eJazzNews Archive

Joe Finn Quartet: Destiny Blue

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By George W. Carroll · CD Reviews

In September 2003 eJazzNews published George W. Carroll’s short review of Destiny Blue, an independently released album by the upstate New York guitarist Joe Finn and his quartet. Finn, born in 1953, has kept recording on his own since then, most recently with the quintet album As Luck Would Have It in 2021, and is based in Old Chatham, New York, where he has long taught guitar.

What the 2003 review said

Carroll, who signed as “The Musicians’ Ombudsman,” wrote a brief and enthusiastic notice rather than a track-by-track review. He described the group’s playing as tight, concise, musical and assertive, and singled out a Latin-tinged arrangement of the standard “Body and Soul” (one of the tunes in our list of the best jazz standards). He credited Finn with setting up a rhythmic dialogue inside the band and with balancing reassuring and restless moods, and closed by urging him to keep going. The review gave the catalog number JFP A-4123 but did not name the other musicians or tracks.

About the album

According to Finn’s website, the quartet on Destiny Blue was Finn on guitar, Scott Bassinson on piano, Mike Wicks on bass and Gene Garone on drums. The eleven tracks listed there are “Body and Soul,” “Kelly’s Other Tune,” “My Ideal,” “Anthropology,” “Upper Manhattan Medical Group,” “An Old Piano Plays the Blues,” “Fall,” “Thinking Out Loud,” “A Portrait of Jenny,” “Midnight Voyage” and the title track. In an interview with JazzGuitarLife.com reprinted on his site, Finn dated the album to 2003 and called it a continuation of the quartet approach begun on Blue Tomorrow (2002): a set of standards and originals the band had been playing live and wanted to document in the studio. He counted it as his fourth release, after Straight Ahead, Guitar Signatures and Duets (2001) and Blue Tomorrow.

Who Joe Finn is

Finn’s site gives his birth date as January 29, 1953, in Hartford, Connecticut. A 2019 profile in The Chatham Press, also reprinted there, says his father hosted a radio show called “Spin With Finn” and that Finn earned a music degree at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, spent about a decade playing across the United States and Canada, then returned to Old Chatham to perform locally, record and teach from a home studio. His biography adds that his quartet’s appearance on BET’s Jazz Discovery Showcase won the program’s 1998 award in the jazz instrumental category. Reviewers quoted on the site compare his clean tone to jazz guitarists such as Barney Kessel, Herb Ellis and Jimmy Raney.

What happened next

After Destiny Blue came String Theory and, in March 2019, Generational Dynamics, credited to the Joe Finn Trio, with Jon LeRoy on organ, Andy Hearn on drums and Finn’s son Tom on alto saxophone. As Luck Would Have It followed in June 2021 with vibraphonist Michael Benedict, pianist Wayne Hawkins, bassist Mike Lawrence and drummer Pete Sweeney. In September 2021 that quintet played the Jazz on Jay series, drawing mostly on the new album and closing with “Blue Ullom,” a tribute to the Albany jazz fan Jim Ullom, according to a review on Nippertown. Finn also wrote instructional columns and a review of Larry Coryell’s autobiography for Jazz Guitar Today in 2021 and 2022.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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