Featured Jazz Articles

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

INTERVIEW August 3, 2020

Rudy Royston: Little Steps, Big Pictures

Everybody needs a helping hand now and then. Rudy Royston understands that. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused gigs to completely dry up for all musicians, and with that, their main income stream. Yet there are still mortgages, rents and bills to pay, and children to feed. It says something about the precarious finances of a jazz musician's life, that Royston, one of the music's most in-demand drummers of the past quarter of a century--a trusted collaborator of Ron Miles, JD ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY July 29, 2020

Blue Note Records: Lost In Space: 20 Overlooked Classic Albums

By Chris May

For anyone with a passion for Blue Note, it is hard to conceive of an album that has been “overlooked," let alone twenty of them. For connoisseurs of the most influential label in jazz history, the passion can be all consuming: if a dedicated collector does not have all the albums (yet), he or she will be aware of their existence. For all but the most hardcore aficionado, however, the chances are that there are a few discs which have ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY July 23, 2020

Lift Every Voice And Sing: Twenty #BlackLives Albums That Matter

By Chris May

Jazz has been inextricably linked with social and political protest since at least the late 1930s, when Billie Holiday made famous the leftist songwriter and poet Abel Meeropol's “Strange Fruit." The song, which has a power to move that is undiminished by familiarity, likens the bodies of lynched African Americans to fruit hanging in trees. But the alignment of jazz and protest goes back further than “Strange Fruit." It is likely to have begun with the emergence ...

INTERVIEW July 21, 2020

Charles Tolliver: Blowing Down The Walls Of Trump’s Jericho

By Chris May

Charles Tolliver has played with practically every major African American jazz stylist of his generation, and composed for some of them, too. In addition, he is the co-founder of Strata-East, the most influential label at the intersection of hard bop and spiritual jazz during the 1970s. Tolliver's long and distinguished career continues to flourish, with a new album, Connect, recorded in London in November 2019, set for release on the Gearbox label at the end of July 2020.

LIVE REVIEW July 19, 2020

4th Zbigniew Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition

By Ian Patterson

4th Zbigniew Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, Poland/Various international locations on-line July 8-10, 2020 When the fanfare and drum roll had died down the big moment arrived. After three days of on-line competition, the six finalists waited anxiously in front of their screens, in Israel, The USA, Austria, France and in Brazil, to hear who would be crowned the winner of the 4th Zbigniew Seifert International Jazz Violin Competition. Ten thousand Euros ...

INTERVIEW July 15, 2020

Jerry Granelli: Updating Music of Past Heroes

By R.J. DeLuke

"I've earned the privilege of not playing anything I don't want to play," says drummer Jerry Granelli, whose past is replete with the names of many greats in jazz for whom he supplied rhythmic support—sometimes force—over several decades. “That used to be a fear," he adds, “You figured if you turned something down, the phone would never ring again. But I don't have to worry about that now. I might do something with a young musician. I won't ...

BUILDING A JAZZ LIBRARY July 13, 2020

Atlantic Records: More Giant Steps: An Alternative Top 20 Albums

By Chris May

Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun's Atlantic Records differs in one key respect from Prestige, Riverside, Impulse!, Strata-East and Flying Dutchman, the most prominent labels covered so far in this Building A Jazz Library series. Those labels' discographies consist almost exclusively of jazz. Atlantic had parallel interests in soul and rhythm-and-blues and, later, rock. This had consequences, as we shall see in a moment. Atlantic was founded in New York in 1947 by jazz and blues enthusiasts Ahmet Ertegun, ...