Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas Sound Prints: Other Worlds

The “Sound Prints” Quintet, co-led by saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas, set out in 2013 with a purpose in mind: that of showcasing Wayne Shorter's legacy by presenting new music shaped in the saxophonist's always forward-looking style. The group released its first CD, Soundprints: Live At The Monterey Jazz Festival (Blue Note Records) in 2015, and followed it up with Scandal (Greenleaf Records, 2018). Both of these previous outings included fresh arrangements of Shorter compositions along with tunes from the pens of Sound Prints' co-leaders. Other Worlds goes with a half-and-half mix of Lovano and Douglas originals.

Recorded shortly after the group's 2020 Village Vanguard run, the music stays true to Shorter's vision of modern jazz which was nurtured, in part, in the saxophonist-composer's mid-to-late 1960s stint with trumpeter Miles Davis' "Second Great Quintet." A fresh sounding, mostly first-take outing, the disc opens with Lovano's ten minute-plus "Space Exploration," a free-ranging journey of instrumental dialogue, interaction and improvisation, leading into Lovano's brief, exploratory "Shooting Star," a marvelously free, just-over-a-minute bit of sound.

Douglas' "Life On Earth," with its animated momentum, could fit in on Shorter's 1964 Blue Note Records outing, Speak No Evil, while Lovano's "Sky Miles" has the prickly agitation and the boldness of Miles Davis' 1968 Columbia Records album, Miles In The Sky, on which Shorter played, leading into the smoother flow combined with a certain restlessness of the Douglas-penned "Pythagoras."

The closer, Lovano's "Midnight March," presents a Miles Davis Nefertiti (Columbia Records, 1968) mode—Shorter wrote the album's title tune—that gives the rhythm section (drummer Joey Baron, bassist Linda May Han Oh and pianist Lawrence Fields) a chance to go into a free-spirited groove behind the robust horn work of Douglas and Lovano.

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