Archive for the ‘Dave Douglas (News)’ Category

East-coasters, be sure to check out the Brass Ecstasy set this Sunday at the Newport Jazz Festival. Those not able to attend can check out WBGO’s live broadcast from the fest. Gonna be great.

The last two Brass Ecstasy shows this year are at the Red Sea Jazz Festival in Israel. Click here for more info on those concerts and the clinic with Dave.

Dave and Keystone hit the Toronto JazzFest (and the Montreal Fest for that matter) next week in support of the Spark releases. Can’t wait for this band to come through Chicago — it’s been awhile since I’ve seen them.

Dug this question and answer from the recent interview with TheStar…

Q How should [Spark Of Being] rank in your catalogue?

A I think in the larger scheme of things, people who are aware of my work will know that I’ve been pursuing this avenue of mixing acoustic improvisation with electronic sound for a long time and I think at this point in my career this is sort of a culmination of what can be done with that. I would hope that that would be the contribution. As in any musical endeavour, one also hopes that the melodies are wonderful, and I’m working with harmony and rhythm and timbre, all the other standard elements of music as well.

Read the full article here >>>

Keystone and I have finished our new recording and it will be released very soon. Here is the cover of the first album in the trilogy of CDs and we’re all really excited about the collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison on Spark of Being. ‘Soundtrack’ is the first release of three — it’s the music from the actual film. We’ve documented much more than that, with two CDs of Keystone recordings from the sessions in Stanford.

We’ll be making a big push for this first release as well as for the three CD set and new subscription podcasts and conversations.

I think you’ll enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.

In this line of work you fly around the globe so much you start to figure you can just get up and jump from continent to continent. That’s changed. I’ve been stuck in Amsterdam for several days now, and the earth feels much bigger than it has in a long time.

As regular readers know, I am supposed to be in Stanford, California right now putting the finishing touches on Spark of Being, film and music event to have its premiere on Saturday, April 24. I’ve been in Amsterdam since last Thursday, and thanks to the volcanic ash of the incredibly photogenic Eyjafjallajokull my departure has been a little bit, well, up in the air.

The show must go on! The band is in California, bless them. I have a flight on Thursday and just today there was a break in the clouds and flights started leaving Schiphol for the States. However, there are several other highly scientific and intriguing ways of playing that show that are under investigation. Just in case the eruption continues and airports are forced to close back down.

We’ll update travel progress at this site. It has been a while since I’ve blogged as well, mostly because of the work to finish this piece. The recording is now complete, the piece is ready to be played and I’ll update with a few brief bloggable thoughts over the coming few days.

By the way, I was heartened to see so many witty and creative responses to the Keystone trivia quiz. You will be rewarded.

This just in: Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy to play Newport Jazz Festival, August 8th, 2010.

Details and ticket links can be found at the dd.com/shows. The complete schedule can be found at the Newport Jazz Fest site.

There will be a special ticket promotion announced shortly, but not here on the blog. For those on our email list, you’ll know all about it in the coming days. For those who aren’t signed up yet, use the widget to your right to do so. Or become a fan of Dave Douglas on Facebook. Those are the two ways you can get privy to the very limited-time offer.

Dave will be running in the Half-Marathon in NYC this Sunday. At the start-point, DD promises to play the Rocky theme song to get everyone in the mood. Just kidding, of course.

From New York Road Runners:

The 90-minute live broadcast will start at 7:30 a.m. EDT and will feature the men’s and women’s professional race. It will be seen on Universal Sports TV and streamed on UniversalSports.com.

NYRR and Flotrack.com have also teamed up to offer live streaming feeds of the race from the start, Times Square, and the finish beginning at 6:30 a.m. Link coming soon.

Not much of a runner myself, but I did just buy a pair of Nike Air’s. Somehow that accomplishment — if one can call it that — doesn’t hold up to a half-marathon run. Ah well.

Good luck, DD!

There’s a great feature on Stanford Lively Arts director Jenny Bilfield posted yesterday at the MetroActive site.

An excerpt from the story of how Reich’s Double Sextet came to be:

Upon hanging up the phone [with Bilfield], Reich thought back to his ’60s pieces like Violin Phase, written for instruments being played live against recordings of themselves. He realized that he could do the same thing for eighth blackbird if the group would agree to pre-record a piece, then play a second sextet performance live against that recording—thus, Double Sextet. He called Bilfield back the next day and proposed the idea, and she took it to the group members, who said they would love to do it.

“And the piece won the Pulitzer Prize, and it is really one of the best pieces I’ve ever written,” says Reich. “But I would never have thought in a million years to write for eighth blackbird. It was Jenny Bilfield, whose basic subtext is ‘I’m not taking no for an answer.’”

And later in the article, some words about the Dave Douglas/Bill Morrison collaboration Spark Of Being [world premiere next month].

“Jenny called me and said, ‘What would you like to do that you couldn’t do anywhere else?” remembers Douglas. “It’s not every day that you get asked that question.”

The basis of the piece is matching Morrison’s talent for shaping films made from a collage of archival footage—his similarly constructed Decasia was named by the Village Voice as one of the 10 best films of 2003—with Douglas’ composition work. It has gone by many different titles over time; for a while, it was known as Frankenstein: The First 100 Years, in reference to Thomas Edison’s 1910 film.

“Before that, it was called The History of Gadgetry,” Douglas says. “For us, it’s all been about this conversation between technology and art, humanity and invention—what our inventions mean to us and how science has affected humanity. We went to Frankenstein because that seemed like a good metaphor for the whole thing. Bill works with older films, creating something new out of them, and I work a lot with samples and various disparate elements of music.”

“The Frankenstein monster is a collage of pieces in and of itself, so we’re referencing our process,” says Morrison. Finally, though, they settled on Spark of Being.

Read the full article here.

A new show just posted to the DD shows page. John Zorn’s Masada Sextet will hit the Cleveland Museum of Art on Friday, March 26th. Show time is at 7:30 PM. Happy hour with a cash bar and light snacks starts at 5:30 PM. Tickets are available here. The Masada Sextet is John Zorn, sax; Dave Douglas, trumpet; Uri Caine, piano; Greg Cohen, bass; Cyro Baptista, percussion; Joey Baron, drums.

In other Masada news, Dave will be conducting a seminar on May 10th at The Stone celebrating the Masada book. Details below. Further info at The Stone’s website.

DAVE DOUGLAS—The Music of Masada
7PM to 10PM—THIRTY DOLLARS: Open to musicians on any instrument.
Trumpeter in various MASADA ensembles since 1993, Douglas talks about and demonstrates some of the unique performance issues raised in this celebrated book of compositions by John Zorn. The group will work on several pieces from the book in differing ensemble formations, illuminating ideas about performance practice and limning the knowns and unknowns in the pages of the MASADA book. For those interested in an inside look at this music, this will be a challenging and fun hands-on experience. Please arrive on time and bring your instrument.

A nice review of the Brass Ecstasy performance last night by the Oregon Music News blog hit this morning. Click here to read.

UPDATE: Check out another review from Mainly Music Meanderings here with accompanying photos. Note: one tune was missing from Posty McPosterton’s setlist — “The Brass Ring” (with the drum solo Posty mentions) should appear between “Awake Nu” and “Mr. Pitiful.” That update came straight from the horse’s mouth. Thanks for posting Posty!

Early Warning: Brass Ecstasy’s next scheduled performance this year will be at the Red Sea Jazz Festival this coming August. More info on that festival coming soon. As always, keep your eye on Dave’s tour page for the most recent tour news.