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Dave Douglas: Energy Fields
Two years after the eponymous album honoring Billy Strayhorn, Douglas continues his exploration of foundational jazz composers. On this new chapter—Transcend (Greenleaf Music)—he turns to Duke Ellington, drawing in particular from Ellington's Sacred Concerts, performed between 1965 and 1973.
Alongside inventive renditions of three Ellington pieces, the album includes striking originals such as "Energy Fields," inspired by the groundbreaking abstract paintings created in the 1970s by African American artist Jack Whitten. Like Whitten's canvases—where bold, seemingly independent gestures of color coalesce into a larger sense of movement and form—the musicians shape the piece through independent lines that continuously converge into collective momentum.
And so the Ellington thread comes full circle: Whitten himself had been deeply influenced by Duke, paying tribute to him in 1974—the year of Ellington's passing—with a slab painting entitled Black Table Setting.
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