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.

228

Take Five With...

Take Five With Peter Knoll

by AAJ Staff
July 16, 2011

Meet Peter Knoll: I am a German-American experimental guitarist living in New York City. The band members of my trio are Mark Peterson on bass and Andy O'Neill on drums. I also co-lead the improvisation Quartet “Conundrum" in Europe. I teach guitar in New York. My most famous students were both children of “The Edge" (U2), and In November, 2007, I was voted Guitar Player of the Week by GuitarPlayerZen.com. My debut album, Certainty Is, is available online.

234

Album Review

The Boswell Sisters: The Boswell Sisters Collection

Read "The Boswell Sisters Collection" reviewed by Chris Mosey

by Chris Mosey
July 16, 2011

This magnificent boxed set of five CDs and one DVD represents the entire commercially released recorded output of the Boswell Sisters, the most popular and influential close harmony vocal group ever. They were white, but lead singer Connie-- she later changed the spelling to Connee--sang black. Ella Fitzgerald, when she was starting out, said her aim was to sound just like her. Before they concentrated purely on singing, the sisters were a vaudeville act, accompanying themselves on ...

283

Live From New York

Live From The Bell House: Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars, Big Sandy And His Fly-Rite Boys, Dennis Coffey & Syl Johnson

by Martin Longley
July 15, 2011

Sierra Leone's Refugee All-Stars The Bell House May 28, 2011 Down in Gowanus again, a few blocks away from its toxic canal, a proximity that doesn't impair The Bell House's ability to present great music, or even discourage folks from sitting outside in the newly-arrived swelter. How charming, to be hanging out in Brooklyn's industrial quarter, quaffing Blue Point blueberry ale, and inhaling the fumes from the nearby organic bratwurst truck.

243

Album Review

Wolfgang Muthspiel: Drumfree

Read "Drumfree" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
July 15, 2011

Drumfree contains some of the most stimulating three-way counterpoint written and played in a long time. All of the compositional credit goes to Wolfgang Muthspiel, the composer; but making it all come alive is Muthspiel, the guitarist, and his chosen partners for this date: saxophonist Andy Scherrer and bassist Larry Grenadier. Muthspiel leads from the front with the warmth and splendor of his authoritative voice. The guitarist is deeply rooted in the harmonic ideas of European music, with phrases fully ...

221

Album Review

Augusto Pirodda: No Comment

Read "No Comment" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
July 15, 2011

A standard comic-strip theme presents the wise man sitting cross-legged on a remote mountain top, contemplating life, the human condition, God. A searcher from the temporal world below climbs the mountain and asks the wise man a question of profound importance. The last frame of the strip is a joke, the wise man's answer that steers the potentially sublime into the depths of the ridiculous; a good laugh at our expense. But the universal quest for truth remains constant, and ...

141

Take Five With...

Take Five With Duane Padilla

by AAJ Staff
July 15, 2011

Meet Duane Padilla: Classically trained violinist (Yale and Northwestern); Honolulu Symphony Violinist; Swing Violinist with Hot Club of Hulaville; Winner Hawaii Academy of Recording ArtsJazz Album of the Year 2011.Instrument(s): Violin.Teachers and/or influences? Teachers: Idell Low, Gerardo Ribeiro, Syoko Aki.I knew I wanted to be a musician when... I was four years old and heard a recording of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto on the radio.

233

Album Review

Brent Canter: Urgency Of Now

Read "Urgency Of Now" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
July 15, 2011

Red flags usually pop up the minute an organ is spotted on the personnel list of a record. Regardless of the quality of the music, the direction is often set in stone, with bluesy Jimmy Smith-style swing dominating the proceedings, but that doesn't always prove to be true. In fact, guitarist Brent Canter's Urgency Of Now might be the least derivative organ-based date to hit the streets in 2011. Canter's music is full of surprises, as he ...

303

From Far and Wide

CrossCurrent 3: A Cry for Cultural Development

by Gian Paolo Galasi
July 15, 2011

CrossCurrent Festival 3: Press Conference Piazza Loggia, Café Aquarium Brescia, Italy June 21, 2011 This space may not be the most fitting for an extended cultural/sociological analysis of how artistic expression and economical acknowledgment feeds each other, but there are events that can be taken as a good starting point for reflection. The New York edition of the forthcoming Crosscurrent Festival can be, with reasonable evidence, considered to be one of them. On ...

284

Album Review

Hiromi: Voice

by Jeff Winbush
July 14, 2011

If there's no guitar are you playing rock n' roll? If there's no singing does it make any sense to call an album Voice? Sure it does because after all, this is a Hiromi record and, while there is no guitar within earshot, there is plenty of rocking and rolling going on.Voice is not--repeat---not a rock album or a jazz-rock album--or fusion or any other such hybrid. It's a jazz record and the seventh Hiromi album is much ...

322

Live Review

Vision Festival: Day 4, June 8, 2011

by John Sharpe
July 14, 2011

Day 1 | Days 2-3 | Day 4 | Days 5-6 | Day 7 Peter Brötzmann Quartet / Jason Adasiewicz/Peter Brötzmann Pulverize The Sound / Peter Brötzmann QuintetVision FestivalAbrons Arts CenterNew York CityJune 8, 2011 Each year the Vision Festival honors one of its own--someone from the avant jazz community whose lifetime achievement merits celebration. This year, for the first time, the plaudits jet-streamed across the Atlantic, with German ...