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.

271

Album Review

Ari Hoenig: Lines of Oppression

Read "Lines of Oppression" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
August 5, 2011

When Bill Evans began building trios that represented a collaboration of equals rather than soloist accompanied by rhythm section, it's unlikely the late pianist could have envisioned the way Jean-Michel Pilc, bassist François Moutin and drummer Ari Hoenig wowed fans at a 2011 Ottawa International Jazz Festival performance. Bringing new meaning to the phrase “egalitarian," each and every member was clearly capable of pushing the music in a new direction, so keenly attuned were they to each other. Hoenig, in ...

275

Reassessing

Ornette Coleman: The Shape Of Jazz To Come

by C. Michael Bailey
August 5, 2011

Ornette ColemanThe Shape Of Jazz To ComeAtlantic1959 Ornette Coleman's Contemporary Records releases Something Else!!!! (1958) and Tomorrow Is The Question! (1959) documented the alto saxophonist's development from the last vestiges of bebop toward a harmonically freer jazz language. Coleman's album titles became more prophetic as they were released. The Shape Of Jazz To Come is a further, but not yet completed, evolution away from harmonic harnesses of the swing and bebop ...

442

Album Review

Mace Hibbard: Time Gone By

Read "Time Gone By" reviewed by Edward Blanco

by Edward Blanco
August 5, 2011

Performing a selection of thoroughly modern jazz, inspired and influenced by the music of Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Branford Marsalis, Atlanta-based saxophonist/composer Mace Hibbard delivers the creative and highly entertaining Time Gone By, his second album as leader and the follow-up to his critically-acclaimed debut, When Last We Met (CDBY, 2007). A busy sideman--in 2011 alone, appearing on albums by Joe Gransden's Big Band, trumpeter Melvin Jones (also a member of Hibbard's quintet) and keyboardist Bryant ...

292

Album Review

Jeff Hackworth: Night Owl

Read "Night Owl" reviewed by Jerry D'Souza

by Jerry D'Souza
August 5, 2011

If there is one trait that time has etched on Jeff Hackworth's career it is his development as a tenor saxophonist. Hackworth has shown a growing maturity on his recordings, with Night Owl being his strongest. He is not afraid to take chances and develops themes with an abiding sense of adventure. His tone can be smooth and coaxing, but it is can also be abrasive as it underscores a tensile groove. Put together they make for music that is ...

192

Big Band Report

Big Band Jazz: It's Not Just for Guys Anymore

by Jack Bowers
August 4, 2011

Back in the early '90s, Stanley Kay, one-time back-up drummer for the incomparable Buddy Rich, later a manager of such artists as Maurice Hines, Michelle Lee and Paul Burke and the entertainment director for the New York Yankees, had a good idea: the time had come, he reasoned, to assemble an all-woman big band that would be more than a novelty act and could stand its ground against the best bands anywhere regardless of gender. Knowing he would need a ...

219

Album Review

Andrzej Przybielski with Oles Brothers: De Profundis

Read "De Profundis" reviewed by Jerry D'Souza

by Jerry D'Souza
August 4, 2011

When trumpeter Andrzej Przybielski passed on in February 2011, he left behind a rich legacy in music. His name may not be widely known outside his native Poland, but he was nevertheless a stylist who carved a nook in several genres. He could play a melody with warmth, and then dart into trajectories that broke the skein but did not sacrifice logic. His harmonic concepts were drawn from several streams and he used them most skillfully.Przybielski's association with ...

427

Live Review

The Garana Jazz Festival: Garana, Romania, July 21-24, 2011

by Adriana Carcu
August 4, 2011

The Garana Jazz Festival Garana, Romania July 21-24, 2011 Hidden in the heart of the Western Carpathians, the small village of Garana, --also called Wolfsberg by the Bohemian colonists who have inhabited it until some 30 years ago--has developed, during the last decades, into an international artist colony--hosting, for the 15th time this year, Europe's only open-air jazz festival, a kind of contemporary Woodstock. Instead of diminishing its appeal, the capricious climate and the special location seem ...

261

Album Review

Chicago Yestet: Jazz Is Politics?

Read "Jazz Is Politics?" reviewed by Alex Marianyi

by Alex Marianyi
August 4, 2011

For an introduction to the Chicago jazz scene, look no further than the Chicago Yestet's line-up on Jazz Is Politics?. From drummer Dana Hall (Terell Stafford) to John Wojciechowski, a finalist in the 1996 Thelonious Monk Saxophone Competition, the roster reads like a who's who in Midwestern jazz. Staying true to the album's namesake, the Yestet opens with the “The Decider," a track featuring audio clips from former President George W. Bush speech, famously giving himself the ...

393

Album Review

Konitz / Mehldau / Haden / Motian: Live at Birdland

Read "Live at Birdland" reviewed by Kevin Davis

by Kevin Davis
August 4, 2011

It begins with a conversation between Lee Konitz's airy alto sax and Paul Motian's even more ethereal drums, and instantly the groove of this 1954 Sonny Rollins workhorse, “Oleo," feels comfortable, welcoming, and lived-in. Like much of what transpired on the December, 2009 dates from which ECM culled Live at Birdland, which plays home to this and five other post-bop standbys, the rapport between Konitz, Motian, pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Charlie Haden is casual and offhanded, but there in ...

238

Album Review

Brad Mehldau: Live in Marciac

Read "Live in Marciac" reviewed by Kevin Davis

by Kevin Davis
August 3, 2011

In his 2000 book Fargo Rock City (Scribner), Chuck Klosterman explains a phenomenon in heavy metal that involves the critical threshold at which the speed of notes within a solo actually changes the inherent meaning of the sound. To illustrate his point, he describes a passage by ex-Kiss guitarist Vinnie Vincent that, upon crossing said threshold, “becomes the equivalent of a police whistle." This is an astute observation which extends to jazz as well: There's a point during “Mars," from ...