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Daily articles carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. Read our popular and future articles.

ALBUM REVIEW February 12, 2020

Miles Okazaki: The Sky Below

Read "The Sky Below" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

Electric guitarist Miles Okazaki—also using electronics—and his rhythm section comprise three-fifths of alto sax great Steve Coleman's current band, as keyboardist Matt Mitchell rounds out this quartet for the leader's second release for Pi Recrodings, but his fifth album overall. And while the album length is a little over 39-minutes, many artists are cutting back some to accommodate the resurgence of LPs. However, quality is the key as Okazaki's idiosyncratic playing and multitiered compositions yield the knockout punch, framed on ...

ALBUM REVIEW August 31, 2018

Miles Okazaki: Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk

By Mark Corroto

The best way to embark upon Miles Okazaki's six-volume Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk is the same manner you might approach Herman Melville's American masterpiece Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Like Moby-Dick with its 135 chapters (and epilogue), Work is a Brobdingnagian accomplishment. Okazaki performs the complete Thelonious Monk songbook. 70 tunes in total. The accomplishment here is not the 4 hours and 44 minutes of music, but Okazaki's dedication to the Monk oeuvre. The only other ...

ALBUM REVIEW May 11, 2017

Miles Okazaki: Trickster

By Hrayr Attarian

There is nothing deceptive about guitarist Miles Okazaki's Trickster. It is simply an elegantly crafted work that engages with its narrative quality and its darkly hued, intriguing texture. On his fourth release as a leader the New York based Okazaki leads a quartet that consists of two of his bandmates from altoist Steve Coleman's Five Elements, bassist Anthony Tidd and drummer Sean Rickman. Dynamic pianist Craig Taborn rounds up the group. Okazaki and Taborn open the album on ...

ALBUM REVIEW March 24, 2017

Miles Okazaki: Trickster

By Glenn Astarita

Guitarist Miles Okazaki (Steve Coleman, Dan Weiss) is a meticulous artist and visionary partly due to his thorny and geometrically inclined theme-building practices. With ECM recording artist Craig Taborn sharing the frontline, the guitarist often makes complex storylines sound effortless by design, paralleled by the quartet's symmetrical pulses and deterministic gait. The band also gels to odd-metered bump and grind motifs and linear progressions amid succinctly stated unison lines. According to Okazaki, “The Calendar" ..." is a song ...

INTERVIEW August 28, 2012

Miles Okazaki: Cleaning the Mirror

By Daniel Lehner

In the backyard of his home in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, guitarist Miles Okazaki has spent time constructing a multifaceted backyard/garden filled with overhanging plants, stone walkways and a wooden pavilion surrounding a table and benches. The slats of the pavilion's floor seem to have been crafted merely for aesthetic purposes, but there's another process at work: the proportions of the ground structure are 144 in. x 89 in., which are, respectively, the 12th and 13th integer of the Fibonacci sequence ...

ALBUM REVIEW May 29, 2012

Miles Okazaki: Figurations

By Raul d'Gama Rose

Guitarist Miles Okazaki's Figurations is a fascinating document of how musical invention takes place on the spur of the moment. It is not a mad conglomeration of notes that come out in jagged clusters, but a mellifluous harmolodic excursion by four spectacular musicians as they begin to create music on each of their instruments, with their own ideas flowing organically, yet directed by the composer, Okazaki, who defines how the melody should sound by stating its antecedents and basic idea. ...

ALBUM REVIEW May 1, 2012

Miles Okazaki: Figurations

By Mark F. Turner

Figurations is the final release in Miles Okazaki's three volume compositional cycle. Its trajectory is based on forward-thinking ideas Okazaki began on his self-produced 2006 debut Mirror, and continued on the nearly sixty-minute Generations (Sunnyside, 2009), which was recorded in the studio in one take. While no less demanding, this recording was commissioned and performed in front of a live and appreciative audience at New York's Jazz Gallery.Methodical yet emotive, there are manifold ideas and theories swirling in ...