Archive for the ‘Dave Douglas (News)’ Category
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.
Creation Suite: New Compositions for Small Improvising Ensembles.
On Thursday there’s a FREE concert at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center [map] in which the Dave Douglas Quintet (with Donny McCaslin, Uri Caine, James Genus, and Clarence Penn) perform as well as the 11 participants in the Weill Music Institute Young Artists Workshop.
Friday at Zankel Hall [map] [tickets] is a concert dedicated to the Young Artist original works. Dave, Uri, Clarence will be hanging out and might play a little bit.
Young Artist Workshop participants and players:
Eden Bareket, Baritone Saxophone
Johannes Dickbauer, Violin
Philip Dizack, Trumpet
Sam Harris, Piano
Kristijan Krajncan, Drums
Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, Saxophones
Hui-Chun Lin, Cello
Rizpah Lowe, Harp
Nadje Noordhuis, Trumpet
Linda Oh, Bass
Dan Peck, Tuba
In the artist’s own words:
In this concert, you will hear original music written and developed by the players.
In a way, this idea is part of our own tradition—musician-composer-performers coming together to create a program of new music that includes the improvised voices of each player. The jazz tradition is where this concept has most recently flourished, and all the musicians on this stage are certainly educated and influenced by the great jazz musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries. But influence is a slippery thing, and you’ll certainly hear shades of all sorts of music on this program. The inclusion of many sources is not approached as eclecticism; rather, it seems to be the natural way that young musicians react to the profusion of musical languages and to the challenges of making personal and powerful music in the current age.
Tradition can be defined as an established method or style. The tradition present in this concert is not so much in the sense of a style, but in the practices of certain kinds of musicians.
Player-composers who improvise tend to learn from one another: writing music for each other to play, learning each other’s practices, listening, exchanging feedback, thinking about what the music means to them and where they fit into it. This music is neither all improvised nor all composed. The amount of improvisation varies from moment to moment and is developed collaboratively by the musicians as part of a charged process that is both intuitive and well considered.
In presenting this original music, the musicians situate themselves in a tradition of creativity—of collaboration, personal investigation, and making the most engaging music in a human and interpersonal context.
Tradition can also be defined as the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. With that transmission, ideas grow and change; new musical forms emerge with each generation. In preparation for this concert, the musicians shared their sense of musical custom and belief in the creation of a new body of work. We are thankful to the Weill Music Institute for giving us this opportunity to find out where tradition will take us next.
-Dave Douglas
We are very excited to announce that Dave’s big band will be playing this years Hollywood Bowl on July 28 performing music from A Single Sky and Dave’s big band work Delighted States with very special guest Jim McNeely.
Click here to listen to A Single Sky.
Click here for the full scores to all 7 tunes.
The night is a triple bill with Dave Holland Big Band and Count Basie Orchestra. Tickets and subscription packages for the Hollywood Bowl are available now.
Two master innovators—jazz trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas and experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison—draw on the unique resources of Stanford University to create Spark of Being, a monumental work combining the screening of film with live musical performances by Douglas’ electric band Keystone.
WORLD PREMIERE: April 24th, 2010 at Stanford University.
More details coming soon.
“Constellations is a new set of songs written and arranged for the trio. It was recorded in mid tour, and so has a different, perhaps more live, character … Many thanks go to Brad and Jim for their dedications and commitment to the music. They are two of the finest listeners around, and in our three years as atrio, we’ve developed split-second reaction times and true fluidity between roles of soloist and accompanist.” – Dave Douglas, 1995
The HatHut reissue of Constellations is now available at our store with full track samples for your listening pleasure. Click the newly-designed album art above to reach the album page. This disc is also available in the Trio Bundle with Donny McCaslin’s Recommended Tools, Nicole Mitchell’s Indigo Trio, Live in Montreal, and a bonus MP3 download of Tiny Bell Trio Live in Europe.
It had been awhile since I listened to these tracks. Man, what a killer album!
Click here to read the AllAboutJazz review of this reissue.
Douglas’ trumpet, visceral and vocalized, steers most of the tracks, counterpointed by Shepik’s emphatic, rock-tinged guitar and Black’s leathery syncopations. As Douglas observes in his (brief) liner notes, three years down the line Tiny Bell had achieved split-second reaction times and extraordinary fluidity between the roles of soloist and accompanist. Douglas is undoubtedly the leader here but the music is a true collective endeavor. Three exploding stars, a shared focus, and one enduring masterpiece. -Chris May, AAJ
Thanks to Werner Uehlinger at HatHut Records for putting this music out there.
The Quintet continues at the Vanguard tonight. Thanks to all who’ve been and will be there this weekend.
The FLACs of the set from the Vanguard last night are being added to our subscriber downloads database. Those are lossless files that you subscribers can download and sink your ears in to. Thanks to WBGO and NPR for their work. Enjoy.
For non-subscribers, plenty of music to listen to at the NPR Vanguard page. And if you’d like to join our Greenleaf subscriber community, click here to see all the current special offer.
We hope to see you out at the Vanguard. Tickets are available here.
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December 11th, 2009
A quick update on those files. We’ve split the set into tracks rather than the one big file up over at NPR Vanguard page. We cut the chatter, too. So it’s as clean as possible.
Also, of the seven tunes played, four have not been released yet. Those tunes and a lot of the new book that the Quintet have been and will play this weekend is scheduled to be recorded and released on the next Quintet studio album tentatively scheduled for late 2010.
The Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT Music) will present Forward Flight, the third and final event of its 7th annual performance season, from Wednesday, January 13th through Saturday, January 16th at New York’s Abrons Arts Center.
This four-day celebration of the eclecticism of the trumpet in contemporary music, curated by Dave Douglas and Taylor Ho Bynum, will feature events on two stages, including performances by a diverse range of ensembles, three free FONT Music Workshop Series events and an opening night tribute to unheralded veteran trumpet player, Wilmer Wise.
The program will include world premieres of music from the New York-based composers collective Anti-Social Music (ASM) and composer David Sanford, whose piece, “Seven Kings”, was commissioned by FONT Music with support from Chamber Music America to be performed by the Meridian Arts Ensemble with guest soloist Dave Ballou. And, The New York Trumpet Ensemble, directed by Mark Gould, will present the New York premiere of Charles Wuorinen’s Brass Quintet.
Sometimes on the road, the strangest meetings come about completely coincidentally. Yesterday on the train from Zurich to Milan, a mini trumpet conference.
Trumpeters Franco Ambrosetti, Dave Douglas, Chris Botti. Captured by the quick thinking Uri Caine. In the background, Tim Lefebvre, Matt Penman, and Clarence Penn share a laugh. Nice to catch up with Chris, who I hadn’t seen since we both auditioned for the house band (he got the gig) at the New York Playboy Club in 1986. Neither of us had met Franco, who is a great Swiss player. I also got to see Billy Kilson, Chris’ drummer, who was my roommate at Berklee.
Douglas band and Botti band merged for about four hours. Hilarity ensued.
