Dave Douglas at Blues Alley
The Wynton Marsalis of progressive jazz channels his inner Ornette Coleman
You’d need a compass to follow all of the musical directions Dave Douglas has taken during his career. The trumpeter dabbles in myriad styles of jazz—and even invented a few of his own. (Balkan fusion, anyone?) Recent work focuses on digital electronics, folk forms, and new soundtracks for silent movies, but Douglas first began making a name for himself in John Zorn’s Masada: think classic Ornette Coleman playing Jewish music. Coleman’s early quartet is actually a major touchstone for Douglas no matter which way he turns; it’s in the looseness of his compositions, the freedom of his solos, and the unpredictability of his next move.
Who, for example, would have thought that Douglas would follow 2007's Moonshine, a tribute to Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, with a brass band on 2009’s Spirit Moves? The Brass Ecstasy ensemble is inspired by the late trumpeter Lester Bowie, who similarly ran through the gamut of traditional New Orleans jazz, marching band, funk, soul, bebop and free jazz as Douglas’ band. Bowie’s humor and daring runs through the recording itself, but Douglas brought Brass Ecstasy back around to that lodestar—Ornette Coleman—last night at Blues Alley.
Not to say that he concentrated the band—trombonist Luis Bonilla, French horn player Vincent Chancey, tubist Marcus Rojas, and drummer Nasheet Waits—on channeling Ornette. Opener and Rufus Wainwright cover “This Love Affair” was straight out of a New Orleans funeral march, with Douglas playing a mournful drawl. But there were subtle allusions in the trumpet tone to Coleman’s legendary trumpeter, Don Cherry, and the melody resembled Coleman’s “Just for You.” Bebopper Fats Navarro ostensibly inspired "Fats," but Douglas’ solos unmistakably borrowed Cherry’s high pitch and gnarled melodic phrasing. Douglas and Bonilla replicated the Coleman-Cherry partnership (the two were allegedly telepathic) throughout, tag teaming as they tried to outrun the trumpeter’s compositions.
Rhythm-section partners Rojas and Waits had a blast following each other and the front-liners: Roja blowing mad arpeggios and Waits piercing cymbals as though with a spear. Chancey, however, was the wild card. He kept one fist jammed into his French horn, creating a mute that was sometimes more like a strangle, so that his timbre and tone were the most daring of the bunch. But on his few solos he was also the most lyrical, and his accompaniment on the closing “Twilight Of The Dogs” was one of the night's standout moments.
Chancey, Douglas, and everybody else kept their originality intact, but on this night, in this set, Coleman was the center of gravity. The maestro’s spiritual presence in a rambunctious, Bowie-inspired brass band showed how dense Douglas’ artistry was—and how, even with huge diversity, a musician can’t completely shake his inspirations.
