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.

136

Album Review

Pete Robbins Transatlantic Quartet: Live In Basel

Read "Live In Basel" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
February 3, 2012

Like most modern jazz players, alto saxophonist Pete Robbins works in multiple bands, playing varying styles and disciplines of this thing called jazz. Sounds reasonable, yes? But, thirty years ago this wasn't possible. Musicians, listeners, and jazz critics (let's not leave them out) had to take sides, choose categories and labels to classify and compartmentalize their music. You were either a traditionalist, a fusion advocate, or an avant-garde specialist. Neither the twain shall meet. Sound like politics in America today?

102

African Jazz

Senegal’s Orchestra Baobab and Guinea’s Authenticite Movement Show Their Roots

by Chris May
February 3, 2012

Sterns Music's lovingly put-together compilations of work by stars of Francophone West African music's “belle époque“--the decade and a half accompanying and immediately following the independence years of the 1960s--are now digging further into history with releases featuring more obscure, but just as entrancing, figures from that era. For different reasons, Senegalese singer and songwriter Ablaye Ndiaye Thiossane, and Guinean singer, guitarist and ngoni player Sory Kandia Kouyaté, have not been celebrated outside Africa like Mali's Rail ...

119

Album Review

Giovanna Pessi / Susanna Wallumrod: If Grief Could Wait

Read "If Grief Could Wait" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
February 3, 2012

There was a time when hard lines existed between genres, but they seem long gone when tenor John Potter and electronic composer Ambrose Field can create a very 21st century take on 15th century musical frameworks with Being Dufay (2009), while Norwegian keyboardist Jon Balke conjoins baroque string ensemble and Fourth World progenitor, trumpeter Jon Hassell into a century and culture-spanning Siwan (2009). It's no coincidence that both recordings are on ECM; with If Grief Could Wait, the German label ...

Album Review

Tim Berne: Snakeoil

Read "Snakeoil" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
February 3, 2012

Tim Berne's previous contributions on the ECM label--guitarist David Torn's Prezens (ECM, 2005) and bassist Michael Formanek's The Rub and Spare Change (ECM, 2009)--represent some of his best work as a sideman. The alto saxophonist's first ECM release as a leader, Snakeoil, not only represents Berne at his best, but also at his most accessible. Berne's quartet consists of outstanding players from the New York jazz scene, all of whom are attuned to Berne's complex free improvisational style of composing. ...

180

Album Review

Sunna Gunnlaugs: Long Pair Bond

Read "Long Pair Bond" reviewed by William Carey

by William Carey
February 3, 2012

Several songs on Icelandic pianist Sunna Gunnlaugs' Long Pair Bond, including the ballad “Elsabella," are lilting and beautiful enough to have an almost hypnotic effect. The interplay between Gunnlaugs and bassist Þorgrímur Jónsson is clearly borne out of a great deal of time spent working together. Along with drummer Scott McLemore, who contributed three compositions to this session, the group plays with an empathy for which jazz ensembles strive, especially important in trios such as this.Gunnlaugs has a ...

225

Album Review

Sunna Gunnlaugs: Long Pair Bond

Read "Long Pair Bond" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
February 2, 2012

With Long Pair Bond, Sunna Gunnlaugs returns to the piano trio format last heard on Far Far Away. Since that 1997 self-titled debut--the only album to use her tongue-twisting full name, Gunnlaugsdóttir--the Icelandic pianist has, in addition to contracting her name to the eminently more memorable Gunnlaugs, recorded almost exclusively with quartets, largely populated with American (or, at least, American-resident) musicians met after moving to the United States in 1993 to study at William Paterson College. Long Pair Bond's return ...

129

Extended Analysis

Tim Berne: Snakeoil

by John Kelman
February 2, 2012

Tim Berne Snakeoil ECM Records 2012 When artists who've already built lengthy careers elsewhere over a period of years (sometimes decades) come to record for Germany's ECM Records, there is occasional trepidation amongst some of their longstanding fans. This is, after all, not just about facilitating the release of recordings; this is a label with a vision, a very personal aesthetic. With over 1,100 titles released across more than four decades, and an expansive ...

Album Review

Tom Arthurs and Richard Fairhurst: Postcards From Pushkin

Read "Postcards From Pushkin" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
February 2, 2012

Trumpeter Tom Arthurs wrote the music for Postcards From Pushkin in 2009, according to his liner notes, “in a moment of particular calm and reflection" when he was a BBC New Generation Artist. Inspired by the works of the Russian poet and author Alexandr Pushkin (1799-1837), Arthurs and his musical collaborator, pianist Richard Fairhurst (of The Hungry Ants and Triptych), recorded the album later that year. Arthur's warm, rich, flugelhorn sound and Fairhurst's delicate, understated, piano combine to create music ...

117

Album Review

Jo-Yu Chen Trio: Incomplete Soul

Read "Incomplete Soul" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
February 2, 2012

Taiwanese-born pianist Jo-Yu Chen is going somewhere. The cover photo of her Incomplete Soul shows the artist in the back seat of a car, gazing at an indeterminate distance, with a look of quiet, unyielding determination on her face. Her journey with this recording is one of a melding of her classical influences with the improvisational aspect of jazz, and to an extent an East/West blend of sound. She begins with her original, “The Wandering Songstress," opening with the eerily ...

Album Review

The Bad Plus: Never Stop

Read "Never Stop" reviewed by Thomas Carroll

by Thomas Carroll
February 2, 2012

For the past decade, The Bad Plus has received both praise and criticism for its idiosyncratic approach to jazz-rock. Liberal jazz fans and those who are inclined towards the mainstream but want to dabble in jazz have enthusiastically received the band's modern piano trio reworking of rock standards such as Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Rush's “Tom Sawyer." Conversely, jazz purists tend to shy away from The Bad Plus and its backbeat-intensive and sometimes bombastic playing.Never Stop ...