Featured Jazz Articles

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

INTERVIEW June 30, 2020

Denys Baptiste: Pathfinder For The New London Jazz

Bandleader, composer and educator Denys Baptiste is among the generation of musicians, many of them of Caribbean or African heritage, who pointed the way for the younger players who have emerged on the London jazz scene since around 2015. Baptiste's contemporaries include saxophonists Jason Yarde, Soweto Kinch, Steve Williamson and Courtney Pine, and trumpeter Byron Wallen, and they were the first wave of British players purposefully to include their cultural heritages in the jazz they played. Unlike earlier generations of ...

UNDER THE RADAR June 29, 2020

Women in Jazz, Pt. 3: The International Women in Jazz Organization

By Karl Ackermann

In part 1 and part 2 of the Women in Jazz series, we looked at the historical marginalization of women in jazz from Lil Hardin Armstrong and Blanch Calloway in the 1920s to Tia Fuller in 2019. Part 2 focused on several prominent pioneering artists including the all-female International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Marian McPartland, and Melba Liston. We also looked at the struggle for gender equality that inspired groups like We Have Voice, aimed at the prevention of harassment, self-preservation ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY June 24, 2020

Jazz & Film: An Alternative Top 20 Soundtrack Albums

By Chris May

Jazz and the movies have a shared history stretching back almost a hundred years. The relationship came into its own in the US in the mid twentieth century. Elia Kazan's 1950 movie Panic In The Streets is an early example of how film makers used jazz-based soundtracks to enhance drama and atmosphere and create ambiances of social or magical realism. As the 1950s wore on, television joined the party. On big and small screens, jazz became the ...

SOCAL JAZZ June 23, 2020

Catalina Jazz Club: Landmark Jazz Haven Forges Onward

By Jim Worsley

While west-coasters long to go to the Blue Note in jny: New York City, east-coasters have their sights set on the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood. The family-owned and operated jazz hot spot has seen and heard from all the jazz legends over the past thirty-four years. The supper club has fine dining and even finer up close and personal jazz performances. Having been there many times myself and seen/heard legends such as Ron Carter, Steve Gadd, Marcus Miller, and ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY June 16, 2020

Sex & Drugs & Jazz & Jive: Top Ten Stash Records Albums

By Chris May

With all the transgressive flair you would expect of bohemian New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, Bernie Brightman's Stash Records made its name with a hugely entertaining series of sex and drugs-themed compilations of swing-era recordings. The first was Reefer Songs in 1976. But Brightman's legacy extends much further. There was a finite amount of this material available for Stash to source and reissue and when the well ran dry, Brightman re-focused on making original recordings. Some of ...

INTERVIEW June 15, 2020

John Scofield: One For Swallow

By Ian Patterson

From time to time in his storied career John Scofield will take a look over his shoulder and re-examine some of the music that has fed into his own, personal brand of jazz. The influences are many, for no matter the context that Scofield engineers, his distinctive sound always carries something of the blues, a little funk, some R&B, a touch of soul, and a country twang. There was the '60s soul-jazz of Hand Jive (Blue Note, 1994) ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY June 9, 2020

Prestige Records: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

By Chris May

Along with Alfred Lion's Blue Note and Orrin Keepnews' Riverside, Bob Weinstock's Prestige was at the top table of independent New York City-based jazz labels from the early 1950s until the mid 1960s. Like those other two labels, Prestige built up a profuse catalogue packed with enduring treasures. Originally a record retailer, Weinstock founded Prestige in 1949. The label struck unexpected gold in 1952 with singer King Pleasure's hit “Moody Mood For Love" (aka “Moody's Mood For ...