Jazz Articles about Lisa Thorson

Lisa Thorson: Lisa Thorson Quartet - Live

by C. Michael Bailey
January 12, 2015

Lisa Thorson is a Boston-based vocalist and educator (she is a professor of voice at Berklee College of Music). She has release three recordings: From This Moment On (Brownstone, 1994), Resonance (GM Recordings, 1999) and Out to Sea (Self Produced, 2002). Even a dedicated teacher must spread her creative wings from time to time, and Thorson does so the present Lisa Thorson Quartet Live recorded at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston (a favorite haunt for fellow Boston vocalists Rebecca Parris ...

Lisa Thorson's Opening of the Jazz Stage

by Norman Weinstein
February 14, 2006

Jazz composer and vocalist Lisa Thorson has long been a leader in making live jazz accessible to the broadest possible audience. In the words of the blues great Sonny Boy Williamson, she “brings eyesight to the blind", and from “just one word from her lips,... the deaf can hear." To achieve such miraculous feats, Thorson, unlike the lusty lover of Williamson's blues, depends on a jazz quintet, a painter, two ASL (American Sign Language) interpreters, and closed caption experts, to ...

Lisa Thorson: Resonance

by Jim Santella
May 1, 1999

Members of the Boston area Lisa Thorson Five have been friends for eleven years; the group’s firm cohesiveness is a direct result. A student of Sheila Jordan, the singer/leader presents modern mainstream vocal art with obvious nods to Erik Satie and Thelonious Monk. Each artist solos and everybody works together on the thrilling arrangements. Spontaneity and surprise show up in the arranged phrases as well as the improvised work.

Thorson’s flexible voice fills several roles: scat singer, quasi-horn player, lyrical ...