Dave Douglas dealt sparingly with the emotional back story at BeCa on Wednesday night, in the auspicious first outing by his new quintet. During a concert built around the Protestant hymns on his gorgeous and contemplative new album, “Be Still” — due out on Tuesday on Greenleaf, his independent label — Mr. Douglas spoke of his motivation only in passing. The album, he said simply, “came about because all these hymns and songs were songs that my mother recommended that I play.” ArtsBeat
Dave Douglas, on his property in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., says his latest album, “Be Still,” is his most personal work.
His mother, Emily Douglas, died in August 2011 after a three-year struggle with ovarian cancer. During her final months, as talk turned to her memorial service, she handed him a list of eight traditional hymns — a poignant commission and in some ways a spiritual bequest.
“She had probably been to more than 200 gigs of mine,” Mr. Douglas, 49, said softly last month at his home, in a densely wooded pocket of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. “She saw every single project, every band, until she was not able to come the last few years. So it wasn’t like she was unaware that my music is coming from another place. And yet she was still like, ‘I want you to go in the church and play these hymns.’ ”
Mr. Douglas, one of the busiest trumpeter-composers in jazz over the last 20 years, grew up one of four children in a household that identified as Christian but acknowledged other systems of belief, from secular philosophy to Sikhism; his faith wasn’t much of a ritual concern for him. “I went to Sunday school at a Presbyterian church until I was 7,” he said. “And that was it.” He grimaced at the suggestion that “Be Still” was his most personal album. “I don’t know if it’s more personal than any of my other records, because they’re all from an incredibly interior place,” he said.
His body of work reflects an inveterate engagement with the world, taking inspiration from literature, politics, dance and film, as well as jazz and new-music traditions. But it doesn’t convey much devotional energy, unless your idea of the divine is Wayne Shorter. Though hardly the iconoclast he has sometimes been made out to be — notably during the late 1990s, when some in the jazz press dimly held him up as a downtown rebuttal to Wynton Marsalis — Mr. Douglas is indeed the type to question any sort of orthodoxy.
He arranged the songs at his mother’s service for a brass ensemble, leaving space for congregational singing, and initially had no further plans for the music. Then, this January, he performed in a concert series in Denver, where he met Aoife O’Donovan, a young singer best known for her progressive-bluegrass band, Crooked Still, and for her guest turn on “The Goat Rodeo Sessions,” the most recent Appalachian foray by the virtuoso cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Almost immediately Mr. Douglas began to envision a new, bucolic setting for the songs, with Ms. O’Donovan’s vocals front and center. Since the dissolution of his previous quintet, which enjoyed a roughly decade-long run, he had been testing out his rapport with a succession of adaptable younger players, including the bassist Linda Oh, the saxophonist Jon Irabagon, the pianist Matt Mitchell and the drummer Rudy Royston. These were the musicians he brought into the studio this spring, along with Ms. O’Donovan.
“It’s the first record I’ve ever had a singer on,” Mr. Douglas said. “That’s a big change for me. A bigger change than, you know, bringing in a D.J. or having an electric group or working with strings or collaborating with film or dance.”
What helped was the vision he shared with Ms. O’Donovan, a vocalist of unerring instinct and a product of the contemporary improvisation program at the New England Conservatory. Both conceived of the hymns as folk music, simple but pliable. “Be Still” is a jazz album, but it’s built around a vocal delivery that Mr. Douglas describes as “uninflected.” Ms. O’Donovan added: “For me to step in and sing pretty simply on top of these gorgeously complex arrangements — it’s like resting on a cloud.”
The album opens with “Be Still My Soul,” with a melody borrowed from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia.” Among the other proper hymns are “God Be With You,” “This Is My Father’s World,” and as a valediction, “Whither Must I Wander?,” which features Mr. Douglas’s horn at its most poetic. Mingled throughout are several other traditional themes, including “Barbara Allen,” a tragic ballad that Mr. Douglas remembers as the first song he ever learned to play, in a school band.
Mr. Douglas contributed a few original compositions, one of which, “Middle March,” is his nod to the drummer and composer Paul Motian, who died last year. He based “Living Streams” on the Irish hymn “St. Columba,” which has its own mournful associations; he discovered it in a hymnal given to him by his mother-in-law, who had been a church organist for 40 years. “There was a little Post-it note in it,” he recalled, “and it was the hymn that she had played at her own son’s funeral.”
But if loss casts a long shadow over “Be Still,” the album also conveys a blush of renewal, especially on a tune like “Going Somewhere With You,” which Mr. Douglas dedicated to his wife, Suzannah Kincannon. And with the quintet alone, he recorded enough material to yield another, forthcoming album. Wednesday’s show, broadcast and archived online by WBGO in Newark (88.3 FM), included a few of these, including “Bridge to Nowhere,” a smart-alecky swinger built on a terse three-bar form.
By its nature Mr. Douglas’s new quintet suggests more of a mentor-and-apprentice dynamic than its precursor. Ms. Oh, who recently released an album on Greenleaf, first met Mr. Douglas at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Alberta, where he spent the last decade as director. The first jazz gig Mr. Irabagon saw in New York City was by Mr. Douglas’s original quintet. (Passing through New Jersey with the national tour of “Chicago: The Musical,” Mr. Irabagon caught a late train in for a 1 a.m. set. “It was a pretty life-changing experience for me,” he said.)
Mr. Douglas has considered his role as a mentor, at Banff and elsewhere. It’s partly why he established the Festival of New Trumpet Music, which is now in its 10th season, running through Oct. 7. “It sends a message that it’s O.K. to experiment,” he said. “When I came up in New York, I was caught between being a straight-ahead player and being a ‘free’ player. It took a good number of years to find a third way, and find colleagues who could see that with me, develop something, build something up.”
In commemoration of his 50th birthday in March Mr. Douglas plans to take the quintet on a tour through all 50 states. And he will run his first New York City Marathon in November, using the occasion to raise funds for the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. Mr. Douglas took up running after the death of his father — Damon Douglas, a serious trail runner — in a car accident in 2003. (“Mountain Passages,” the first Greenleaf release, was dedicated to his memory.)
The day after my visit, Mr. Douglas sent me an e-mail. “On reflection,” he wrote, “of course you are right that this is my most personal record. To reflect on the loss of my mother makes the emotional story in this music very explicit. There’s no doubt for me that this record exposes some feelings that cut deep.”
Dave Douglas Quintet: Be Still
By Will Layman 25 September 2012
Jazz isn’t afraid to mix it up with other kinds of music, and certainly an artist as bold as trumpeter Dave Douglas isn’t going to shy away from stylistic collision. Douglas’s earlier work mixed jazz with Balkan music, film music, brass band elements, electronics—so what’s the big deal in taking on a set of hymns or many elements of folk music?
But it’s rare that the particular elements that mix on Be Still, the latest from Douglas’s shimmering jazz quintet, fuse so convincingly and effortlessly. This recording, inspired by the passing of the leader’s mother and a list of hymns and spiritual folk songs that she chose for her own service, is majestic. Douglas uses his quintet in new ways to work with a different kind of source material. And the jazz group is supplemented brilliantly by Aoife O’Donovan, a young singer with a clarion but gentle gravity to her voice.
Be Still is a triumph, a beauty, a revelation. It’s as a good a jazz record as 2012 is likely to produce—and maybe it’s not quite a jazz record at all.
First, this is a record of crystalline quiet. O’Donovan sings gently, with a soft and often breathy approach. She’s no stranger to this kind of artistic fusion, having sung with the Wayfaring Strangers, Matt Glaser’s trailblazing mixture of jazz, bluegrass and klezmer, and being the main voice of Crooked Still, a hip “newgrass” outfit. Douglas’s arrangements in support of her are full of space and gentle care. On “Barbara Allen”, for example, Douglas starts by deploying O’Donovan’s voice as a wordless instrument in a chorale written out for trumpet, saxophone, piano, bowed bass, and voice. The lyrics are then supported by a very spare set of statements by the horns only, then horns and piano. O’Donovan is given lengths of as much as eight slow bars to sing without accompaniment, making the reentry to the quiet instrumental work that much more dramatic.
Not that drummer Rudy Royston has no role here. His tuneful cymbal work on “Be Still My Soul” is essential to balancing the performance. But his role on this tune is hardly that of a typical jazz drummer. Mainly, he performs as colorist, filling the atmosphere around the carefully phrased melody with a series of pings and shimmers, flinging sparks around the grounding provided by bassist Linda Oh and the transparent piano work of Matt Mitchell. Later, as Douglas takes the disc’s first improvised solo, Royston begins playing loose time, which builds to be even more dramatic under the tenor saxophone solo by Jon Irabagon. This track is arguably a masterpiece, and Royston is a critical reason for that.
But Douglas uses the band different ways on different tracks. “High on the Mountain” is essentially a bluegrass tune, and he uses a horn arrangement on the chorus that sets up the kind of drone that a different band would get out of a fiddle. Royston plays a highly syncopated train beat under the verse while the leader plays a flowing jazz counterpoint to the vocal melody. On “God Be With You”, however, the trumpet takes the first reading of the melody, loosely, setting up the stately hymn as a kind of jazz ballad. After O’Donovan’s statement of the melody, the horns come in together with a wholly separate melody that launches Irabagon into a short but surging improvisation. Each of the approaches seems just right for its tune.
Three of the songs here are instrumental, yet they do not feel out of place or ultimately much different in character from the more traditional material. “Whither Must I Wander”, in fact, is a known hymn that the quartet (minus tenor) performs with great feeling but no words. The first two minutes or so feature only Mitchell and Douglas, with the two men drawing maximum feeling from the simple tune. Soon, though, Linda Oh joins on bass and Royston gets in on the action. Douglas’s tone is raw around the edges even as it’s big—he lets his sound veer outside of any notion of “pure” tone to catch the ripples of feeling obviously present in the material, yet there are always moments where the jazz musician catches himself and brings the line back to center, to a sense of form and grace.
On the recordingJust as feeling is the Douglas original “Going Somewhere With You”, which is thicker with tricky jazz harmony and syncopation. But it shares with the other material a plaintive melody that develops with care toward emotion. Here, the trumpet is up on top of the line, with Irabagon acting as a harmonic shadow. It’s notable that the short trumpet solo flows so wholly out of the melody that it seems to have been composed. When Irabagon takes over, his statement is more obtuse—but genuinely original. (It’s worth noting that Irabagon is developing into one of those players who, despite having an essentially mainstream approach to jazz, has a vocabulary so singular and original that he can be identified almost immediately, hard to mistake for, say, Chris Potter. Amen.) The other instrumental original, “Middle March”, was written shortly after Paul Motian’s death, and it works as a tribute to the great composer and drummer, sharing with his canon a gorgeously shaped melody that works without the feeling of a set tempo.
The last original tune here is “Living Streams”, which uses as its source a traditional Scottish hymn. O’Donovan sings plainly with Mitchell’s piano (in a single-line counterpoint) and Douglas—releasing the quintet to play a similar chamber passage that uses each voice independently. As vocal sections alternate with instrumental sections, Douglas pulls off a most unusual fusion of folk traditionalism, “classical” written composition, and freely improvised, aharmonic dissonance. This tune—so different and unique as to have almost no precedent that I’ve ever heard—is utterly original without seeming to violate any rules or clash with expectations.
That is, “Living Streams” is a wholly singular artistic achievement. And that is true for all of Be Still, in fact. Like all the best music, all the best art, it seems to come simultaneously from the history before it and the world around it, yet it also stands as an act of pure imagination that could only have come from the artist himself.
With Be Still, Dave Douglas seems to be standing both smack in the middle of American art—jazz, sure, but so much else as well—and slightly apart from it. He’s seeing connections and beauty where others might not. He’s making something that is mysterious but also ought to touch any listener who dares beyond the Top 40. It’s a great, great record.
Only after the last tree has been cut down, Only after the last river has been poisoned, Only after the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find money cannot be eaten.
