IMN : Updates for Dave Douglas

Confirmed Tourdates As Of February 7th, 2013

IMN

June 28th, 2013: Town Hall New York, NY USA [Wayne Shorter 80th Birthday Celebration Featuring Wayne Shorter Quartet, ACS, Sound Prints: Dave Douglas & Joe Lovano Quintet]
August 18th, 2013: Red Butte Garden Amphitheatre Salt lake City, UT USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
August 28th, 2013: Hollywood Bowl Los Angeles, CA USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
September 15th, 2013: Palo Corona Ranch Monterey, CA USA [Dave Douglas Quintet]
September 16th, 2013: Kuumbwa Jazz Center Santa Cruz, CA USA [Dave Douglas Quintet]
September 17th, 2013: Glen Deven Ranch Monterey, CA USA [Dave Douglas Quintet]
September 17th, 2013: Nightclub Stage, Monterey Jazz Festival Monterey, CA USA [Dave Douglas Quintet]
September 21st, 2013: Dizzy's Den, Monterey Jazz Festival Monterey, CA USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
September 21st, 2013: Lyons Stage, Monterey Jazz Festival (1st set) Monterey, CA USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
September 24th, 2013: Wexner Performance Space Columbus, OH USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
September 25th, 2013: Williams Center For The Arts - Lafayette College Easton, PA USA [Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints Featuring: Lawrence Fields, Linda Oh and Joey Baron]
June 7th, 2014: Rice Auditorium Monomouth, OR USA [Dave Douglas and the Western Hemisphere Orchestra in conjunction with the American Metropole Orchestra]

"Finest 'new' current American jazz acts": Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano

IMN

November 30th, 2012

From Santa Barbara Independent

Belgrade Jazz Festival: Belgrade Hosts a Hot Jazz Fest
By: Josef Woodard

Sometimes, especially for those of us jazzheads stuck out here in fringes of the west coast, a fine way to discover America, jazz-wise, is to get to European festivals, as evidence when I finally caught a live set by this wondrous crackpot band, an acoustic, chordless quartet reminded variously of Ornette Coleman, Bad Plus, and some quirky fresh variation on avant-garde circus-making. Humor and avant-garde abandon somehow get along famously in this band.

Hearing the music in Belgrade, Serbia, after midnight, only enhanced the epiphany sensation. We were definitely not in Goleta anymore.

Coming at the end of a festival which also featured two of the finest “new” current American jazz acts – Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano’s fab “Sound Prints” project and young trumpet poet powerhouse Ambrose Akinmusire and band – might have spurred a kind of American pride for a yankee visitor, while also validating the intelligence and adventurism of the festival’s programming. But some of the more enticing treats on the musical menu were from the region, including the band led by Serbian bassist Nenad Vasilić, replete with virtuosic accordion (Marko Zivadinović) and serpentine Serb-bop melodic lines. Nimble Serbian trumpeter Lorenz Raab also left a strong, left-of-conventional impression with his band, while Polish saxist Mikołaj Trzaska represented the hgh art of captivating free improvisation.

To read more click here

Sound Prints Live Performance on NPR Nov 28

IMN

November 25th, 2012

Few jazz bandleaders are as active — and actively acclaimed — as saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas. But while they’ve met from time to time on the bandstand, their brief overlap in the SFJAZZ collective — during a season where the compositions of Wayne Shorter were featured — got them to front a band together. It’s a quintet where they share the compositional duties, and the top billing. And it’s also a band featuring two up-and-coming musicians in pianist Lawrence Fields and bassist Linda Oh, as well as a drummer they’ve grown up in music with, Joey Baron.

The Sound Prints Quintet has been touring this year, and will play some U.S. dates when it swings into New York’s Village Vanguard for a week. (Both Douglas and Lovano are well acquainted with the place.) WBGO and NPR Music will feature a live concert by the band, broadcast on air and as a video webcast, on Wednesday, Nov. 28 at 9 p.m. ET.

For a link to the webcast click here

Live Review: Sound Prints, "mutual trust between Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas is palpable"

IMN

October 24th, 2012

networkedblogs.com/DP4Nx

Review: Dave Douglas / Joe Lovano Soundprints
By: Sebastian Scotney

In the corporate world and in business schools there is an endless debate as to whether a dual CEO arrangement can ever work. (if I’ve put you off with this irrelevance read Ivan Hewett’s succinct and spot-on review – or John Fordham’s thoughtful five-star-er ).Perhaps, as in many areas of life, jazz can be allowed to lead the way, and show how unselfishness and respect can make things work. The mutual trust between Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas is palpable. They both compose for this band, they introduce each other generously, each listens intently to what the other plays, but above all they leave space. In fact Joe Lovano’s playing in this band gives true expression to that phrase of the veteran baroque ‘cellist and teacher Anner Bylsma: “ a rest is never nothing.” Lovano built a whole solo around rests. When he chose – theatrically, at the last split-second – to leave another idea unsaid rather than said, you could see the expression of sheer glee light up his face. It makes the listener appreciate all the more the sheer presence and humanity of his saxophone sound as it returns.

To read the full article click here

Live Review: Sound Prints at Ronnie Scott's

IMN

October 17th, 2012

from telegraph.co.uk

Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, review
By: Ivan Hewett

What a joy it was, to see two of jazz’s biggest personalities together and up close on Ronnie’s stage. The only doubt was: would there be room, metaphorically speaking, for the two of them?

They’re such different animals: saxophonist Joe Lovano, as expansive and generous in tone and line as he is in girth, his playing firmly rooted in a post-bop idiom: trumpeter Dave Douglas, short, wiry, rooted nowhere in particular, with a restless and probing tone and temperament.

In fact these two have been playing together for some years, and know just how to steer around each other, and when to come together in a dance, or a scrum. The first number started off with an air of deliberate casualness, as if each player were marking out a space and simultaneously searching for the other, as if in a darkened room. Suddenly we were hurled into a fast bop tempo; but no, this was a false alarm, we weren’t there yet.

To read the full review click here

Live Review: Sound Prints, "rarely sounded better together"

IMN

October 17th, 2012

from telegraph.co.uk

Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas Quintet: Sound Prints, Ronnie Scott’s, London
By: Mike Hobart

Gruff, airy-toned saxophonist Joe Lovano and spiky, brittle-voiced trumpeter Dave Douglas have a long history of collaboration – John Zorn’s Masada project and Germany’s NDR Bigband capture the recent range. Their latest joint project, the Sound Prints quintet, celebrates the devious logic and collaborative freedoms of saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter. The band was a standout at last July’s Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and this gig, with its intricate detail and shifting-sand arrangements, confirmed that the cut of the Douglas trumpet into Lovano’s breathy sax has rarely sounded better.

To read the full article click here

Live Review: Sound Prints, "enough ideas for a gig twice as long."

IMN

October 17th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Dave Douglas/Joe Lovano – review
By: John Fordham

The Soundprints quintet, led by trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Joe Lovano, played almost two hours straight on their first night at Ronnie Scott’s – yet the show felt as if it had passed by in a flash, while boiling with enough ideas for a gig twice as long.

Soundprints is a reference to the saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s famous theme, Footprints. But though Footprints and other Shorter classics surfaced as passing references within the swirl of solos, the band’s mission is the development of a tradition inspired not just by Shorter, but by the innovators before and since – not least Douglas and Lovano themselves. Ornette Coleman’s presence, for instance, was plain in the springy pulse and intertwining sax and trumpet line of the opening Soundprints, with the magnificent Joey Baron gleefully ticking off the cymbal beat over Linda Oh’s tenacious bass walk.

To read the full article click here

Finnish Patriotism, Christian Hymns, One Trumpeter's Mom

IMN

October 15th, 2012

from NPR

Finnish Patriotism, Christian Hymns And One Trumpeter’s Mom
By Patrick Jarenwattananon

The band above is the new Dave Douglas Quintet, who we’re webcasting live Wednesday night as part of WBGO’s The Checkout: Live series. The quintet is actually six people: special guest Aoife O’Donovan, a folk and bluegrass singer, joins the band on stage and on the new album, Be Still. The rest of the band is Douglas on trumpet, Jon Irabagon on tenor saxophone, Matt Mitchell on piano, Linda Oh on bass and Rudy Royston on drums (Clarence Penn will play the gig). If you can join us, we’ll be live with video from 92Y Tribeca at 8 p.m. ET this Wednesday, Sept. 19; we’ll be recording if you miss it.

“Be Still My Soul,” above, is the leadoff track from the new album. Perhaps you’ve heard the song before? It’s a fairly popular Christian hymn: “Be still my soul, for God is on your side,” it begins. But it’s also quite likely that if you have heard this tune before, it had different lyrics — or even no lyrics at all.

The original melody comes from a small section of composer Jean Sibelius’ piece Finlandia, written in 1899. Since it was commissioned for a Finnish pride event when Finland was seeking independence from Russia, it has assumed a place in the Finnish national imagination. In 1941, there were words added to the “hymn” section, beginning, “Finland, behold, thy daylight now is dawning.” That hymn is now an unofficial national anthem in Finland, akin to “America, The Beautiful” in this country.

Obviously, those aren’t the only words which go with this melody. “This Is My Song” is another popular rendition, and curiously, the lyrics carry a message of overarching holy governance (above any nationalistic concerns such as, say, Finnish pride): “This is my song, O God of all the nations / A song of peace for lands afar and mine.” An NPR Music colleague says he used to sing this melody as “I Sought The Lord” as a kid in church. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, there are plenty of other lyrics — sectarian and secular — that go with the “Finlandia Hymn.”

“Be Still My Soul” is just one of those versions. The words originally come from a German woman named Katharina von Schlegel, who died in 1768. The English translation comes from a Scottish woman named Jane Borthwick, who died in 1897. Since Finlandia first appeared in 1899, that means the lyrics actually pre-date the melody!

In any event, “Be Still My Soul” was the version known to Dave Douglas’ mother, Emily Douglas. Before she died of ovarian cancer last year, she left her son with a collection of hymns and folk songs to play at her memorial service, this being one of them. Dave Douglas has found some inspiration in them, arranging and rearranging the music for a new band and a new collaborator in Aoife O’Donovan. In a newsletter, he writes, “Far from funereal (!), playing these tunes has become a true celebration for us, and the kind of party that Emily would have wanted.” Be Still the album collects these arrangements and adds a few originals too.

Jazz folks often breathe new life into old tunes. Of course, sometimes those old tunes have seen many lives before any jazz musicians get there in the first place.

Read the full article and watch video here

A Jazz Composer Turns His Grief into Devotional Music

IMN

October 15th, 2012

from The New Republic

A Jazz Composer Turns His Grief into Devotional Music
By David Hadju

Dave Douglas, the jazz composer and trumpeter, has made quite a bit of adventurous and unusual music over the past two decades, and I’ve written with admiration of it in the pages of TNR. He has made music more original than his new album, Be Still—a collection of Protestant hymns, mainly, performed with Douglas’s new group, augmented by the young Appalachian-style vocalist Aoife O’Donovan, and released last week on Douglas’ label, Greenleaf Music. But he has never done anything braver and, by my measure, more important. What’s extraordinary about Be Still is its beauty, its lack of affect, the stillness at its heart. It’s important not because it sets a new agenda for contemporary music, but because it has no cultural strategy. It’s a personal piece of work that grew from the death of Douglas’ mother, Emily, last year. Before she died, she had given Douglas a list of hymns to be played at her memorial service, and Be Still is made up mostly from that list.

On one level, Be Still connects to the great tradition of secular artists such as Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan taking unexpected turns into sacred territory. (Saved, the second of Dylan’s born-again albums, has some of his most lucid and forceful writing, and, I think, the best singing of his career.) In devotional music, musicians have to devote themselves to something other, something larger than their selves, and the results can seem miraculous.

Read the full article here#

REVIEW: Be Still (Greenleaf Music) Dave Douglas

IMN

October 15th, 2012

from Ottowa Citizen

Be Still (Greenleaf Music)
Dave Douglas
By Peter Hum

Now this is how to make a great a first impression:

That’s the Be Still My Soul, the quasi-title track from Be Still, the disc released Tuesday by trumpeter Dave Douglas and his quintet, joined by singer Aoife O’Donovan. I confess to being transfixed by this clip when I first saw it a few weeks ago. I must have watched it a four times on the day I discovered it, and a few more times the day after. Each time, it was a day-brightener. O’Donovan’s uplifting voice — I didn’t know it from her work with the bands Crooked Still or Sometymes Why — was a revelation. I love the contributions of all of the musicians — especially the vulnerable Douglas solo and the more high-gear, triumphal turns by tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon and pianist Matt Mitchell as the song crests. The song is so strongly felt and emotionally transparent that if I were Douglas, I too would be smiling at the end of the performance.

Much of Be Still – a concise, 43-minute disc consisting of nine tracks — falls in line with Be Still My Soul, evoking thoughts of loss, consolation and spiritual matters. It couldn’t be otherwise, given the disc’s back story. Douglas’ mother died last year, and she gave her son a list of hymns and folk songs to be played at her memorial service. After her passing, Douglas could not let the music go. He arranged it for his own artistic expression and some of the results appear on Be Still.

Much of the album is sombre and plaintive, rooted as it is in the music that Emily Douglas wanted to voice thoughts of consolation. She could have no better proxy than O’Donovan, who guests of six of the disc’s nine tracks. Breathily and affectingly, she gets to the essence of the pieces God Be With You, This Is My Father’s World and Barbara Allen, singing with tradition in her bones. She owns the rousing bluegrass brevity and change-of-pace track High On A Mountain.

But Douglas has also expertly applied his own transformations to make the music his own. For example, he strips down Barbara Allen so that if feels like a choral work arranged for horns, voice and piano, and he adds dimension to it with the occasional rub of jazz harmony. Swing burbles up intermittently on This Is My Father’s World, a track that affords Mitchell some small space to solo lyrically and Douglas an even smaller space for a nonetheless potent cadenza.

The disc’s third act is a slight sidestep. populated by several Douglas compositions that complement the songs of yore while at the same time broadening the CD’s scope. Two instrumental tracks,the celebratory Going Somewhere With You and the free-ish, rough-and-tumble Middle March, give full opportunity for Douglas and his bandmates to convey themselves. There’s a strong and similar searching quality to Living Streams, a Douglas original graced by O’Donovan’s singing. It’s possible that these open pieces give the best sense of what Douglas wants to do with this new quintet — as opposed to his previous, more Miles-influenced group, and as opposed to the demands of interpreting and personalizing hymns.

The disc closes with the rhythm section and Douglas playing Whither Must I Wander? by Ralph Vaughan-Williams. Begun as a stately, tender duet for trumpet and piano, the track grows into a gentle but moving quartet performance. It feels like the core sentiment of Be Still beautifully writ small, with Douglas marking not only his own losses but ours as well.

Read the full article here

Dave Douglas Turns His Trumpet to the Hymnal on 'Be Still'

IMN

October 15th, 2012

from Metro Pulse

Dave Douglas Turns His Trumpet to the Hymnal on ‘Be Still’
By Chris Barrett

The restless trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Dave Douglas does not make music for lazy listeners. Since 1993, Douglas has released around three dozen recordings under his own name, and has appeared on many more than that as a sideman. About the only thing all of that music has in common is Douglas’ apparent determination to never play the same thing twice.

It’s habit—and sometimes a comfort—to associate favorite players with a recognizable pattern of phrasing or a reliance on effective motifs. The characteristics that identify Douglas are his obvious delight in making sounds he has not made before, and a sublimation of the self—many minutes pass during his finest compositions without the sound of a trumpet. In place of ego there seem to be generosity and modesty and a genuine desire to hear what his always well-chosen colleagues will do with his ideas.

Douglas has made a dozen or so recordings with the John Zorn-led ensemble Masada, mashing up klezmer with Ornette Coleman-esque improvisation. All of them are worth hearing. Certain of them are worth owning. Douglas’ bright, radiant horn proves to be the perfect foil for Zorn’s dour and digging alto sax. That Douglas-Zorn combination, it could be argued, is about as close as the current generation of players has come to fixing a distinctive, personalized sound in time, the way Miles Davis and John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse or Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro did before them in the early 1960s. The Douglas albums In Our Lifetime (1995), A Thousand Evenings, (2000) and Soul on Soul (also 2000) are perfect packages of original music. The music is truly original, even though Lifetime contains several Booker Little compositions, and Soul on Soul is a tribute to pianist Mary Lou Williams. On A Thousand Evenings, the Douglas quartet covers the theme from Goldfinger. It is both sexier and more suspenseful than the film. Soul on Soul closes with Williams’ jubilant “Play It Momma,” sans piano. It’s the best example of barrelhouse trumpet you’re apt to find.

For all of its celebration as a borderless, freely expressive, and spontaneous form, jazz enters the 21st century as a fairly rigid way of thinking, defined primarily by bright spots of innovation along the 20th-century timeline. Too often it is an exercise in recycling. The status quo expects players entering the field to align themselves with the sound of a predecessor or two and subscribe to a particular style for the length of a career, more or less. For people like Douglas and a small group of others, being narrowly categorized as a jazz player seems a discourtesy to the musicians. Douglas’ music has more in common with composers like Morton Feldman, late-in-career Elliott Carter, or Osvaldo Golijov than it does with the work of Dizzy Gillespie or Miles Davis. The Dave Douglas Quintet featured on the 2005 Keystone includes DJ Olive working turntables. The so-called jazz quartet one hears on A Thousand Evenings consists of a trumpet, bass, accordion, and violin. The music on both records is the stuff of dreams and nonviolent nightmares. There is never one set of sounds to help you predict what the next sounds will be. And if you are inclined to seek and listen to music as a way to add to what you know rather than confirm what you know, it is a rare and beautiful thing.

Read the full article here

IMN

October 12th, 2012

from Dusted Magazine

Dusted Features
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists determined by our favorite artists. This week: Trumpet master Dave Douglas

Dave Douglas
After logging time in inside-out combos like New and Used in the late 1980s, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas broke out in the early 1990s “downtown” NYC jazz/improv scene (most visibly as a longtime member of John Zorn’s Masada) and has never looked back. From the beginning, he struck listeners with a dazzling virtuosity and an occasional puckish sensibility to his playing. But what stood out perhaps even more was the vast range of his interests as a composer, improviser and bandleader. Whether leading his strings-heavy chamber group, his rocking Balkan-influenced Tiny Bell Trio, the wistful Charms of the Night Sky, or tributes to under-heralded composers like Booker Little and Mary Lou Williams, Douglas brought to his first wave of records a committed exploratory sense and a catholic taste. Over the last decade or so, these tendencies have only deepened (abetted by Douglas’ decision to document his music on his own Greenleaf imprint), as he has explored fusion with The Infinite, pursued multimedia work on Witness, and put together an ever-expanding group of ensembles from his Brass Ecstasy to his latest singer-songwriter effort, Be Still.

1. Joni Mitchell – Mingus
I was a child of the 1970s who read the players’ names on the backs of albums. Wayne Shorter was the link for me between Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Weather Report, Milton Nascimento, Herbie Hancock, and um, what’s his name…. oh yeah, Miles Davis. This record is such a classic… Brings together Jaco Pastorius, Herbie, Peter Erskine, Wayne, and of course Joni Mitchell with deep words and music. Great horn charts to boot. Seminal. If you haven’t heard this, or haven’t listened in a while, it’s good medicine. Joni’s delivery of the songs is so pure and direct, and the subject matter personal.

2. Weather Report – Heavy Weather
I got turned on to Weather Report by friends in Spain during a high school year abroad and memorized every note of this one. This record may have been the band’s best seller and spawned countless high school marching band arrangements of “Birdland,” but nonetheless the whole album is crafted with brilliance. Each of the members, as composers, contribute their finest work, and I think more than the virtuosity, that is what stands out for me. Wayne’s pieces are so finely detailed and it’s amazing to think about how much they differ from his work of just a few years earlier and a few years later. Zawinul had a way of personalizing synthesizers—it still sounds like Joe and still sounds fresh all these years later…

…
3. Steely Dan – Aja
4. Herbie Hancock – VSOP
5. Miles Davis – Miles Smiles
6. Wayne Shorter – Native Dancer
7. Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key of Life
8. Talking Heads – Remain in Light
9. Charlie Haden – Liberation Music Orchestra
10. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk
11. Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um

Read the full article here

A Jazzman Looks at Loss and Finds Inspiration

IMN

September 24th, 2012

from nytimes.com

A Jazzman Looks at Loss and Finds Inspiration
By: Nate Chinen

Dave Douglas dealt sparingly with the emotional back story at 92YTriBeCa on Wednesday night, in the auspicious first outing by his new quintet. During a concert built around the Protestant hymns on his gorgeous and contemplative new album, “Be Still” — due out on Tuesday on Greenleaf, his independent label — Mr. Douglas spoke of his motivation only in passing. The album, he said simply, “came about because all these hymns and songs were songs that my mother recommended that I play.”

To read the full article click here

GRAMMY.com Exclusive Backstage Interview with Dave

IMN

September 19th, 2012

from grammy.com

The Recording Academy played host to GRAMMYs On The Road at the Detroit Jazz Festival on Aug. 31 – Sept. 3 in downtown Detroit. GRAMMY.com conducted exclusive backstage interviews with artists performing at the festival, including GRAMMY-nominated trumpet players Dave Douglas and Christian Scott.

Douglas discussed the Festival of New Trumpet Music, his creative influences and music education, among other topic

To read the rest of the article and watch the video interview click here

Video: Dave Douglas - Be Still My Soul feat. Aoife O'Donovan

IMN

September 10th, 2012

Be Still

IMN

August 10th, 2012

Be Still the new album by Dave Douglas who describes the title as “aspirational.” The continually evolving trumpeter and composer settles down for a ballad-like set that presents a series of hymns and folk songs with an intensely personal connection. Be Still brings out the most lyrical side of Douglas, and introduces both a newly configured Quintet — Jon Irabagon, Matt Mitchell, Linda Oh, and Rudy Royston — and an important new collaborator, vocalist Aoife O’Donovan.