Dave Douglas: Music, Commerce and Culture Wars

AAJ: You've just come off a U.S. tour. After quite a few gigs with the quintet, did the shows give you any new insights into the music you've been playing or about the band? Did anything new occur to you about this music?

DD: First of all, let me just say that touring in the States is really important to me. When I first became a bandleader and a touring artist, I would constantly hear, "well, this music is really popular in Europe, and you guys tour in Europe all the time, but nobody in the States knows what you're doing. And that was really frustrating to me because I'm an American artist. I'm American! I love America, and I feel like what I'm playing is American music. So that whole cliché about progressive music only succeeding in Europe was something that really pissed me off.

First of all, I feel it's not true. But second of all—since all stereotypes generally come out of something that has a basis in a perception—there's something wrong! So I made a concerted effort to tour in the United States starting, oh, 12 years ago. At a loss, initially—I lost money. But it was just really important to me to get beyond New York—to get to the West Coast, to play in Chicago, to be able to go around the States. Because I think that on the level that music speaks to people, it speaks to them culturally as well, and it was important for me to play this music for American audiences.

I also feel that the response we get in America is somehow more heartening to me. By "heartening, I mean I get the sense people are really getting it in America in a different way than they do in Europe. I do tour in Europe quite a bit, but at this point in my career, I actually tour more in the United States. That's because of all that footwork I did in the last decade trying to make a viable touring model in the U.S. I love playing in Europe, and we get great response, and yet I sometimes get the feeling that people aren't always getting it for the reasons that I'm putting it out.

People there will come up after the show and they'll say [in a Teutonic accent] "ja, this is really like rock-and-roll jazz. And they're loving it, and, hey, great. But I don't really think it's rock-and-roll jazz, or that that even means anything. So I guess my feeling is in the States, even if somebody doesn't know about the music, they get the cultural references—where the music is coming from, whether it's blues or jazz or old American music or even just people expressing themselves as individuals, as who they are and not as a representation of something else.

AAJ: As a band, and not as Jazz with a capital J.

DD: Yeah, maybe. You were at the Green Mill. It was just exciting. A lot of people there are connoisseurs and know a lot about the music, and a lot of them are just there because it's a nice scene. And that's going on all around the country, which is very heartening.

I have to get back to the rest of your question. I think that when you play a book of music night after night, you get more in touch with what you really meant when you wrote the music. And I see in myself this search to get back to the earliest language of the music that I played when I was a really small kid, which is the American songbook. That sounds trite, but I think there's something in writing tunes that have rules and forms and strategies. That comes from that place in me, and I feel a very real, personal connection to that.

AAJ: Let's talk about your previous big project, Keystone, which was both the name of your last album and the name of the band that toured it. This is, of course, your tribute to Fatty Arbuckle—sort of an attempt to produce a new set of soundtracks to some of his unfairly neglected films.

DD: I wouldn't call a tribute to Fatty Arbuckle. I never said that. It was writing new soundtracks to his films—and in the process learning about his life. I felt like he was a neglected figure. But I don't feel like I know enough about him, or maybe that my music doesn't have enough to do with him, to actually call it a tribute to Fatty Arbuckle.

AAJ: Point taken. In any case, it's really lovely, interesting music that stands alone. There were, in a sense, two different presentations of this stuff—the individual tunes on the CD like "Just Another Murder or "Mabel Normand —and the scores that were performed for the films live that incorporated sections from these tunes into longer live pieces. At a distance of a year or so, do you have any oversights, insights?

DD: Well, you know, the reason that the film scores worked the way they did was that my goal, first and foremost, was not to put handcuffs on the band. Having [saxophonist] Marcus Strickland play a melody is a really deep and specific thing, so when I wrote the themes, for me it was all about leaving enough freedom for Marcus to do his own thing. But the theme had to be strong enough to go along with the moving images as they moved.

And that's a little original for a film score, because I think usually things tend to get very set. The same with [drummer] Gene Lake; I think Gene is one of the preeminent drummers of this day and age, and I wouldn't have wanted to write for him and just ask him to give a rim shot every time there's a knock at the door. So the challenge was, how do you write a music in which everyone can be free to do their own thing from moment to moment and still reflect the sense of the scenes that are flickering by on the screen?

So my approach was to write themes that would be flexible enough to be able to be reinterpreted, to be played a lot of different ways, but that would also work with the scenes as they went along. That's why I felt it was important to record the songs as discrete songs not in relationship to the film, and then to also do a version where we actually played it in real time with the film. I think that was a difficult challenge to set in writing a film score—to write music that would serve the players just as much as it would serve the film.

AAJ: I put this album on recently and hadn't heard it in a while. I was immediately struck by the eeriness of its overall sound. Everything's very close: a small room in the rain. I suppose Jamie Saft's Wurlitzer and DJ Olive's turntables are a big part of its ambience (it was DJ Sundance and Adam Benjamin when I saw you live). Certainly you made no effort to make any self-consciously "period jazz or comedy music. How did you go about inventing this particular style of music for these films?

DD: Well, that's a very generous and huge question. First of all, I think on the record you have to give credit where it's due to David Torn, who did a lot of editing and mixed the record—and the mixing process was a huge one in this case. So a lot of the shaping of the way the Wurlitzer and the turntables sound with the acoustic instruments has to do with his brilliance as a recording engineer.

Now, you're saying that I invented a style, which is [laughing] really, really nice, and I hope that in each recording project, in each book of compositions that I write, I try to invent a new way of thinking about things, and if that comes up with a new style, hey, fantastic. I would never claim that for myself. But in the case of Keystone, I watched these films with the music soundtracks that were on the VHS tapes that I found the films on. And Fatty Arbuckle, being the overlooked genius that he is, was very obscure and hard to find. The first VHSs that I found were at Kim's Underground in the East Village, and they were kind of in the back far corner underneath the X-rated naughty videos. I'm not sure why. And very poorly labeled. And so I would watch these things, just as part of my research—I didn't know that I was going to be working with these films when I first saw them.

But the music really made it hard for me to watch the films and enjoy them, and the reason for that was that it was music that was made later that was trying to evoke what we think of as silent film ambience. This is music that was mostly made in the seventies and eighties, probably during the second or third revival of watching silent films. And so it was, you know, stride piano and old-school, but a lot of rah-rah Yale 1920s collegey-sounding stuff. And taken on its own, wonderful. But for me, put with those films, it kind of did a disservice to both. It just turned the whole thing into a cliché of what we're supposed to be thinking about when we see old silent movies. It was an artifact of neither.

So very quickly, I started to watch these films with the sound off, and then I could sense the films very, very differently. I started to go and grab records from my collection and just play things along with it, and so many things worked. Some things didn't work, but you'd be surprised. So I said, "well, let me see how far I can go, and I would pick the most opposite thing I could think of to play with these Arbuckle films. And I felt like it made the films stronger. They have so much character as it is that they were strong enough to coexist—and if anything, the images got more vivid with the challenge of an unexpected kind of music.

So that was my first inkling that I could write some music to this, because I got this kind of picture of music that, quote-unquote, wouldn't belong—running parallel to the films. And I felt that it could bring the images back to life on some level to have a 21st-century music soundtrack. Then one of the other things that was a spark for me was reading about Arbuckle's process of making the films, which was kind of revolutionary and exploratory. A lot of the technology was new and they were improvising a lot, and I got the sense that he would come to the lot with these new ideas of how they could use the cameras to capture something in a new way. Like, you know, the scenes of him going up the slide backwards, or dancing on the telegraph wires, or falling through someone's roof. And all these falling-down type gags that he found a new way to capture.

So part of what was new was the technology and his experimenting with the technology—and since I was making this electronic score, I felt like I was experimenting with the technology as well. I had gotten ProTools for my own computer. I was building these beds of sound only with trumpet sounds. In other words, I went in the studio and I recorded an hour of just trumpet, and then chopped it up and put all kinds of effects on it—just wanted to mess around with the bare sonic artifacts that came out of those sounds.

And a lot of the tracks on the record are built out of those first experiments. So I saw a kinship on a technological level with Arbuckle. I guess on a very, very surfacey level, I just felt like the movies were cool and I wanted to write a cool soundtrack for him. And have fun—a lot of my music is very serious, so I felt like it was time for me to just do something enjoyable. I didn't realize I was wading into the whole American scandal issue [Arbuckle's career was destroyed by a very dubious rape/murder accusation after the death of actress Virginia Rappe] until after I was well underway writing the music.

AAJ: Well, it's not as if the music really comments upon that aspect.

DD: Well, a lot of people say that it does. That there's a dark edge to the music and I wouldn't be able to deny that that dark edge is in there because of all the reading I was doing about his life and what happened to him. It's hard to watch him without having that in mind—for me, anyway.

AAJ: I do think you raised Arbuckle's profile from this. And you may be the only musician this century to go on the road to play along with films.

DD: Well, Frisell went on the road with films, and I toured Mark Dresser's score for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari back in the nineties. And Philip Johnston writes these wonderful scores for—is it Tod Browning? So I came to the thing thinking, "well, all classical composers write a string quartet and all modern jazz composers do a silent film project. So here's mine. I'm being a little facetious, but to put it in context: I didn't feel I was revolutionary on that level.

AAJ: Let's talk about your Blue Latitudes project, which I believe you did very recently with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. This was, I think, an hour of music for three improvisers—percussionist Susie Ibarra, bassist Mark Dresser, and you—and an ensemble of 14 instruments.

DD: And a conductor. We hope to release it later this year on Greenleaf if we can get the rights to the recording. Boy, that was such a huge project. I guess I started thinking about it over two years ago. And yeah, I wrote an hour of music for this great, great ensemble of contemporary instrumentalists. It's 14 players, all soloists: four strings, four winds, four brass, percussion and piano doubling harpsichord. And I think I really wanted to get at this problem of contemporary music and improvisers. So there are all different strategies, all different ways that I tossed paint at the canvas of that problem.

I was pretty happy with the results; a large part of that came about because the conductor, Peter Rundel, was so wonderful. He is the guy who was the violinist in Ensemble Modern for many years and gradually, more and more, became a conductor. Now all he does is conducting. He had a unique ability to understand what I was looking for, and what were the clashes and interesting aspects of the improvising—how it should all be put together, timing-wise. And of course Susie Ibarra and Mark Dresser are just towering figures as improvisers.

We had to work really hard to find the right thing, the right way to play from moment to moment. But they're so dedicated to doing that anyway that it was a joy; it was wonderful. Blue Latitudes came from a book by Tony Horwitz about the voyages of Captain James Cook in the South Pacific, which is a great read. But I also like the fact that "blue for me refers to the jazz side of things and "latitudes referred for me to this idea that I was trying to find a way to create a latitude for players. There's a little bit of improvising for the ensemble, but mostly it's me, Mark and Susie, who have no written notes.

I found a metaphor in Cook running into these cultures and peoples that he didn't ever know anything about—and some of them didn't know anything about him—and we all know the horrible things that followed those discoveries. But at that time, it was a very Age-of-Enlightenment kind of meeting of cultures. And I think we're still, in this day and age, fighting with this idea of the clash of cultures. So improvising and notation is no different, in a sense, from oral histories and written histories. They're ways of viewing our human history that are very much at odds. So that's how the piece came about, and I'm hoping that the recording will be available sometime later this year.

AAJ: Any other new projects?

DD: I'm working quite a bit, actually, on the Festival of New Trumpet Music, which this year will be on September 15th to October 15th. Roy Campbell and I are going to do a living tribute to Don Cherry in which we both perform a short set with our quartets and then we come together and do a symphony for improvisers. That'll be at Merkin Hall [at New York's Kaufman Center]. A lot of people are thinking about Don Cherry this year because it would have been his 70th birthday.

I'm working on something with John McNeil, the trumpeter, who was my teacher at New England Conservatory, and who introduced me to the Carmine Caruso method that saved my life. So that should be an interesting thing to work on.

I had so much fun working with Fatty Arbuckle that I'm almost 100% sure I'm going to score another set of 1915 Fatty Arbuckle films with Keystone, the same band.

AAJ: I saw that band in Chicago.

DD: Oh, at the Old Town School. That was fun.

AAJ: It made me very happy to see you actually laughing at a film you'd no doubt seen 40 times or so.

DD: It's so funny! I still laugh. Other than that, now that I've finished Blue Latitudes, I'm just beginning to put my mind around the next so-called classical piece. Over the last decade, I've always worked in the background on one of those while everything else is going on. I have this idea—I've been invited by a ballet choreographer named David Justin, who lives in Austin, Texas, to write a piece for his company. I'm talking to you about it, so I guess I've decided to do it. But I'm looking at the next project being a classical piece that I don't play in and writing a sextet for string quartet, clarinet and piano coming out of this Aaron Copland piece that I love, "Sextet.

Just coincidentally, I now live in the same town where Aaron Copland lived. They have his house renovated to the way it was when he was there, and composers go up there and they can write in his workroom. It's interesting. I guess as I get older, I think more of what it means to be American—getting in touch with the things that I ran away from for so many years. And I think that maybe musically, there's something that's always been a challenge to me about that period when they were trying to say, "okay, this is American classical music and trying to come up with an American language. Copland was very much at the center of that. So that's something I'll probably be working on.

AAJ: What is your least favorite side of what you do?

DD: Sitting in the airport, without a doubt. The travel. It's not romantic like people would like to think. It's just a drag. Another frustration for me, and I don't think I'm alone in this, everybody goes through it—is just when you're on tour, getting the sound to be right night after night. There's no finger to point, there's no one to blame; it's just that every room is different. We all show up, we get on stage and then we have to go through whatever we have to go through to figure out how to play the room and get it to sound right in the P.A.—that's a big concern for me.

I know a lot of musicians don't worry that much about it, but I know that the room you're in affects how you play. So that takes a lot of work and I think it's a part of making the music that a lot of listeners don't see. They walk into the room and then you come onstage and play, and it's as if nothing else happened between the last gig and you being up there. That's a pretty meaty part of the job of being a bandleader, I think—getting the band to sound good in a room.

I think that part of what makes my life difficult is that I do a lot of different things. And I think people have different viewpoints about the value of doing all those different things. But all I can say is that for me, that's what I enjoy. I enjoy being involved in what the cover of a record is going to look like. I enjoy being involved now with the label in actually distributing the music. I enjoy composing quite a bit. I'd say that's the driving force behind everything that I do: composing as a force to create new contexts for myself as a player and as a human being.

And then the trumpet takes up a lot of time—practicing and trying to be a performer. And studying all kinds of music. So I think that's what's the hardest work: trying to keep all of that going with friends and family and keeping the band on the road. I'm not complaining. It's wonderful. I can see that a lot of musicians are going this direction nowadays of doing all kinds of things, and maybe to what we might call the old-school view of a jazz artist, that would be anathema. That would be something not seen as a positive. I can relate to that viewpoint, but I also just think that times have changed and they are changing. Some things die and some things are born and new realities are created. So I just follow through all of that.

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