Dave Douglas: Transcend

Dave Douglas has spent a career dodging his own shadow, and that restlessness is precisely what keeps his catalog from ever feeling stagnant. Transcend locates its friction point between two titans who seem unlikely to share the same oxygen: the spiritual grandeur of Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts and the dense, mosaic canvases of painter Jack Whitten.

The weight of the album rests on the chemistry of this specific quintet. With James Brandon Lewis on tenor, Tomeka Reid on cello, Rafiq Bhatia on guitar, and Ian Chang on drums, the music moves away from a traditional leader-and-sidemen setup toward something genuinely collective. Reid is a fresh voice in Douglas's orbit, and she fundamentally shifts the group's architecture. Cello can often feel like a novelty in jazz, but Reid integrates it so seamlessly into the harmonic floor that you quickly forget the instrument and simply hear the depth it adds.

The set opens with Ellington's "Come Sunday," played with a grit that favors atmosphere over reverence. Douglas avoids the trap of making the melody too precious. Instead, Bhatia's distortion-laced guitar rolls in like a storm front while Lewis enters with that signature, forceful tenor sound, pushing just enough against the melody to keep it from settling. The originals carry even more weight, particularly "Energy Fields," which feels unsettled in the best way as Chang drives a nervous pulse from underneath while Reid and Bhatia tangle in tactile textures, the whole thing morphing into Douglas' intense proclamations.

On "Gentle Collapse," Whitten's influence is most tangible—melodic fragments appear, dissolve, and reassemble in altered forms, mimicking the layered surfaces and broken symmetry of Whitten's canvases. "Heaven" serves as the emotional hinge, featuring Douglas and Lewis circling one another in near unisons that never quite lock. That microscopic gap between their notes is where the real drama lives, generating a sustained tension that only partially resolves.

Not everything lands with equal force. "Argle-Bargle" aims for a specific kind of jagged friction, but the moving parts never quite click into place. It feels more like eavesdropping on an interesting process than arriving at a satisfying payoff. Ellington's "Oclupaca," however, provides a welcome rhythmic snap to a set that often prefers texture over momentum.

Douglas skips the big theatrical finish and simply lets the sound evaporate into the room—a move that feels less like a conclusion and more like a mark of genuine confidence, trusting the listener to find their own way out.