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Michael Grande
Newly retired and repatriated, Michael’s search for perfect sounds intensifies.
About Me
I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, eons before the Big Ears Festival existed. Prior to my professional life as a psychologist, I managed a record store that specialized in finding obscure, hard- to-find albums, and was the primary source of albums for a progressive jazz program on WUOT, a college radio station. That experience exposed me to the vast universe of jazz and took me well beyond the Errol Garner, Stan Kenton, and Herb Alpert that I heard at home. After twenty years of working as a school psychologist in the Washington, D.C. area, I moved to Taipei, Taiwan where my wife and I worked as psychologists for twenty- one years. Living and traveling in Asia for that long has surely changed me but I’m at a loss as to how. However, having just returned after such an absence, to live in Richmond, Virginia, I have a newly found understanding of being a stranger in a strange land. I wallow in all kinds of music but jazz provides the greatest sustenance for me. There is just so much of humanity in jazz - humor, tragedy, spirituality, anger, intelligence, sadness, redemption, love. It’s all there. The more I learn about jazz, the more I listen, the more I feel connected - to others, to life. It’s a great way to understand the world.
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