Jonathan Wires

Don Aliquo: Growth

by Jack Bowers
March 11, 2023

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 ...