Clearly Dave Douglas is feeling it in 2026. The trumpeter/composer has already released the remarkable Four Freedoms this year, and now he’s lined up album #2. Transcend reunites the band with whom he recorded the exceptional Gifts: saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang, adding the extraordinary Tomeka Reid on cello. While Gifts paid tribute to Duke Ellington’s co-composer Billy Strayhorn, Transcend salutes the man himself, with a similar blend of challenging originals and Ellington classics.
As on Gifts, Douglas takes advantage of his players’ unique skills. As members of experimental rock band Son Lux, Chang and Bhatia know how to casually kick holes in musical…
Tag Archive: Dave Douglas
Inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech — articulating freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear — trumpeter Dave Douglas frames Four Freedoms as both political echo and musical proposition.
Although the quartet is geographically dispersed — Marta Warelis, Nick Dunston and Joey Baron residing in Europe, Douglas based in New York — the album sounds anything but remote. Distance, instead, sharpens focus. What emerges is a newly formed working band whose cohesion rests on shared vocabulary and intent rather than physical proximity, its music animated by alert listening and collective purpose.
That sense of shared language is anchored…
Alloy the band started as a vehicle for Dave Douglas in cahoots with the now passed Roy Campbell Jnr and Baikida Carroll. Douglas was the then greenhorn alongside those masters of free. In this incarnation the roles are reversed, with Douglas the senior to David Adewumi and new kid on the block, Alexandra Ridout. This is austere, disciplined music, perhaps reflecting Douglas’ current mood, where so many of his values, musical and social, must feel under threat.
The first two cuts set the tone: ‘Standing Watch’ is a tight, almost second line blues, resonant of Gary Burton and Carla Bley’s Genuine Tong Funeral, the state of readiness resonating with Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watch. Brennan does the Burton fluid thing while the steadfast…