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.

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Book Review

Kathy Sloane: Keystone Korner - Portrait Of A Jazz Club

by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
January 26, 2012

Keystone Korner: Portrait Of A Jazz ClubKathy Sloane 220 pages; audio CDISBN: 978-0-253-35691-8Indiana University Press2012 Photographer Kathy Sloane's Keystone Korner: Portrait Of A Jazz Club is a love letter: a love letter to something more than just a business, to something less than a generation. It's a love letter to a relatively short-lived community that coalesced around a jazz club in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood: the ...

116

Album Review

Jeff Lorber: Galaxy

by Jeff Winbush
January 26, 2012

Don't call it a comeback. Call it a throwback. In a time when many of the major players of the fusion era have unplugged, keyboardist Jeff Lorber not only keeps grinding away, he's doubling down. Not by coincidence is Galaxy billed as a Jeff Lorber Fusion project rather than a Lorber solo project. This is clearly an artist not the least bit embarrassed by his roots in jazz fusion. If anything, with smooth jazz evaporating as a dominant style, now ...

141

Album Review

Jake Saslow: Crosby Street

Read "Crosby Street" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
January 26, 2012

One of 2011's many notable debuts is saxophonist Jake Saslow's Crosby Street, an ode to the street in New York's iconic SoHo, where the musician's formative years recalled the neighborhood's sights, music, and people. An analogy is formed between the music and the community, one that speaks of a distinct personality carried in Saslow's full-bodied horn that's filled with lyricism and communication interpreted by peers and fellow-New Yorkers that include guitarist Mike Moreno and pianist Fabian Almazan. ...

102

Album Review

Joanna Weinberg: The Piano Diaries

Read "The Piano Diaries" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
January 26, 2012

Joanna Weinberg's The Piano Diaries is not exactly jazz, but it is also not exactly not jazz. Intended for the small stage--appropriate, given her work in several musicals and one-woman shows--the singer/composer's music lives in that overlap between cabaret and jazz. Relocating from South Africa to Sydney, Australia in 1997, the London-born Weinberg is a true cosmopolitan, despite still sounding curiously homespun. All of this makes for an interesting and heady mix of musical and lyrical creativity. ...

117

Extended Analysis

Ahmad Jamal Trio: The Legendary 1958 Pershing Lounge & Spotlite Club Recordings

by Chris May
January 25, 2012

Ahmad Jamal TrioThe Legendary 1958 Pershing Lounge & Spotlite Club PerformancesSolar Records2011 “Play like Jamal," trumpeter Miles Davis is reputed to have told his pianist Red Garland in the mid 1950s. We can but speculate how Garland reacted to this request, assuming the story is true. It has the ring of truth: Davis was not best known for mincing his words, and he championed Ahmad Jamal at a time when many ...

Album Review

The Teaching: 12.26.09 Live at Dazzle

Read "12.26.09 Live at Dazzle" reviewed by Florence Wetzel

by Florence Wetzel
January 25, 2012

One of the most inspiring stories in jazz concerns saxophonist John Coltrane's valiant attempt to kick heroin. In the midst of a physical firestorm, Coltrane had a spiritual awakening, and he asked God to give him the means and privilege to make others happy through music--which he ultimately did, creating jazz history in the process. The new generation of jazz musicians has different issues--struggling less with addiction and more with attracting an audience and finding time to do ...

Live Review

Paul Dunmall Quartet : London, England, January 9, 2012

by John Sharpe
January 25, 2012

Paul Dunmall / Matthew Bourne / Steve Davis / Dave KaneVortex Jazz ClubLondon, UKJanuary 9, 2012 Although saxophonist Paul Dunmall performs in London with reasonable frequency, he rarely appears in the same configuration twice. But for anyone who's heard his excellent Moment To Moment (Slam, 2009), tonight's gig was not to be missed, as the reedman renewed his acquaintance with the young trio of pianist Matthew Bourne, bassist Dave Kane and drummer Steve Davis.

122

Album Review

Andre Canniere Group: Forward Space

Read "Forward Space" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
January 25, 2012

Although the United States may still lay claim to be the home of jazz and its largest commercial market, there are still plenty of musicians from that country who choose to leave for pastures new. Trumpeter Andre Canniere is one such: a young player and composer from the US who is now based in London. As with so many of his fellow emigré players, he's a talented musician with some original compositional ideas, and Forward Space demonstrates that the USA's ...

Album Review

Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga: Stroke by Stroke

Read "Stroke by Stroke" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
January 25, 2012

Zither player Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga's Stroke by Stroke is initially intriguing for the circumstances of its recording. As Lazaridou-Chatzigoga writes in her sleeve notes, “All the recordings were made at home in Athens between June 2010 and April 2011... Ambient noise from several parallel events taking place in Greece at the time of the recording has deliberately not been removed." As the period during which the recordings were made coincided with considerable unrest and disturbances on the streets of Athens, those ...

Album Review

Patrick Battstone and Richard Poole: Mystic Nights

Read "Mystic Nights" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
January 25, 2012

Pianist Pat Battstone and vibraphonist Richard Poole's Mystic Nights follows a small but illustrious tradition duo recordings including Gary Burton and Chick Corea's Crystal Silence (ECM, 1972) and Visions (Steeplechase, 1979), from Sun Ra and Walt Dickerson. Also a pianist, Poole shows significant musical sympathy with Battstone who, having studied with Burton, also has a deep understanding of his colleague's instrument. This camaraderie is heard best on “Reflections," with each instrument reflecting--but not mimicking--the other with crystalline ...