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.

287

Live Review

Jamie Saft Special Quintet at Cornelia St. Café

by Sean Patrick Fitzell
November 19, 2010

Jamie SaftCornelia St. CaféNew York, NYNovember 12, 2010Perhaps better known for his electric keyboard work in genre-flouting projects, Jamie Saft also possesses a deep jazz sensibility and prodigious piano technique. It was these talents he sought to exercise with his “Special Quintet" for a 2-night, 4-set stand at Cornelia Street Café. Not stodgy or rote, the first set was firmly grounded in tradition but retained a sense of surprise. Saft was joined by ...

277

Afrobeat Diaries

Part 14 - Fela! Original Broadway Cast Recording

by Chris May
November 19, 2010

Various ArtistsFela! Original Broadway Cast RecordingKnitting Factory Records2010 One of the several extraordinary things about the Broadway musical Fela! is not so much that approaching 400,000 people have seen the production since it opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in November 2009, but that the many friends and family of Fela Anikulapo Kuti who have attended the show are unanimous in their praise for it. For the producers of Fela! have ...

263

Album Review

Vienna Art Orchestra: The Minimalism of Erik Satie

Read "The Minimalism of Erik Satie" reviewed by Raul d'Gama Rose

by Raul d'Gama Rose
November 19, 2010

This is starting to look like the year of Erik Satie. How else could there be two magnificent albums dedicated to his music? The first was Dan Willis and Velvet Gentlemen's The Satie Project (Daywood Drive Records, 2010), while this rerelease of 1984's classic, The Minimalism of Erik Satie, features Mathias Rüegg's large ensemble tribute to the late-19th/early 20th Century French composer. Both albums are unique: Willis' essentially transposing for reeds and an ensemble slightly larger than a quartet, playing ...

1,596

Live Review

Kurt Rosenwinkel Monvínic Experience in Barcelona

by Roan Clay
November 19, 2010

Kurt RosenwinkelMonvínic42nd Barcelona Voll-Damm International Jazz FestivalNovember 15, 2010The Berlin based guitarist and composer Kurt Rosenwinkel spent two days performing in Barcelona this week in two markedly different contexts. His loyal fans turned out en mass at the famed Luz de Gas, an intimate club in the Eixample neighborhood, to hear his trio, resulting in an illuminating set of standards featuring drummer Ted Poor and bassist Eric Revis (look for more information in our ongoing ...

121

Album Review

Randy Simon Jazz Project: Light It Up

Read "Light It Up" reviewed by Alexander M. Stern

by Alexander M. Stern
November 19, 2010

The Randy Simon Jazz Project is a collection of some of Upstate New York's best and brightest jazz luminaries, all brought together to play the music of the titular Simon. Simon's compositions and arrangements are extraordinary. Complex yet completely accessible, he paints dazzling portraits in sound, creating perfect launching points for his soloists. Light It Up, Simon's fourth album since 2008, continues a run of exceptional albums that present modern jazz at its best. The performers on this album are ...

349

Take Five With...

Take Five With Steve Sacks

by AAJ Staff
November 19, 2010

Meet Steve Sacks: A jazz saxophonist/flutist and Harvard-trained musicologist, Steve, has for 35 years, focused his talents on the richness and diversity of Brazilian and Latin music. An internationalist fluent in five languages, and with twenty years experience on the New York music scene, Steve has performed, recorded and/or written for a wide variety of artists including Tito Puente, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Earl Klugh, Mongo Santamaria, Astrud Gilberto, Paquito D'Rivera, Paul Simon, ...

259

Album Review

Albert Beger Electroacoustic Band: Peacemaker

Read "Peacemaker" reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

by Eyal Hareuveni
November 19, 2010

Peacemaker, from Albert Beger, marks a new beginning for the innovative Israeli saxophonist. Beger introduces a new quintet that adds, for the first time, live electronics to his fiery-spirited palette of sounds, and a new approach to composition and playing that stresses thematic structure. He is also recording for a new local label that is identified with alternative music. Like on his previous Big Mother (Jazzear, 2008), which dealt with the damage that humans are inflicting upon ...

411

Album Review

OnGaku2: Kado - Live @ Area Sismica

Read "Kado - Live @ Area Sismica" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
November 19, 2010

D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “we don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known." That reflection keeps reverberating during the 43 minutes of this improvised performance by guitarist Elia Casu and drummer Paolo Sanna. Their interaction is at times beyond music, and that is not some “new age" shamanist statement. This session easily transcends the conscious act of listening to enable a meditative response. The recording ...

221

Album Review

Jenny Davis: Inside You

Read "Inside You" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
November 19, 2010

Jenny Davis' It Amazes Me (Self Produced, 2006) was a relaxed tuneful affair employing a crack quintet capable of multiple layers of musicianship. For Inside You, Davis whittles her quintet to a duo, featuring her regular guitarist Chuck Easton, and bassist Ted Enderle, furnishing a stripped-down swing that depends on its own momentum with which to propel it. From the near orchestral duet with Easton on “When Your Lover Has Gone" to the brilliantly spare duet with Enderle on “Softly, ...

701

Extended Analysis

Nellie McKay: Home Sweet Mobile Home

by Matt Marshall
November 18, 2010

Nellie McKayHome Sweet Mobile HomeVerve2010 Singer and multi-instrumentalist Nellie McKay seems to need a break. Not from music-making, mind you, but from the toils of existing within a bump and drive world that has little time for reflection or respite, and none, seemingly, to worry about repeating yesterday's mistakes. With any luck, McKay, that spunky champion of the underdog, was far away, basking in island breezes when the recent US election ...