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Jazz Articles about Marcus Finnie
Vance Thompson: Lost and Found
by Jack Bowers
For several years, Vance Thompson's career as a musician hung in the balance. Owing to a neurological disorder known as Focal Dystonia, the Grammy-nominated trumpeter and founder of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra was literally unable to blow his own horn. But unlike other people who may have thrown in the towel or called it a day, Thompson instead looked for an alternative, set his mind and body to work and learned to play a second instrument, namely the vibraphone.
Continue ReadingDon Aliquo: Growth
by Jack Bowers
On Growth, his eighth album as a leader, it is said that Nashville-based saxophonist Don Aliquo “pushes past his established comfort zone and into more precarious and challenging improvisational territory." While that may well be true, another truism is that the harmonic vocabulary of contemporary jazz has remained essentially unchanged for more than eight decades, and Aliquo does nothing to alter the blueprint. He simply approaches improvisation in his own way while embracing time-honored parameters. In other ...
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