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.

128

Album Review

Rich Halley Quartet featuring Bobby Bradford: Live At The Penofin Jazz Festival

Read "Live At The Penofin Jazz Festival" reviewed by Bruce Lindsay

by Bruce Lindsay
October 19, 2010

As the title suggests, Live At The Penofin Jazz Festival is a straight-from-the-stage recording, from the 2008 Festival held at Potter Valley, California. It chronicles a fiery, upbeat performance, from the Rich Halley Quartet, that combines composed and improvised music in an interesting and enjoyable set of tunes. Four of the compositions can be found on tenor saxophonist Halley's previous studio albums--three from The Blue Rims (Louie, 2003), and one, “Grey Stones," from Objects (Louie, 2002)--in addition to Streets Below," ...

537

Live Review

Pat Metheny: The Orchestrion Project Live at The Flynn Burington VT

by Doug Collette
October 19, 2010

Pat MethenyFlynn Center for the Performing ArtsBurlington, VermontOctober 5, 2010 Pat Metheny as one-man band? As mad scientist? As master innovator/musician of the (not-so) new millennium? All those thoughts and perceptions came to mind during the two-plus hours the Missouri-born guitarist and composer turned the MainStage of the Flynn Center for The Performing Arts into a combination of laboratory and classroom.In all the years Metheny has appeared at the Flynn-eighteen times total as ...

186

Album Review

Robert Plant: Band of Joy

Read "Band of Joy" reviewed by C. Michael Bailey

by C. Michael Bailey
October 19, 2010

Classic rock music from the mid-1960s to the mid-'70s produced three great voices: Rod Stewart, Roger Daltrey, and Robert Plant. Of these, the most incendiary was Plant. Never in the voice of a white man was there ever so much raw sexual power than that voice that sang “Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," “Whole Lotta Love," “Gallows Pole," “Black Dog," or “In My Time of Dying." Jimmy Page may have been the genius, but he would have been nothing but ...

344

Take Five With...

Take Five With Aimua Eghobamien

by AAJ Staff
October 19, 2010

Meet Aimua Eghobamien: With a dad who listened to a world of music from British pop to Highlife and Calypso; a mum who sang him a do lullabies; and siblings who were interested in all things American--Motown, soul, US pop and R&B charts--his musical tastes developed without limitations. Living at various points on three continents, he has experienced at firsthand Nigerian drums and folk, European pop and American R&B. His own performance experience includes theatre, gospel, rock, pop, Contemporary Christian, ...

370

Album Review

Nik Bartsch's Ronin: Llyria

Read "Llyria" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan

by Dan McClenaghan
October 19, 2010

On Stoa (ECM Records, 2005), Nik Bärtsch's Ronin offered up music made with a clock-like precision. Zen Funk, Ritual Groove Music--take your pick of descriptive tags--was meted out by a machine-like ensemble, using repetition and reduction and space sparked by the leader's punctuating, crystalline piano notes underlain, a great deal of the time, by a bass/contrabass clarinet rumble that suggested a sinister gargantuan presence dwelling in the basement beneath the machinery.Holon (ECM, 2008), the Swiss band's second recording ...

397

Album Review

Trey Gunn / Marco Minnemann: Modulator

Read "Modulator" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
October 19, 2010

Touch guitar ace Trey Gunn composed this album based upon Marco Minnemann's 51-minute Normalizer 2 drum solo. Thankfully, this is not a bash fest; instead, the drummer's rhythmic foray features odd-metered polyrhythmic episodes and textural cymbal swashes amid a cavalcade of salient percussive concepts.The preponderance of the largely, contiguous tracks do indeed pronounce a modulating framework; on “Flood," the duo exercises restraint to complement the sinuous journey. Gunn's limber touch guitar work encompasses fretless guitar and basses to ...

3,133

Interview

Markus Reuter: (R)Evolutionary Touch Guitarist

by Jeffrey L. Melton
October 19, 2010

German touch guitarist Markus Reuter stands at the forefront of the international ambient music community. From his various collaborations with King Crimson alumni and electronic music pioneers Ian Boddy and Robert Rich, Reuter has crafted a busy schedule of his own recordings, lent his own ear and expertise to engineering and production work in parallel with leading classes on the unusual 8-stringed instrument he uses to promote his art. This interview is the first of two parts documenting Reuter's efforts ...

205

Album Review

The Man Who Laughs: Deep Song

by Chris May
October 18, 2010

On Deep Song, London based singer Fumi Okiji and looped up guitarist Stefano Kalonaris--recording under the auspices of the experimentally inclined, but historically literate, musicians' collective F-IRE--offer a noir-ish, digital-age spin on jazz standards and the Great American Songbook. Okiji has explored similar material with the Portrait Bellevue trio featuring cellist Ben Davis and pianist Zac Gvirtzman, and Kalonaris has done so via vintage jazz ensembles on the cabaret circuit. Deep Song takes 10 popular and jazz standards--from ...

413

Live Review

Jazz Middelheim 2010

by Martin Longley
October 18, 2010

Jazz MiddelheimPark Den BrandtAntwerpen, BelgiumAugust 12-15, 2010 The Jazz Middelheim festival is a weekender that hasn't relinquished its fondness for adventure over the last four decades. Nuzzling up against stellar bookings are acts, Belgian and otherwise, who seek to jolt the expectations of many audience members. The entertaining middle way is subverted by the sideways thrust of jazz extremity. This too can often be entertaining. 2010 is the third year that Bertrand Flamang has ...

213

Album Review

Rashanim: The Gathering

Read "The Gathering" reviewed by Warren Allen

by Warren Allen
October 18, 2010

Jon Madof was studying jazz and rock guitar when he first heard John Zorn and Masada, playing what Zorn eventually termed “radical Jewish music." Masada's sound, imbued with the fire of rock and the dynamic improvisation of jazz--and combined with the powerful roots of Hebraic modes and Middle Eastern rhythms--became an inspiration to make something new out of tradition. It led Madof to a similar expansion of Jewish religious and cultural music beyond the world of scratchy Klezmer and cantorial ...