“I'm always watching younger musicians,” Dave Douglas writes in the liner notes for his latest album, “I'm interested in what they play and listen to, and what's going on around me. It's impossible for this not to influence my desire to form new bands and play and write in new ways.”
With this enthusiasm, the sixty-year-old American saxophonist introduces his new album, “Gifts” (“Gifts we give and gifts we receive. That's where this music is coming from”), recorded at the end of 2023 with a new quartet: Rafiq Bhatia is the guitarist of Son Lux, the post-rock project led by Ryann Lott, with whom Douglas has been collaborating for some years; James Brandon Lewis, according to the prestigious Downbeat among the brightest stars of new jazz, has played with Joshua Redman, Marilyn Crispell and Hank Roberts; Ian Chang is a rock drummer who has been part of half a dozen groups of the star-spangled indie scene (from Son Lux to Body Language, passing through Landlady and the Texan Brazos).
The quartet's mix is apparently simple: two jazz musicians and two musicians from the most experimental rock background. The coordinates are those of New York's night jazz, the child of the contagious electricity of the evenings thirty years ago at the Knitting Factory and the more recent ones at The Stone. On the other hand, Dave Douglas himself was a protagonist of that scene, having played in many realities linked to the uncontainable exuberance of John Zorn (above all that of the wonderful Masada). Just to dispel any doubts about the juxtaposition between jazz and rock: “Gifts” has nothing to do with the explosion overflowing with phosphorescent psychedelia of post-“Bitches Brew” fusion.
Douglas' young quartet presents itself with a handful of elastic compositions by the host plus four classics by Billy Strayhorn. It is precisely the sequence formed by “Take The A Train”, “Rain Check”, “Blood Count” and “Day Dream” that gives polish and rhythm to the album's tracklist. The unorthodox approach of Bhatia and Chang – literally explosive on the finale of “Blood Count” – is complementary to the elegance of the timbres of the trumpet and saxophone (the latter present only on the first of the four tracks), which masterfully interpret the melodies made immortal by Duke Ellington.
Douglas seems to have found in Lewis an ideal companion, capable of duetting in a disruptive and at the same time engaging way (“Seven Years Ago”).
27/08/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
