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.

119

Album Review

Hans Glawischnig: Jahira

Read "Jahira" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
February 29, 2012

The tonal riches of Hans Glawischnig's Jahira are so prodigious that the album feels like a devastatingly beautiful canvas that remains constantly wet and therefore changing and shape-shifting. Glawischnig has always given notice of his propensity for colors as he held together the bottom--and sometimes the top--register of the harmonics of many breathtaking musical charts. Now in supreme command of melody (which he generously shares with a pair of saxophones) and rhythm (which he shares with a drum set), the ...

Album Review

Jan Lundgren / Bengt Hallberg: Back 2 Back

Read "Back 2 Back" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
February 29, 2012

An historic meeting of two giants of modern jazz in Sweden. Bengt Hallberg, born 1932, helped to found the idiom via his work with alto saxophonist Arne Domnérus in the 1950s and attracted international attention by recording with such US legends as Clifford Brown and Stan Getz. Leonard Feather praised his “unique light-fingered style." Jan Lundgren, born 1966, gigged with Domnérus and the great Swedish clarinetist Putte Wickman before going up against such visiting American luminaries as ...

Album Review

Christoph Irniger / Pilgrim: Mt. Tongariro

Read "Mt. Tongariro" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 29, 2012

Whether by default or intent, Europe's Pilgrim communicates an artistic portraiture of progressive jazz. Framed on the sensibilities of travel and alluding to New Zealand's Mt. Tongariro as a core premise for the underlying themes, this quartet led by saxophonist Christoph Irniger pursues a signature sound and methodology. With ethereal overtones, budding passages, and succinct treks into the free jazz realm, the program encompasses blustery textural components, as the soloists' detail-oriented exchanges are modeled with authority and poise.

101

Extended Analysis

Stanley Clarke: The Complete 1970s Epic Albums Collection

by John Kelman
February 29, 2012

Legacy Recordings' recent spate of Complete Albums Collection box sets have righted a whole slew of wrongs by bringing long out-of-print recordings back in a reasonably priced and tidily collected series. They may be relatively light on production values--simple clamshell-style boxes, mini-LP cardboard sleeves, and booklets whose information, beyond detailed track and personnel listings, is largely dependent upon how much the artist has to say, if anything at all--but the opportunity to collect an entire discography from a specific period ...

121

Album Review

Mike Nock Trio Plus: Hear and Know

Read "Hear and Know" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
February 28, 2012

It's an admirable objective to push the musical envelope, but it's unrealistic to expect artists of longevity to make each and every record a major milestone. What goes a longer way for those with careers measured in decades is consistency. New Zealand-born/Australia-based pianist Mike Nock has a handful of particularly memorable recordings including In Out and Around (Timeless, 1978) and, more recently, Mike Nock's BigSmallBand Live (ABC Jazz, 2004) and Meeting of the Waters (Jazzahead, 2007), but there's nary a ...

Extended Analysis

Louis Armstrong: Satchmo - Ambassador of Jazz

by Chris May
February 28, 2012

Louis ArmstrongSatchmo: Ambassador Of JazzVerve/Universal2012 “You can't play anything on a horn that Louis hasn't played," trumpeter Miles Davis said. And while pianist Jelly Roll Morton may have claimed to have invented jazz, if any one artist could be said to have done that, it would be trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong. No one artist invented jazz, of course, but Armstrong's importance in its early development is supreme, ...

Album Review

Eddie Daniels / Roger Kellaway: Live At The Library Of Congress

Read "Live At The Library Of Congress" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
February 28, 2012

Perhaps no wind instrument can be as expressive as the human voice besides the trombone and clarinet. The litmus test, so to speak, might be to cast either instrument in a silent movie and then to watch the film as the instruments imitate the lives whose stories they tell. Of course the instruments must be played exceptionally well--perhaps trombonist Roswell Rudd and clarinetist Barney Bigard, in days gone by or, if the film were being made today, clarinetist Don Byron ...

107

Album Review

Giovanni Francesca / Aldo Galasso / Dario Miranda: Telegraph

Read "Telegraph" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
February 28, 2012

This Italian trio imparts a cunning and personalized manifesto within the fuzzy area that borders free jazz, jazz-rock and avant-garde musings. The artists' realm of applications and concepts elicit an aura that hovers atop many theme-building episodes, prudently morphing various perspectives into loosely organized structural facets. These components serve as a baseline for both the intricately stylized or hard-hitting parts. The musicians mix it up via a jam band orientation or generate semistructured motifs amid live electronics implementations ...

102

Album Review

Brian Patneaude: All Around Us

Read "All Around Us" reviewed by Nicholas F. Mondello

by Nicholas F. Mondello
February 28, 2012

With All Around Us saxophonist Brian Patneaude delivers a bravura performance as both artist and composer. This superior effort shouts breakthrough for this talented, but not widely known, New York Capital District saxophonist and his crew. The session offers eight brilliantly performed straight-ahead jazz compositions, of which six emanate from Patneaude's pen. Patneaude writes in a similar style to his playing; the heads feature melodic ebbs and flows in a palette of tempos, rhythmic strands and colors. ...

143

Interview

Joe Lovano: Inimitable Streams of Expression

by Angela Davis
February 28, 2012

Penned as “one of the greatest musicians in jazz history," saxophonist Joe Lovano has successfully created a unique voice within the jazz tradition and has contributed significantly to the continuance and development of the idiom.In just over a quarter of a century he has created an expansive body of work that has covered a broad spectrum of styles. This includes swing, bebop, hard-bop, post-bop, the avant-garde and interpretations of the music of Frank Sinatra and Enrico Caruso. He ...