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Dave Douglas: Brave New World
by AAJ Staff
Trumpeter / composer Dave Douglas has been creating new worlds for listeners for the past decade. His ethereal writing style for unconventional configurations transports audiences into unfamiliar territory. These distinctive compositions combined with his astonishing technique and expressionist improvisations have brought him critical and public acclaim as a visionary of his generation. The diversity of his influences is marked by the breadth of his own projects as a leader: the lyrical musings of Charms of the Night Sky with accordionist ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: The Infinite
by David Adler
The Infinite is one of Dave Douglas's more “mainstream" dates, in that it features standard quintet instrumentation--save for Uri Caine's sparkling, superbly played Fender Rhodes. Paradoxically, though, this is also a record that finds Douglas loudly declaring his love for some current pop music. It opens with a tender reading of Rufus Wainwright's “Poses" and goes on to cover songs by Mary J. Blige ("Crazy Games") and Bjork ("Unison"). Douglas also tips his hat to Radiohead's lead singer on the ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: Witness
by David Adler
Although there have been notable exceptions, music that is intentionally political is often bad--preachy, parochial, sanctimonious, obvious. Instrumental music has an edge in that its messages, once-removed from spoken language, are necessarily indirect and subjective. With Witness, Dave Douglas's first overtly political album, the trumpeter/composer stimulates our imaginations even as he encourages us to confront global injustice. He makes his own opinions abundantly clear in the liner notes, but even there, he doesn't lecture or propagandize. As for the ultimate ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: A Thousand Evenings
by David Adler
Bringing the “Charms of the Night Sky" ensemble to his new creative home at RCA Victor, trumpeter and over-achiever Dave Douglas releases his third album of the year, A Thousand Evenings. The lineup is the same as it was on the group's 1998 Winter & Winter debut: Douglas on trumpet, Mark Feldman on violin, Guy Klucevsek on accordion, and Greg Cohen on bass. “Chamber jazz" does seem the ideal term for this instrumentation, although Douglas is of course eager to ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: A Thousand Evenings
by Mark Corroto
Last night I had the strangest dream. I dreamed Dave Douglas’ Charms Of The Night Sky band took the place of the original band The Monkees on their TV comedy show (stay with me and we might make some sense of this). Remember The Monkees were actors chosen to play musicians (not unlike today’s Backstreet Bunch), but later rebelled against their producers and created their own records. Their coup against network expectations (all unknown until I stumbled upon the VH-1 ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: Moving the Music Forward
by David Adler
There aren't many artists who release records two at a time, but trumpeter Dave Douglas has done it already this year with Leap of Faith, a quartet date for Arabesque, and Soul On Soul, a sextet session for RCA Victor which pays tribute to the late pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams. On top of that, Douglas has scored one of the most sought-after prizes in jazz: a week at the Village Vanguard, performing with his sextet from February 29 ...
Continue ReadingDave Douglas: Soul On Soul
by C. Andrew Hovan
It's a promising sign to see that the revivalist movement once fronted by Wynton Marsalis has now given way to a manifold and more healthy jazz outlook. A bi-product of the shifting mores, trumpeter Dave Douglas could be considered a renaissance man, ready to carry the music to the next level. JazzTimes magazine's 1999 Musician of the Year, Douglas regularly leads a number of ensembles. From the Balkan strains of his Tiny Bell Trio to the Indian-jazz group Satya, the ...
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