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 future articles page. Read our daily album reviews.

Extended Analysis

-Isq: Too

by Phil Barnes
May 21, 2015

Vocal jazz gets a justifiably hard time these days--endless rehashes of “the Great American Songbook" or other Fifties showtunes, with high production values but little originality and even less to say. Enough to make any self-respecting reviewer power down their laptop you might think, but then out of the blue come gems like this from the improbably monikered -isq. -isq are a quartet who draw inspiration from jazz, taking it as their starting point but allowing other influences ...

Album Review

-isq: Too

by Bruce Lindsay
March 26, 2015

Too is the second album from London-based quartet -isq. No surprise there. The slightly odd presentation of the band's name remains in place and continues to trouble the usually faultless activities of the planet's internet search engines. The line-up from debut album -isq (Cheesepeas Records, 2013) is still intact. The band's distinctive “every silver lining has a cloud" approach to songwriting--lyrics by singer Irene Serra--was a strength of the debut and is also pretty much at the core of these ...

Album Review

-isq: -isq

by Bruce Lindsay
February 25, 2013

Type -isq into Google and the legend “Your search-- -isq --did not match any documents" appears. Add quotation marks and try again: this time around 6.5 million results appear and in among the links to Information Standards Quarterly and Integrated Systems Queensland up pops the website for London-based quartet -isq. This eponymous debut from the band, led by singer Irene Serra, is full of beautifully crafted original songs, performed with a pleasingly individual style. It can't be long before Google ...