6. Dave Douglas Quintet “Time Travel” (Greenleaf) The trumpeter Dave Douglas formed a smart new quintet last year, and along with a beautiful album of hymns, it created this knockabout winner, capitalizing on the diversity of a roster with the saxophonist Jon Irabagon, the pianist Matt Mitchell, the bassist Linda Oh and the drummer Rudy Royston.
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By Nate Chinen
The defining trait of Sound Prints, a newish quintet making its New York debut this week at the Village Vanguard, is the tangled crosstalk of its front line: an urbane, on-the-fly counterpoint brimming with crooked urgency, like a choice bit of dialogue in a David Mamet play. In this case the sparring partners are the saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas, who share leadership of the band and compose all of its music. Their rapport seemed all but inexhaustible during Thursday night’s powder-keg first set.
Mr. Lovano and Mr. Douglas are two of the leading figures in jazz, with separate histories and only a few points of past intersection. One of these was a brief overlap in the SFJazz Collective, in 2008, when that organization was focused on the repertory of Wayne Shorter. Given that Mr. Shorter is a living totem for both of these bandleaders, it made sense that they would rekindle that tribute, on their own time and in their own fashion.
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By John Fordham
The Soundprints quintet, led by trumpeter Dave Douglas and saxophonist Joe Lovano, played almost two hours straight on their first night at Ronnie Scott's – yet the show felt as if it had passed by in a flash, while boiling with enough ideas for a gig twice as long.
Soundprints is a reference to the saxophonist Wayne Shorter's famous theme, Footprints.
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By Mike Hobart
Gruff, airy-toned saxophonist Joe Lovano and spiky, brittle-voiced trumpeter Dave Douglas have a long history of collaboration – John Zorn’s Masada project and Germany’s NDR Bigband capture the recent range. Their latest joint project, the Sound Prints quintet, celebrates the devious logic and collaborative freedoms of saxophonist/composer Wayne Shorter. The band was a standout at last July’s Copenhagen Jazz Festival, and this gig, with its intricate detail and shifting-sand arrangements, confirmed that the cut of the Douglas trumpet into Lovano’s breathy sax has rarely sounded better.
The genesis of the band lies in 2008, when Lovano and Douglas led the much-praised SF Jazz Collective through a programme of re-arranged Shorter classics. This band, though, captures the Shorter essence with a self-penned set that studiously avoids mimicry. The logic unfolds with unexpected angles, and themes emerge from a mist of improvised detail, but gone are the oblique brushstrokes of the Shorter palette. Lovano and Douglas’s lines are clear cut, sharp edged and border at times on the anthemic.
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