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.

208

Album Review

David Binney: Graylen Epicenter

Read "Graylen Epicenter" reviewed by Dan Bilawsky

by Dan Bilawsky
February 4, 2011

19th-century German novelist Berthold Auerbach is long forgotten by the masses in modern day society, but his best-known quote about music, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life," still lives on but pays no mind to the fact that some of the finest music can be reflective of everyday life. The human population experiences a daily yin and yang built of creation and destruction, hope and despair, joy and anger, simplicity and complexity, ...

298

Album Review

douBt: Never Pet a Burning Dog

Read "Never Pet a Burning Dog" reviewed by Mark Redlefsen

by Mark Redlefsen
February 4, 2011

Guitarist Michel Deville, of the Belgian Wrong Object, and British keyboardist Alex Maguire team up to form a power trio with drummer Tony Bianco as doubt, on its debut, Never Pet a Burning Dog. Deville steps out with a louder, more direct tone, affectionately and more overtly exposing the influence of Terje Rypdal--even including one of his compositions, “Over Birkerot," from Odyssey (ECM, 1975). The enhanced gunslinger performance is warranted, to meet the demands thrown up by Maguire and his ...

808

Record Label Profile

Accurate Records: Growing Out of Boston

by Jakob Baekgaard
February 3, 2011

In the age of globalization, when almost every musician churns out his or her own record digitally, the boundary between being a one-man business and a record company is porous. However, while many of the new labels remain dedicated to a small circle of artists, there is also the more rarified example of the musician-based label which takes on a greater responsibility and becomes an outlet for a whole community. This has happened in Los Angeles, where reed-player Vinny Golia ...

683

Book Review

Hi-De-Ho: The Life Of Cab Calloway

by David Rickert
February 3, 2011

Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab CallowayAlyn ShiptonHardcover; 288 pagesISBN 9780195141535Oxford University Press2010 During the swing revival of the 1990s it was singer and bandleader Cab Calloway, and not Benny Goodman or Duke Ellington or Glenn Miller, who provided the biggest influence--with the snazzy suits, hep language, and singer and band call and response that made Calloway famous. It was as if all you needed to do to form ...

175

Album Review

Koby Hayon: Gemini

by Dan Bilawsky
February 3, 2011

While Israeli-born guitarist Koby Hayon has been Stateside since 2001, he still proudly displays his roots in his musical projects. His position as the director of a Westchester, NY-based Jewish music festival--Nigunim: A Festival of New Improvised Jewish Music--and his work with fellow Israeli's Nadav Snir-Zelniker and Assaf Glizner in Trio Shalva are overt expressions of his background, and plenty of the pieces on Gemini also look out toward the Middle East. For this outing, Hayon is ...

195

Album Review

Wayne Wallace: To Hear From There

Read "To Hear From There" reviewed by Hrayr Attarian

by Hrayr Attarian
February 3, 2011

San Francisco-area trombonist Wayne Wallace is known for his Grammy-nominated forays into Afro-Cuban music, and on the surface, To Hear From There is another Latin jazz album. But mixed with the danceable, percussion-heavy rhythms and exuberant melodies, with a touch of melancholy, are complex, improvised solos that would delight even a jazz purist. The improvised give-and-take between pianist Murray Low and percussionist Michael Spiro, at the beginning of Tito Puente's classic “Philadelphia Mambo," is as angular and ...

184

Album Review

Paul Hubweber & Philip Zoubek: Archiduc Concert: Dansaert Variatiions

Read "Archiduc Concert: Dansaert Variatiions" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
February 3, 2011

Trombonist Paul Hubweber has previously impressed in the trio PaPaJo, which he shares with bassist John Edwards and percussionist Paul Lovens, rightfully being compared with the late, great Paul Rutherford. Despite such comparisons, he draws from many sources. When practicing, he plays many Albert Mangelsdorff tunes, alongside Charlie Parker standards and J. S. Bach pieces. In contrast to PaPaJo, Hubweber is here paired with prepared pianist Philip Zoutek. who is his junior by 24 years. The two have ...

224

Album Review

Scott Colley: Empire

Read "Empire" reviewed by Mark F. Turner

by Mark F. Turner
February 3, 2011

Empire is another exceptional release by Scott Colley, the first-call bassist whose deep strings have been the mainstay with numerous leading artists and a part of several fine recordings including drummer Antonio Sanchez's outstanding Live in New York at Jazz Standard (Cam Jazz, 2010). “January," the album's opener, sets a mood that is as cinematic as it is compelling. The twang of strings from Bill Frisell's guitar, the whispered wind song of percussive bells from drummer Brian Blade, and the ...

323

Album Review

Jim Hall: Concierto

Read "Concierto" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
February 3, 2011

Amongst the many CTI classics of the 1970s, few stand the test of time as well as guitarist Jim Hall's Concierto, an ambitious album that, in its original form, married one side of modern mainstream with a second taken up by a 19-minute version of Joaquin Rodrigo's 1939 piece for classical guitar and orchestra, “Concierto de Aranjuez." That Miles Davis and Gil Evans had already delivered what was considered the definitive jazz adaptation on the trumpeter's 1960 classic, Sketches of ...

222

Album Review

Michel Portal: Bailador

Read "Bailador" reviewed by Charles Walker

by Charles Walker
February 2, 2011

For all the lip service paid to the idea of jazz as a universal language, the modern performing landscape is still, by and large, segregated into separate continental categories, each with a host of attendant stereotypes. For every Randy Weston or David Murray, musicians who have made studious efforts at cross-border communication, there are dozens of territorial musicians, content to limit themselves to a very parochial sphere of influence. Well, quelle surprise! On Bailador, French multi-reedist Michel Portal, having spent ...