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Dave Douglas

Dave Douglas is a prolific trumpeter, composer, and educator from New York City known for the stylistic breadth of his work, the lyricism and wide-ranging curiosity of his music, and for keeping a diverse set of ensembles and projects active simultaneously.

His 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 60 unique original recordings as a leader and more than 500 published works. His current ensembles include the Dave Douglas Quintet; Sound Prints, a band co-led with saxophonist Joe Lovano; Gifts Trio, with guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang; Gifts Quintet, adding saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and cellist Tomeka Reid to the trio; OVERCOME, with vocalists Fay Victor and Camila Meza and instrumentalists Ryan Keberle, Jorge Roeder, and Rudy Royston; and If There Are Mountains, a sextet with pianist & co-leader Elan Mehler featuring haiku and poetry from vocalist Dominique Eade. Douglas is often engaged in special projects which include big bands, tributes, and multi-trumpet ensembles, such as Dizzy Atmosphere: Dizzy Gillespie at Zero Gravity.

As a composer, Douglas has received commissions from a variety of organizations including the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Essen Philharmonie, The Library of Congress, Stanford University, and Monash Art Ensemble. The American chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound recently premiered his piece Facts and Fictions.

Douglas has held several posts as an educator and programmer. From 2002 to 2012, he served as artistic director of the Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music at the Banff Centre in Canada. He is a co-founder and president of the Festival of New Trumpet Music, which celebrated its 17th anniversary in 2020. He is currently on the faculty at Mannes School of Music and The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music. He was the Artistic Director of the Bergamo Jazz Festival for four years ending in 2019.

In 2005 Douglas founded Greenleaf Music, an umbrella company for his recordings, sheet music, podcast, as well as the music of other artists in the modern jazz idiom. Greenleaf Music has produced over 80 releases and celebrated its fifteenth year in 2020. In addition to hosting a podcast featuring engaging interviews with more than 100 creative artists, Greenleaf Music recently joined Bandcamp for Labels and is a pioneering independent music platform with a strong subscription model featuring hours of exclusive content.

Awards

His unique contributions to improvised music have garnered distinguished recognition, including: a Doris Duke Artist Award (2016), an Aaron Copland award (2010), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and two Grammy Award nominations for Best Instrumental Jazz Album by an Individual or Group (The Infinite, 2002) and Best Contemporary Jazz Album (Keystone, 2005). He has received fellowships supporting his compositional work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, Mid Atlantic Arts, Meet the Composer, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Arts International, the Vooruit Culture Center, Stanford University and the Library of Congress. Additional Awards (Selected): Jazz Artist of the year, DownBeat Critics Poll, 2000 Composer of the Year, DownBeat Critics Poll - 2000, 2001, 2002 Trumpet Player of the Year, DownBeat Critics Poll - 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013 Composer of the Year, DownBeat Critics Poll - 2001, 2002 Trumpet Player of the Year, Jazz Journalists Association Awards - 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Rising Star-Producer, DownBeat Critics Poll, 2015 Musician of the Year, Italian Jazz Critics Society, 2001 Personality of the Festival, International Cork Jazz Festival, Guinness Jazz Festival, 2001


Tags

9
Album Review

Mareike Wiening: Reveal

Read "Reveal" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Mareike Wiening is a German drummer/composer who began her career in New York, and now divides her time between there and Köln, Germany. On her third album, she continues making music with her New York-based working band, an increasingly rare situation in contemporary jazz. It provides her an opportunity for more compositional experimentation with each release. “Time for Priorities" begins abstractly, a duet between drums and guitarist Alex Goodman's spacey electronics, before introducing the swinging theme and the rest of ...

4
Album Review

Dan Costa: Beams

Read "Beams" reviewed by Craig Arthur


UK-born pianist Dan Costa plays and composes in the impressionistic tradition of Bill Evans, acoustic Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea or Marcin Wasilewski. It is a style that lends itself well to the alchemy of turning light into music, music into light. And his subject matter of choice on Beams, like that of an impressionist painter, is indeed light. He describes the album as “a celebration of light in some key physical and metaphysical forms." Light is like water, ...

20
Six Picks

January 2023

Read "January 2023" reviewed by Pat Youngspiel


Masaki Hayashi Group Blur The Border S/N Alliance 2023 In contrast to its sister-label Nagalu Records, Shinya Fukumori's S/N alliance is devoted to music and musicians outside of Japan, bringing idioms from classical music and improvised streams under one roof, to be shared across borders. And pianist Masaki Hayashi's Blur The Border fits right on the cusp of those idioms--too through-composed and arranged, with traits from European classical music, to simply be considered ...

Album Review

Dave Douglas: Songs Of Ascent Book 1 — Degrees

Read "Songs Of Ascent Book 1 — Degrees" reviewed by Giuseppe Segala


La curiosità di Dave Douglas verso l'esplorazione, la scoperta, lo stimolo intellettivo, non si placa. Si focalizza, con inesauribile attenzione, su progetti sempre diversi. Così la sua musica, che poggia sempre su un motivo di ispirazione forte: di carattere musicale, poetico, artistico e spirituale in senso ampio. Tra gli altri, Mary Lou Williams, Wayne Shorter, Booker Little, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, hanno fornito negli anni passati al trombettista materiali, ma soprattutto motivi di riflessione dai quali partire con le proprie ...

9
Album Review

Dave Douglas Quintet: Songs Of Ascent Book 1—Degrees

Read "Songs Of Ascent Book 1—Degrees" reviewed by Dan McClenaghan


“Devotion is not a singular expression. I wanted to come at this from as many directions as the psalms do." Dave Douglas. Trumpeter Dave Douglas released one of the finest recordings of his career in 2010, Spark Of Being (Greenleaf Records), a musical immersion into Mary Shelley's pioneering horror & science fiction novel Frankenstein. Douglas is at his best when he bites into themes--Frankenstein, the films of Fatty Arbuckle, the music of pianist & composer Mary Lou Williams, ...

3
Radio & Podcasts

Powerful music from John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Dave Douglas

Read "Powerful music from John McLaughlin, Chick Corea and Dave Douglas" reviewed by Len Davis


Retrospective of the the years 2000-2010 including John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, fretless bassist Mark Egan, trumpeter Dave Douglas, Chris Poland and OHM and CAB. Playlist John McLaughlin “Recovery" from To The One (Abstract Logix) 00:00 Wallace Roney “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down" from Miles From India (Times Square) 08:34 Mark Egan “Three Way Mirror" from As We Speak (Waveton) 17:04 Chick Corea-John McLaughlin “New Blues Old Bruise" from Five Peace Band (Concord) 25:40 Dave Douglas “Catalyst" from Strange ...

3
Album Review

Dave Douglas: Secular Psalms

Read "Secular Psalms" reviewed by Jerome Wilson


Trumpeter Dave Douglas has worked with religious themes in the past, notably on Be Still, (Greenleaf Music, 2012), and he gets back into that realm on this wide-ranging 2022 album. The music is a suite commissioned by the city of Ghent, Belgium to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the creation of an altarpiece for its St. Bavo's Cathedral. For this occasion Douglas assembled a group of young European musicians along with cellist Tomeka Reid who, because of the pandemic, had ...

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Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Dave Douglas' birthday today!

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. His 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 60 unique original recordings ...

1

Festival

Festival Of New Trumpet Music Celebrates 20th Season, September 7-14, 2022

Festival Of New Trumpet Music Celebrates 20th Season, September 7-14, 2022

Source: Lukas Frei

FONT was conceived out of humble beginnings: a post-gig conversation, a sketch on a cocktail napkin, and an ambition to spotlight the full expressive range of the trumpet through the voices of its manifold practitioners. What started on that cocktail napkin twenty years ago has grown into something we never could have dreamed of: featuring over fifty artists from around the globe and nine different events, this year’s festival is the most ambitious edition of FONT to date, and we ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Dave Douglas' birthday today!

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. His 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 60 unique original recordings ...

1

Festival

Festival Of New Trumpet Music 2021 announces Brass Without Borders, September 8-15, 2021

Festival Of New Trumpet Music 2021 announces Brass Without Borders, September 8-15, 2021

Source: Lukas Frei

A GLOBAL CELEBRATION OF THE EXTRAORDINARY DIVERSITY IN CURRENT MUSIC FOR THE TRUMPET For almost 20 years, the Festival Of New Trumpet Music has embraced innovation and the unheard. Led by Dave Douglas, this small festival defies stylistic categories and presents exciting music centered around the trumpet each year, in previous years at clubs and stages around New York City. The pandemic-related all-digital version of 2020 was the occasion to be able to present trumpeters from all over the world ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Dave Douglas' birthday today!

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. His 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 60 unique original recordings ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Dave Douglas' birthday today!

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. His unique contributions to improvised music have garnered distinguished recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland award, and two GRAMMY nominations. While his career spans more than 40 recordings as a leader, his active projects include ...

Recording

Dave Douglas w/ Caine & Cyrille + Mary Lou Wiliams

Dave Douglas w/ Caine & Cyrille + Mary Lou Wiliams

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey

Dave Douglas is a trumpeter whose adherence to basic jazz values justifies the title of the new album that he shares with pianist Uri Caine and drummer Andrew Cyrille in their unusual trio. How unusual? First of all, there is no bassist to help with harmonic and rhythmic responsibilities. At the piano, Caine takes care of business in both departments, abetted by Cyrille, a drummer whose strength and drive have seemed to intensify as he built on the qualities that ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci


4

Radio

Talk Mode with Eamonn Lenihan—New Podcast Series Offers Three Jazz Interviews A Week

Talk Mode with Eamonn Lenihan—New Podcast Series Offers Three Jazz Interviews A Week

Source: All About Jazz

“Duke Ellington reckoned ‘Too much talk stinks up the place’. And of course it must be about the music. But sincere, intelligent conversation can lead to enlightenment. My role, as podcast host, is to steer guests away from bland, chat show patter into areas of genuine interest…” —Eamonn Lenihan Talk Mode, the very first podcast by broadcaster Eamonn Lenihan, launched on November 2nd. It’s a series he feels will appeal to seasoned jazz lovers and newcomers alike. Exclusive interviews will ...

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Jazz Musician of the Day: Dave Douglas

Source: Michael Ricci


"Dave Douglas is the unassuming king of independent jazz, a model of do-it-yourself moxie, initiative and artistic freedom." Frank Alkyer, Publisher, Down Beat

Alon Farber
saxophone
Lynn Ligammari
saxophone
Aaron Bahr
trumpet
Waxwing
band / ensemble / orchestra
Paul Giess
trumpet
Lex French
trumpet
CODE Quartet
band / ensemble / orchestra
Daniel Tamayo
guitar, electric

Photos

Concerts

Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

The Magician: Live in...

Origin Records
2024

buy

Beams

Dan Costa
2023

buy

Reveal

Greenleaf Music
2023

buy

Secular Psalms

Greenleaf Music
2022

buy

Misogi

Self Produced
2022

buy

Songs Of Ascent Book...

Greenleaf Music
2022

buy
https://soundcloud.com/davedouglas

Encaminho

From: Beams
By Dave Douglas

Persistence of Memory

From: The Magician: Live in Jerusalem
By Dave Douglas

Garden State

From: Time Travel
By Dave Douglas

Bad Mango

From: Bad Mango
By Dave Douglas

The Gulf

From: Orange Afternoons
By Dave Douglas

Safeway

From: Rare Metals
By Dave Douglas

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