Live Review: Umbria Jazz Winter #27
Orvieto, in the dead center of the Italian peninsula, is a perfect oval hill town right out of central casting, perched majestically 1,000 feet above … Read More “Live Review: Umbria Jazz Winter #27”
Live
The true jazz experience happens onstage in front of an audience—our concert and festival reviewers take you there.
Live Review: ECM 50 in New York
To say that there is a single ECM Records sound is to oversimplify a catalog that now encompasses more than 1,600 albums. One suspects that if the late Jan Erik Kongshaug, who engineered hundreds of those albums, were still with us, he’d coolly dispute such a statement with a nuts-and-bolts response, pointing out the many … Read More “Live Review: ECM 50 in New York”
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Live Review: 2019 Belgrade Jazz Festival (VIDEO)
When you think of the great autumn jazz festivals of Europe, cities like London, Berlin, and perhaps Milan come to mind. You don’t necessarily think of Belgrade, Serbia. Many jazz people are probably surprised to learn that Belgrade has a festival. In the 1990s, Serbia and the Balkans dominated the cable news channels during the … Read More “Live Review: 2019 Belgrade Jazz Festival (VIDEO)”
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Live Review: 2019 Monterey Jazz Festival
Much like Ernest Hemingway’s famous description of how bankruptcy happens (“Gradually and then suddenly,” he wrote in The Sun Also Rises), the pervasive presence of women instrumentalists at the Monterey Jazz Festival seemed to materialize in an instant, but actually resulted from a long, often underground buildup. Last year’s breakthrough, with more than 15 ensembles … Read More “Live Review: 2019 Monterey Jazz Festival”
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Live Review: 2019 Detroit Jazz Festival
“Reunion” was the watchword for the 40th annual Detroit Jazz Festival, which welcomed back five of its former artists-in-residence for the occasion. But one unwelcome reunion threatened the fest’s culminating performance on Labor Day, as storm clouds once again gathered prior to Stanley Clarke’s final set—as they had in both 2014 and 2017, when the … Read More “Live Review: 2019 Detroit Jazz Festival”
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Live Review: Double Vision Revisited at the Birchmere in Virginia
The trend for a band to revisit a particularly successful album from its past seemed to have started with the curators of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival who asked hip hop and alternative rock artists to perform one of their older albums from start to finish. The phenomenon soon spread to the 60s and 70s … Read More “Live Review: Double Vision Revisited at the Birchmere in Virginia”
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Live Review: 2019 San Jose Jazz Summer Fest
Tech-subjugated San Jose, main hub of Silicon Valley, has always been somewhat iconoclastic. Its Jazz Summer Fest—anchored around downtown Plaza de Cesar Chavez Park, the refined Fairmont Hotel, and numerous palatable restaurants—started in 1990 as a two-day (one fusion and one mainstream) grass-roots event. That makes this year’s installment the 30th, a milestone you’d think … Read More “Live Review: 2019 San Jose Jazz Summer Fest”
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Live Review: 2019 Concord Jazz Festival
The temperature was hot, but the jazz was cool at the Concord Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 3. At the Concord Pavilion, an outdoor venue east of the city of Concord, California, around 10,000 people gathered for an event that was born in their town and, after a 15-year hiatus, was now celebrating its 50th … Read More “Live Review: 2019 Concord Jazz Festival”
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Live Review: 46th Umbria Jazz Festival
When you have made many trips to Perugia, Italy for the Umbria Jazz Festival, you never get a sense of which years are bigger than others. They are all crazy (“pazzo,” in Italian). The main drag of the hill town, Corso Vannucci, is all but impassable every night because of the crush of revelers. The … Read More “Live Review: 46th Umbria Jazz Festival”
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