Catching Up With

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

Less formal than our standard interviews with a focus on an artist's recent recording project or tour.

Catching Up With

Camille Bertault: The Fine Art of Breaking Jazz Conventions

by Emmanuel Di Tommaso
March 27, 2021

After achieving overnight notoriety thanks to a dazzling rendition of “Giant Steps" which went viral on Facebook, Camille Bertault has now established herself as one of the most original and genre-defying musicians on the scene. In Le Tigre (Okeh/Sony Music, 2020), her third album after the acclaim garnered by En Vie (Sunnyside Records, 2016) and Pas de Geant (Sunnyside Records, 2017), Bertault brings contemporary music towards brilliant new directions. All About Jazz: Le Tigre is an exceptionally intense ...

Catching Up With

Steffen Basho-Junghans: Guitar Excursions into the Unknown

by Mario Calvitti
January 22, 2021

On the occasion of the release of German guitarist Steffen Basho-Junghans' album The Dancer on the Hill (Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records, 2020) after 10 years of discographic silence, All About Jazz contacted the artist for a short interview. All About Jazz: Your new album Dancer on the Hill comes out more than 10 years after the previous one, IS, which was published in 2009. Why was there such a long gap between recordings, after an intense ...

Catching Up With

Ron Miles: Rainbow Sign Of The Times

by Ian Patterson
December 29, 2020

The title of Ron Miles' Rainbow Sign (Blue Note Records, 2020) carries great personal meaning for the Denver cornetist/composer and educator. The initial influence was The Carter Family song “God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign," with its line 'No more water but the fire next time," which in turn gave James Baldwin the title for his famous book on racial injustice, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963). “That's where James Baldwin got that," says Miles. “This kind of sense ...

Catching Up With

Allison Miller: Driving the Balance

by John Pietaro
December 22, 2020

Allison Miller sits at the vintage Camco drumkit in her Brooklyn home, playing post-bop over a rolling samba. Within the shimmer of an age-darkened cymbal, she switches from sticks to brushes, filling the room with the shush of summer rain, then a sudden hailstorm as her arms, aerial, traverse snare, tom-toms and cymbals in a blurring, but loving assault. Just a release of Covid fallout frustration? Maybe for some, but Miller remains unstoppable: this time also marks the rising of ...

Catching Up With

Claire Cowan: Jazz in Ballet

by Martin McFie
December 20, 2020

Composer Claire Cowan has been writing film scores since 2007. She branched out from her film work to accept a commission from the Royal New Zealand Ballet company, producing a completely new score for the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel." An old lady living in the woods who fattens up children with gingerbread to make a tasty meal would today find herself high on the FBI's most wanted list. However, in 1802, the publication of a collection of ...

Catching Up With

Jack DeJohnette: Bill Evans Legacy

by Franz A. Matzner
December 7, 2020

Modern Drummer Hall of Fame inductee, drummer and pianist Jack DeJohnette has shaped jazz drumming for decades. A compatriot of illustrious players like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, John Scofield, and many more, DeJohnette helped shape a new conception of what the drums could bring to ensembles, including adding color, detail, and fluid interplay. His contributions to the music are legendary and could fill volumes. Reinforcing this impact, Resonance Records has been releasing a series of never-before heard live recordings of ...

Catching Up With

Olafur Arnalds: Music and Art are Most Important in Times like These

by Nenad Georgievski
November 28, 2020

Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds has been described as a contemporary composer and synthesist, but that doesn't adequately reflect the alchemy of modern and traditional that he is able to blend on his new record, some kind of peace (Mercury KX, 2020). The album is steeped in reflective and introspective emotions, and themes that provide an underlying narrative. Cinematic in its scope and scrupulous in its detail some kind of peace has a melancholy beautiful yet is an uplifting album. Characteristically, ...