Dave Douglas

Dave Douglas’ High Risk Ensemble - new album and European tour dates, July 2016. https://t.co/loLGzVOT4Q

— Ian Mann (@thejazzmann) July 9, 2016

Acclaimed jazz journeymen Lovano and Douglas grace Earshot jazz fest

Posted by Paul de Barros
October 6, 2014 at 4:12 PM
Only a handful of journeymen jazz players consistently win magazine polls of both critics and readers. Saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas are longtime members of that club.

Both are coming to the Earshot Jazz Festival in the rarely-seen collaborative group Sound Prints, on Saturday, Oct. 18. It should the highlight of the four-week annual spree.

Lovano and Douglas have carved out a territory that could arguably be called a new mainstream — between roots revivalism and head-exploding experimentalism. No matter how far out they go — into dissonance, free-improvisation, tangential forms or extended instrumental techniques — their music is still blues-drenched, swinging jazz.

In a phone interview last month from his home in upstate New York, the Cleveland-raised Lovano said he owed his openness to both traditional and avant-garde sounds to his father, tenor saxophonist Tony “Big T” Lovano.


“I have to credit my dad for his passion and record collection,” said the 61-year-old sax man, whose raspy voice and beat-hipster patois are beloved by fans the world over. “He played with Tadd Dameron and heard Charlie Parker and Lester young live and played a jam session with Coltrane. He had all Coltrane’s records, man, right on into ‘Meditations’ and ‘Kulu Sé Mama,’ so I grew up listening to music as one expressive thing.”
read more: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2014/10/06/acclaimed-jazz-journeymen-lovano-and-douglas-grace-earshot-jazz-fest/?syndication=rss

Dave Douglas is the Ironman of jazz

The trumpet star, who performs here Wednesday, leads multiple bands, heads a record label and annual festival, teaches and much more

By George Varga4 P.M.OCT. 4, 2013
Casual fans may find it intriguing that internationally acclaimed trumpeter Dave Douglas runs marathons in his spare time. But longtime followers of Douglas are more likely to react with disbelief that this perpetually busy jazz maverick has any spare time at all.

This, after all, is the same Dave Douglas who leads up to half a dozen different bands, almost concurrently, runs his own record and DVD label, Greenleaf Music, and works around the world as a jazz educator (he just concluded a 10-year run as the director of the Jazz & Creative Music Program at the Banff Center in Canada). He is also the founder and director of the New York-based Festival of New Trumpet Music, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, and he hosts “A Noise from the Deep,” a regular series of Podcasts in which he interviews prominent musicians.

For good measure, to commemorate his 50th birthday this year Douglas is doing a 50 States Tour, which he launched with the goal of performing this year in all 50 states. He performs here Wednesday, under the auspices of the La Jolla Athenaeum, at TSRI Auditorium (known until last year as the Neurosciences Institute Auditorium). He’ll be accompanied by an all-star band that features saxophonist Jon Irabagon, bassist Linda Oh, pianist Bobby Avey and drummer Rudy Royston.
Read more: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/oct/04/dave-douglas-ironman-of-jazz/

Dave Douglas: Jazz Hymns Honor A Dying Wish

Photo: Austin Nelson/Courtesy of the artist

by NPR STAFF
Dave Douglas has been an important player in the jazz world for more than two decades, producing a broad body of work as both a trumpet player and a composer. His newest album, Be Still, has a bittersweet backstory: It contains his arrangements of several hymns that his dying mother asked him to perform at her funeral service.


"She was towards the end of a long struggle against ovarian cancer, and we had the time to have those conversations that I feel so lucky to have had now that she's gone," Douglas says. "As anyone who's lost a parent recently knows, that's the best feeling — that you really had this communication, and you really shared what was there to share up until the end."

To make Be Still, Douglas enlisted a new quintet and, for the first time in his career, a vocalist. Here, he discusses the making of the record with NPR's Rachel Martin; click the audio link on this page to hear more.

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/16/167107868/dave-douglas-jazz-hymns-honor-a-dying-wish

Dave Douglas: Three Records, Five Months

Time for a new ABS feature. On Tuesdays, I, the editor, will be recommending things for you. Mostly recorded music to listen to, but also books to read, and shows to go see, and other things I haven't thought up yet. There are a lot of these good things being produced in jazz, and we don't discuss enough of them, and this is a jazz blog, so that needs to be fixed. It'll be kind of like an "editor's picks" section. In fact, it will be that.

This week: The three new releases by Dave Douglas, and the Greenleaf Cloud Player they can be heard on.

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The trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas has released three albums' worth of music in under five months. That's a lot.

How did he do it? A few thoughts:

1. Dave Douglas is a super-prolific composer. You know how jazz journalism convention often identifies people as "[instrumentalist] and composer"? Sometimes it feels a little bit like, "OK, you wrote a few blues heads, that's nice." Other times, it properly credits the musician for the fact that he regularly generates original melodies, harmonies that make sense and interlocking arrangements for three to 21 different parts. Some jazz musicians find time to concentrate on this in particular, and others largely execute those visions for others. Dave is of the former category.
2. Dave Douglas is a pretty savvy businessman. He's generally successful as a touring artist. He has his own record label, Greenleaf Music, which he's written about for us. That means he has a few folks working to bring his visions to life, both in producing music recordings and distributing them. He knows how to do things like apply for grants. He can thusly afford three recording sessions' worth of studio time that less successful musicians cannot. And he's devised a unique way of releasing these recordings, which brings us to ...
3. Dave Douglas is experimenting with format here.He's calling these latest three records the Greenleaf Portable Series — the idea being that they're shorter, more informal sessions released only in digital formats. So far, the three GPS releases are somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes each, sort of like the LP era — so he didn't necessarily road-test this material with a working band and have to come up with two more tunes, as he might have on a "real" Album album. Douglas even discussed this in the promotional copy: "Also the idea of shorter, more informal sessions appealed to me as it harked back to the way jazz records used to be made. The GPS gave me an outlet for a lot of new tunes and presented me with a way to record with some musicians I really admire but would rarely get to play with."

Compared to pressing and selling CDs, all this is affordable for both producer and consumer. You can buy each of these GPS records for $5 a pop as a high-quality MP3, or $7 as a losslessFLAC set. Or you can subscribe to the entire Greenleaf Music catalog for on-demand streaming ... more on that soon. First — what does this music sound like?

GPS 1, called Rare Metals is from a band I know and like, Brass Ecstasy. It's Douglas' mini brass band, a quintet with plenty of touring experience. And he came up with a bunch of new tunes for it, including an arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life": - http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2011/10/11/141253172/dave-douglas-three-records-five-months?ft=1&f=10002

Marshal Solal & Dave Douglas

Here's a little love in the form of a consummate jazz duo: piano player Marshal Solal and avant garde trumpet man Dave Douglas. This is one of those cases where you get to the heart of the music by going through the cover and album title. Rue de Seine puts us in Paris, a city I have otherwise never visited. Marshal is apparently legendary in France, which is a good place to be legendary. There is a brilliant piece on him at the British Guardian.

Martial Solal lives in Chatou – the island-like Paris suburb on the Seine they call the ville des impressionistes. His house is so unlike any jazz musician's home I've visited that I feel I've flipped into a parallel world. Peering like a child through the high metal fence at a tree-shrouded villa beyond an ornamental garden, I'm in a fairytale in which jazz artists are feted, instead of consigned to dividing up the door money. But eventually I have to break the spell, press the buzzer, and wind my way through the shapely flowerbeds to meet France's most famous living jazz artist.
Yes, it would be nice if all jazz greats had ornamental gardens. But it's hard to argue that legendary American jazz men aren't treated pretty well. See Wynton Marsalis.

The Solal/Douglas duo is very impressive. Duos are often a bit dry, but this is anything but dry. I have a special fondness for one number, a tribute to soprano sax genius Steve Lacy. So I will offer that. Marshal Solal and Dave Douglas/Blues to Steve Lacy/Rue de Seine.

You can pick it up at eMusic for a song. You don't want to miss 'Elk's Club' and their inventive interpretations of 'Have You Met Miss Jones?' and 'Body and Soul'.
http://jazznotesdp.blogspot.com/2010/06/marshal-solal-dave-douglas.html

Dave Douglas Quintet (2007) - Blues to Steve Lacy

Jazz Baltica Festival 2007 (Salzau / Germany)
Dave Douglas - Trumpet,
Donny McCaslin - Tenor Sax,
Uri Caine - Fender Rhodes,
James Genus - Bass,
Clarence Penn - Drums
http://greenleafmusic.com/

Dave Douglas, Trumpetist....

Dave Douglas was born in 1963 in Montclair / New Jersey. As the first child he learned piano and trombone, then trumpet, and has become the most versatile trumpeter probablemante of the current jazz scene.

In 1987, was for the first time in Europe as a trumpeter of the group of Horace Silver and is staying in this group until 1990. From that year had published under his own name more than 24 discs. He was in his nineties "Tini Bell Trio," his "String Group" with Mark Feldman on violin, Erik Friedländer in the cello and double bass player Mark Dressler. After working with various formations themselves, and in recent years Discs recorded some extraordinary with his quintet, the first with Chris Potter, then with Marcus Strickland and Donny McCasling on tenor saxophone and repeatedly with Uri Craine at the piano. Outside of his work as a composer since 1993 form part of the project Acustic Masada John Zorn, near Uri Craine p, Greg Cohen DEM by Joey Baron.

The spectrum of musical Dave Douglas is huge: from folclorísticas European influences, from contemporary classical music to the most avant-garde jazz. Along with Dave Holland and Ken Vandermark is one of the most innovative jazz musicians of our time, looking forward, but always respecting the tradition.
I listen to Dave Douglas for the first time live in 2007 with the SF Jazz Collective, and in August 2008 with Acoustic Masada, a concert that fascinated me as very few in recent years.
www.apoloybaco.com