realm of pop music, led by saxophonists such as Stan Getz, Bud Shank and Zoot Sims, and abetted by guitarists Charlie Byrd, Laurindo Almeida and others. After scoring a hit in 1962 with an adaptation of Antonio Carlos Jobim's “One Note Samba," Getz had a million-seller the following year, again thanks to Jobim, ...