Michael Ullman

Music Feature: The Best Jazz Albums and Live Shows of 2023

December 20, 2023
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The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums and live shows.

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October Short Fuses — Materia Critica

October 1, 2023
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

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Jazz Album Review: “Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section” — Unquenchable Talent

February 21, 2023
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This Craft reissue is welcome for the presence and distinctness of its sound, and for the state-of-the-art playing. Art Pepper will be going through my head for days.

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Music Feature: The Best Jazz Albums of 2022

December 19, 2022
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The magazine’s jazz critics look back over the past year and highlight their favorite albums.

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Jazz/Film Review: “An Evening of Jazz Healing” — A Thing of Beauty and Sharing

December 3, 2022
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Jazz, in particular, seemed to not merely satisfy Justin Freed’s inner cravings for beauty, but it led him outwards, to others, eventually inspiring some of the key relationships in his life.

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Jazz Album Review: Jussi Reijonen’s “Three Seconds/ Kolme Toista” — “One Hell of a Journey”

November 13, 2022
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The music comes out of an extended personal crisis; the compositions found here are a testament to a musician regaining his voice.

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Jazz Album Review: Pianist Jason Yeager’s “Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite” — So It Goes

November 10, 2022
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The advantage to listening to the recorded Unstuck in Time: The Kurt Vonnegut Suite is that on disc pianist Jason Yeager writes beautifully for septet: the textures he evokes in his arrangements are curiously varied and invariably moving.

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Jazz Album Review: The Vince Guaraldi Trio — “Peanuts” and Beyond

November 9, 2022
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Vince Guaraldi isn’t the heaviest of jazz pianists: he played at a time when McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans were omnipresent. But his tunes, his gently humanist approach to music, meant that he reached listeners that others couldn’t or didn’t.

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Jazz Album Review: Newvelle Records’ Renewal Collection — A Beautifully Compact Clarity

October 30, 2022
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This collection, Newvelle Records’ first series release in two years, features original compositions by Elan Mehler, Michael Blake, Dave Liebman, and Nadje Noordhuis.

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Jazz Album Review: Keith Jarrett’s “Bordeaux Concert” — A Varied Masterpiece

September 28, 2022
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Given Keith Jarrett’s current disability, this new ECM recording is an unexpected gift to his fans.

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