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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Album Review

Jane Ira Bloom: Wingwalker

Read "Wingwalker" reviewed by Greg Simmons

by Greg Simmons
March 25, 2011

Saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom is a first-class improviser and composer, and delivers a compelling case for herself on Wingwalker. Full of inventive original compositions, fine performances, and Bloom's rich, natural tone, this record is a standout. Although the soprano saxophone is less frequently heard, this record boldly demands its place at the table with its curved-bell brethren. Bloom takes composition credit for all but one track. Even so, Wingwalker has a collaborative overall feel to it. All of ...

327

Forgotten Finds

Lions in Winter

by Greg Simmons
March 25, 2011

Recently passed jazz greats, saxophonist James Moody and pianist Hank Jones, were both fortunate enough to be making solid, vital recordings right up to the ends of their lives. Moody's 4A (IPO, 2009) and 4B (IPO, 2010) were as well-played as any he ever recorded, and Jones, who was still active in his last year at the age of 92, was the quintessential jazz classicist--a person younger musicians turned to when they wanted to hear something played right.Of ...

331

Album Review

Harris Eisenstadt: Canada Day II

Read "Canada Day II" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
March 24, 2011

If you believe most recordings by drummer/composers are positive statements, then Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day II is more than a glass half full. It is a brimming cup of music. The disc follows 2009's Canada Day, on Portugal's Clean Feed label, with the same lineup. Eisenstadt infuses each recording with a buoyancy and high-spiritedness, not unlike fellow drummers Matt Wilson and John Hollenbeck. Eisenstadt, a student of African drumming, has written for large jazz bands, ...

201

Album Review

Shawn Bell Quintet: Things Yet Unknown

Read "Things Yet Unknown" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
March 24, 2011

Trombonist Shawn Bell wants to sate the appetite of avid brass lovers with his Things Yet Unknown. He hosts a trombone/trumpet (or flugelhorn) frontline quintet that is, at once, smooth and bright. This slim release comprises seven selections, five of which are original compositions. Bell is a conservative sort, opting to mostly stay in the mainstream; however, he does get an impulse to color outside the lines also. The disc begins with the diptych of Bell's title ...

422

Extended Analysis

Paul Motian Trio 2000 + Two: Live at the Village Vanguard, Volume lll

by Charles Walker
March 24, 2011

Paul Motian Trio 2000 + TwoLive at the Village Vanguard, Volume IIIWinter & Winter2011 It almost seems like a challenge to the critical establishment: return to the scene of your greatest early-career triumph, 40 years later, surrounded by active musicians instead of legends, and see what happens. Drummer Paul Motian, a fundamental gear in the Bill Evans Trio's landmark Sunday at the Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), has spent many of the intervening ...

208

Album Review

Tim Berne: Insomnia

Read "Insomnia" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
March 24, 2011

Recorded in the summer of 1997, the previously unreleased Insomnia offers an expanded variation of composer/saxophonist Tim Berne's critically lauded 1990s quartet, Bloodcount. The group, which featured Berne (on alto and baritone saxophones), tenor saxophonist/clarinetist Chris Speed, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Jim Black, was widely revered for its ability to fashion dramatic opuses that seamlessly integrated abstracted mutant funk vamps with extended episodes of spectral introspection. Bolstered with a mixed quartet of notable string and brass players, the augmented ...

348

Album Review

Peter Scharli Trio featuring Ithamara Koorax: O Grande Amor

Read "O Grande Amor" reviewed by Douglas Payne

by Douglas Payne
March 24, 2011

In their second recording together, Swiss trumpeter Peter Schärli and Brazilian singer Ithamara Koorax have come up with a beautiful reflection on Brazilian music that goes far above and beyond expectation. Schärli, whose attractive sound and complimentary interjections suggest the influence of Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, and Koorax were first brought together in 2006 by legendary Brazilian percussionist Dom Um Romão (1925-2005), who had previously worked with both musicians on separate occasions, to record Obrigado Dom Um Romão ...

255

Album Review

Ted Rosenthal Trio: Impromptu

Read "Impromptu" reviewed by Greg Simmons

by Greg Simmons
March 24, 2011

On Impromptu, pianist Ted Rosenthal modestly credits every track to the original classical composer on which the song is based. It's a nice, self-effacing touch, but probably unnecessary. No one will misconstrue this album as anything but a modern jazz recording--and a good one at that--even if Rosenthal is performing adaptations. For the most part, the classical music themes are relatively easy to pick out against the jazz trio format, but they've been heavily adjusted for tempo and ...

428

Album Review

James Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: James Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: The Causeway Suite

Read "James Hamilton Jazz Orchestra: The Causeway Suite" reviewed by Mark Sabbatini

by Mark Sabbatini
March 24, 2011

James Hamilton is an idiot and the world is a better place as a result. The debut album by his 19-member orchestra, The Causeway Suite, is the 2010 British Composer Awards' 2010 winner for Contemporary Jazz Composition. The live performance is a bold and abruptly shifting mix of classic and modern concepts, full of innovation in group and individual passages, and a worthy acquisition even for those who (like me) don't always cotton to big band.

229

Album Review

Anthony Braxton: Trio & Quintet (Town Hall) 1972

Read "Trio & Quintet (Town Hall) 1972" reviewed by Troy Collins

by Troy Collins
March 23, 2011

Time has an ability to obscure certain details of the past. This notion is apparent when considering the multi-decade oeuvre of visionary composer Anthony Braxton, whose restructuralist Tri-Axium Theory is as unique as Ornette Coleman's Harmolodic Theory or Cecil Taylor's Unit Structures. Braxton's use of pulse structures and multiple logics has long encouraged a considerable amount of expressive autonomy from performers, yet the composer's idiosyncratic aesthetic has commonly been attributed to an iconoclastic sensibility that inadvertently undervalues his seminal membership ...