Articles
Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.
Jazz in the Time of Pandemic
The first week of April 2020: images crystalized the daily news reports; a dystopian Times Square; Piazza Navona in Rome, emptied of tourists, Barcelona's Basílica de la Sagrada Família standing like an abstract ruin, makeshift morgues in hospital parking lots. The jazz world is small but still a microcosm of society with interdependencies that run deep. For every shuttered performance venue there are promoters, agents, ticket sellers, bookkeepers, print shops, servers, bartenders, cleaners, outside suppliers, and so on. At the ...
read moreGeorge Garzone: Sax In The City
George Garzone is not the mayor of the city of Boston. If he was appointed to a position it would more likely be king. He is, at the very least, the toast of the town. This isn't news. King George has reigned with a firm grasp of his mighty tenor saxophone for close to half a century now. Although not as much of a household name outside of Boston, Garzone is nonetheless revered by jazz enthusiasts around the globe. Perhaps ...
read moreThe Necks: Three
Live performances by Australian free-improvising trio The Necks typically take the form of a single, slowly growing and morphing mass of sound. On recordings the musicians give themselves permission to sculpt the sound, so it is not a real-time document. Nevertheless their two previous albums Vertigo (Northern Spy Records, 2015) and Body (Northern Spy Records, 2018) both presented a single long track apiece, paralleling their live practice. This time the program is broken into three parts, each with its own ...
read moreAlexander Hawkins and Tomeka Reid: Shards and Constellations
Although they have not recorded together previously, pianist Alexander Hawkins and cellist Tomeka Reid are both improvisers with omnivorous musical tastes and soaring ambition. Hawkins has fronted his own ensembles over the years—perhaps the most notable example being Step Wide, Step Deep (Babel, 2014)—but he's been active in freely-improvised contexts as well, working with everyone from Louis Moholo-Moholo to Evan Parker. And Reid has generated ample accolades both for her own quartet, most recently on Old New (Cuneiform, 2019), as ...
read moreAlfredo Chacon: Bossing in the Rain
Multi-instrumentalist and Latin-jazz star Alfredo Chacon presents a Brazilian-tinged package of light bossa nova and Afro-Cuban rhythms on the sensational Bossing in the Rain, adding to his ever-growing list of music as a leader and sideman. A major voice in the Latin jazz genre, and fixture in the Miami jazz scene, Chacon honed his skills on the vibraphone and percussion by living and performing around the world. Having an affinity for the sounds of samba and bossa nova, it is ...
read moreAndy Milne: The reMission
Ever hear a disc and wonder why the deep-seated beauty of some players' music escapes your radar? Juno Award-winning pianist and composer Andy Milne's The reMission, a challenging, tough, terse and ultimately triumphant recording, is one of those. One of those discs that, after several uninterrupted listens, has one digging into the discography scrambling to catch up. A composer with an agile, far flung curiosity, Milne has held the bench for Ravi Coltrane and Ralph Alessi. He's teamed ...
read moreMaking Friends with a Giant: How I first met Michael Brecker
Bob Reynolds is one of those great tenor saxophone players and teachers you should know but perhaps don't. He's in that class of great musicians like drummer Anwar Marshall, tenor player Tivon Pennicott, and Scottish guitarist Kevin Mackenzie who work steadily, gigging and releasing an increasingly excellent body of work you should definitely check out if you haven't yet heard it. Bob is a Grammy Award-winning member of the band Snarky Puppy and is known for his work with both ...
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