All About Jazz

Home » Articles | Album Reviews Only

JAZZ POLLS | VOTE
Support All About Jazz DONATE

Dear All About Jazz Readers,

If you're familiar with All About Jazz, you know that we've dedicated over two decades to supporting jazz as an art form, and more importantly, the creative musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made All About Jazz one of the most culturally important websites of its kind in the world reaching hundreds of thousands of readers every month. However, to expand our offerings and develop new means to foster jazz discovery we need your help.

You can become a sustaining member for a modest $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky Google ads PLUS deliver exclusive content and provide access to future articles for a full year! This combination will not only improve your AAJ experience, it will allow us to continue to rigorously build on the great work we first started in 1995. Read on to view our project ideas...

Articles by Arthur R George

PROFILES

Brother Thelonious Re-Released At California North Coast Jazz and Ale House

Read "Brother Thelonious Re-Released At California North Coast Jazz and Ale House" reviewed by

"Brother Thelonious," an ale named in tribute to pianist Thelonious Monk using a Belgian Trappist brew style, is flowing again out of the North Coast Brewing Company in Fort Bragg, California and its jazz-devoted performance venue, The Sequoia Room. An intermission in production occurred after a dispute between North Coast Brewing and the Estate of the late Thelonious Monk, now resolved, over the use of Monk's image promoting the ale and related products. The Estate, represented by Monk's son drummer ...

PROFILES

Sonny Buxton: Mid-Day Saturdays and A Radio Master Class With Strayhorn's Last Drummer

Read "Sonny Buxton: Mid-Day Saturdays and A Radio Master Class With Strayhorn's Last Drummer" reviewed by

Sociologist, anthropologist, historian: storyteller, raconteur, entrepreneur and griot, in the guise of a deejay. Registrar, dean, professor: The jazz class of Sonny Buxton is barely concealed as entertainment within his weekly radio program every Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific time on San Francisco Bay Area FM station KCSM 91.1, streaming live on kcsm.org. At age 81, with a still-strong crisp baritone voice, he's like a garrulous and enthusiastic great-uncle, spinning classic songs with stories that he ...

PROFILES

Istanbul’s İKSV: An Intensity Beyond Cool

Read "Istanbul’s İKSV: An Intensity Beyond Cool" reviewed by

It would be easy to get breathless, even giddy, about the range and schedule of cultural events organized by İKSV, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (in Turkish: İstanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfı). One individual could not possibly keep up with its jazz and classical music festivals and everything else that's offered by İKSV. It brings under one organization something like the variety and aspirations of Lincoln Center in New York, the National Endowment for the Arts, commercial promoter Live ...

PROFILES

SFJAZZ: Decades After, Five Years In

Read "SFJAZZ: Decades After, Five Years In" reviewed by

Five years after the jny: San Francisco, California organization SFJAZZ created its own building, the SFJAZZ Center, it has proved a raving, even rampaging, success, unrelenting in programming, sales, education, and music production. Its number of concerts has doubled from 248 to more than 500. Its membership has increased by almost 200% to more than 14,000. It moves a million dollars worth of tickets in the first week its box office opens; some shows sell out to members even before ...

PROFILES

Kuumbwa And The Magic of Monday Night

Read "Kuumbwa And The Magic of Monday Night" reviewed by

Monday nights, otherwise a down time for many music venues, have been magic for the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in jny: Santa Cruz, CA. Kuumbwa's most prominent shows occur, oddly, on off-calendar Monday nights or midweek, featuring headliners before or after their engagements nearby in jny: San Francisco and jny: Oakland and who are touring up or down the West Coast, going to or coming from bookings in other more major cities. It's a business plan which has found ...

PROFILES

The Bach's Beach Vision Of Jazz Heaven

Read "The Bach's Beach Vision Of Jazz Heaven" reviewed by

Heaven for some is a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield. For Pete Douglas, it was a house on a beach with a jazz club in his living room, a would-be heaven also for anyone who dropped in. Douglas passed on, in 2014 at age 85, sitting at his desk overlooking the Pacific Ocean. But his vision lingers at the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, aka the Douglas Beach House, at Miramar Beach on Half Moon Bay in Northern California ...

PROFILES

A Vintage Year For Jessica Felix And The Healdsburg Jazz Festival

Read "A Vintage Year For Jessica Felix And The Healdsburg Jazz Festival" reviewed by

It's a 20th anniversary vintage year for the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, pouring over the first ten days of this coming June, in the Sonoma County “wine country" 70 miles north of jny:San Francisco. That there is a festival at all is due to the tenacity of its artistic director Jessica Felix, who planted jazz in Healdsburg twenty years ago and has kept working to sustain it. That Jessica Felix is at the center of the festival at all is due ...