Featured Jazz Articles

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

INTERVIEW October 26, 2020

Joe Farnsworth: Friends In High Places

Joe Farnsworth is one of the top jazz drummers working today, with a resume that includes some of the absolute greats. His muscular swing and precise timekeeping have been attractive to employers like Wynton Marsalis, Diana Krall, McCoy Tyner, George Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, Eric Alexander, Benny Golson and many more. He likes to say he has friends in high places. True enough. It also helps to have monster chops and a great sense of time and swing, garnered ...

RECORD LABEL PROFILE October 21, 2020

Analog Africa: digging deeper into forgotten corners of global groove

By Rob Garratt

For casual but curious collectors of eclectic sounds and global grooves, Analog Africa might be the Holy Grail. Since being founded in Germany by Samy Ben Redjeb in 2006, the Tunisian crate digger's deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic imprint has birthed a steady stream of 40 peerless releases and counting--carefully curated collections of rare and obscure analogue-era recordings which invariably act as thrilling sonic transporters, touristic time capsules and irresistible dance-floor fillers. The story begins in 2000 when ...

INTERVIEW October 19, 2020

Rez Abbasi: On balancing picture with music and shifting into Django mode

By Friedrich Kunzmann

To really distinguish oneself in today's vast universe of guitarists, even within the confines of jazz, more and more resembles a Sisyphus task. When so much has been said and done, a specific tone or distinctive vocabulary alone no longer suffice to set an artist apart from the crowd. It is only through the sum of the different parts—various technical, aesthetic and even philosophical ones—that a musician is able to claim a place among the original voices on the instrument. ...

UNDER THE RADAR October 13, 2020

The Word from Johannesburg, Part I: Nduduzo Makhathini

By Karl Ackermann

In 1919, the Pasadena Evening Post said: “the friends of Mr. Whiteman have with much enthusiasm bestowed the title of “King of Jazz" upon him." While Paul Whiteman was heavily criticized for wearing the crown, it was not one that was self-attributed or with which he felt completely comfortable. But Whiteman was a brilliant marketer and used his notoriety to become the most financially successful bandleader of the 1920s. He had taken territory bands to franchise-like status with dozens of ...

INTERVIEW October 12, 2020

Tamar Osborn: From Kalakuta To Collocutor: New Directions In Jazz

By Chris May

She has been likened to Gil Evans, Fela Kuti, Pharoah Sanders, Bismillah Khan and Mulatu Astatke, and the traditions represented by those musicians are all to be heard in the music of baritone saxophonist and composer Tamar Osborn. Osborn's aesthetic, however, is her own, and her band, Collocutor, is among the most distinctive on the British jazz scene. Collocutor is three albums old. It began as a studio project with the album Instead in 2014 and then became ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY October 6, 2020

Chet Baker: An Alternative Top Ten Albums To Get Lost In

By Chris May

Chet Baker was born to a farmer's daughter and a hard-drinking, weed-smoking singer and guitarist in a Western Swing band in Yale, Oklahoma in 1929. Like many Okies, the family fared badly during the Great Depression but did a little better after moving to Glendale, California in 1939. Largely self-taught as a trumpeter, Baker honed his skills playing in an army band after volunteering for military service in the mid 1940s. By the turn of the decade, he was making ...

SO YOU DON'T LIKE JAZZ October 4, 2020

Discovering Jazz through Pretzel Logic

By Alan Bryson

It's a good bet that most of us have heard people say they don't like jazz, or even worse, drop the H-bomb, “I hate jazz." If you choose to engage, the key is to tread lightly and tailor an approach that considers the tastes and sensibilities of the other person. The “So You Don't Like Jazz" column explores ways to do just that. Steely Dan If you dig down in the music collection of many people who claim ...