Troubled by the fraud and greed that dominate the news today, the composer-trumpeter Dave Douglas and the author David Hajdu joined up to confront the issues creatively in words and music. They collaborated to explore the twisted, enigmatic power of con artistry through the story of the most notorious con in American history, Cassie Chadwick. In 12 new genre-defying songs, Chadwick captures how an audacious grifter of the Gilded Age amassed millions of dollars in riches through a string of scams under false identities. The ruses made her infamous as, “the Queen of the Con.”

Douglas composed, arranged, and led the ensemble of eight voices and six instruments, in addition to playing trumpet, in this ambitious long-form work. An artist long renowned for his adventurism, Douglas ventures into yet another realm of new creative territory with Chadwick. The music transcends standard categories while drawing deftly on the narrative power of theater music, the kinetic vitality and expressive flexibility of jazz, and the thought-provoking capacity of art song. Greenleaf Music, the label Douglas founded in 2004, will release Chadwick on CD and streaming services on February 5, 2027, with album release concerts at The Pocket Jazz Club in New York on February 17 and 18.

To pull off her elaborate grifts, the woman best known as Cassie Chadwick (born Elizabeth Bigley) posed as a spiritualist, ran a brothel, took over a farm, and, most famously, passed herself off as Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter. Chadwick conjures this rogue’s gallery of artful artifice by having the song for each of Chadwick’s various identities sung by a different singer: Dominique Eade, Aubrey Johnson, Karen Oberlin, Aoife O’Donovan, Alicia Olatuja, Sami Stevens, and Fay Victor, with Donnie T Smith performing the male vocal roles. A work of richly varied words and music, Chadwick probes the lure of greed, the malleability of identity, and the vulnerability of people all too willing to believe fanciful lies too bad to be true.

“The story that David brought to me was rich and full of creative adventure. I was immediately intrigued by the life of Chadwick and the contemporary resonance of her con artistry,” says Dave Douglas. “The grifts felt built for new songs of conflicted love and heartbreak, songs that each singer could deliver in their own voice. It was an amazing opportunity to write for such distinguished vocalists, and to bring out the emotions evoked by these stories.”

A longtime admirer of Douglas’s work, David Hajdu first conceived of this project and brought it to Douglas, suggesting the idea of using a variety of singers. “Only a composer with Dave’s open-mindedness and sense of adventure would dare trying to pull this off,” says Hajdu. “One of the benefits of the variety in this structure is that it works with the way people listen to music in the age of streaming and handheld devices. Chadwick tells a story from beginning to end, but you can dip into it and listen to any one song and have a unique experience, and everything comes together in the end like a mosaic.”

Douglas directs the six-piece ensemble of stellar improvising musicians, featuring Douglas himself on trumpet, Gary Versace on keyboards, Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee on woodwinds, Erik Friedlander on cello, Matt Penman on bass and Rudy Royston on drums.

The band comprises old and new colleagues of Douglas, capable of approaching the music with the flexibility of improvised music and the specific shadings of each story. Versace’s versatility is on display in his use of multiple keyboards: Fender Rhodes, acoustic piano, Hammond B3 organ, accordion, and mellotron. A new voice in Douglas’s ensembles, Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee plays with feeling on both clarinet and tenor saxophone. The sextet also includes longtime Douglas associate Erik Friedlander on cello, filling out a sound that evokes both chamber music and a small jazz pit orchestra.

Dave Douglas is a prolific trumpeter, composer, educator and entrepreneur from New York City known for the stylistic breadth of his work and for keeping a diverse set of ensembles and projects active simultaneously. Douglas’ unique contributions to improvised music have garnered distinguished recognition, including a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland award, and two Grammy Award nominations. Douglas’ career spans more than 90 unique original recordings as a leader and more than 500 published works.

David Hajdu, lyricist and co-producer, is the author of eight books of biography, cultural history, criticism, fiction, and graphic nonfiction. As a songwriter, he has worked with collaborators as diverse as the classical composers Sarah Kirkland Snider and Ted Hearne, and the jazz composers Fred Hersch, Renee Rosnes, and Darcy James Argue. Prior to Chadwick, Hajdu collaborated with Dave Douglas on three songs on Lives of the Saints, an album of musical portraits of women from history.

Track Listing:

1. Who Did the Gilding? feat. Aubrey Johnson w/ Dominique Eade
2. My Card feat. Aubrey Johnson
3. What If I Were One of Them? feat. Aubrey Johnson
4. Born to Use feat. Karen Oberlin
5. The Doctor’s Wife feat. Dominique Eade w/ Donnie T Smith
6. You Can Bet the Farm feat. Fay Victor
7. Song of the Spirits feat. Aoife O’Donovan
8. Social Intercourse feat. Sami Stevens w/ Aubrey Johnson
9. The Secret feat. Alicia Olatuja
10. I, Andrew Carnegie feat. Alicia Olatuja and Donnie T Smith
11. Millionaire’s Row feat. Alicia Olatuja
12. I Was Her feat. Alicia Olatuja w/ Dominique Eade, Aubrey Johnson, Karen Oberlin, Aoife O’Donovan, Sami Stevens, Fay Victor

Personnel:

Voice: Aubrey Johnson
Voice: Dominique Eade
Voice: Karen Oberlin
Voice: Donnie T Smith
Voice: Fay Victor
Voice: Aoife O’Donovan
Voice: Sami Stevens
Voice: Alicia Olatuja

Trumpet: Dave Douglas
Piano, Rhodes, Organ & Mellotron: Gary Versace
Clarinet & Tenor Saxophone: Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee
Cello: Erik Friedlander
Bass: Matt Penman
Drums: Rudy Royston

Production Credits:

Compositions by Dave Douglas (Dave Douglas Music, BMI)
Words by David Hajdu (Charles Hajdu’s Son, ASCAP)

Produced by Dave Douglas and David Hajdu
Recording, mixing, and mastering: Tyler McDiarmid
Recording Assistant: Jasper Leach
Recorded on June 3, 4, 5, 2026 at The Bunker Studio, Brooklyn NY
Additional tracking at Brooklyn Recording
by Andy Taub on July 7, 2026

Copyist: Geoffrey Countryman
Project Assistant: Kate Pass
Photography: Christopher Drukker and Tomás Tarnopolsky
Album Design: Lukas Frei
Executive Producer: Dave Douglas

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