Douglas

“How often do we step back and realize what a gift it is to have this music in our life?” asks acclaimed trumpeter, composer and Greenleaf Music founder Dave Douglas. On Gifts, his newest Greenleaf project, Douglas harnesses that feeling of simple wonder with a new book of pieces and four intriguing takes on Strayhorn songs, premiering a new quartet with poll-sweeping tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and two members of the Oscar-nominated post-rock trio Son Lux: guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The sound is harmonically spacious, with no bass, but a full, sonically adventurous guitar palette from Bhatia that frames the group’s trumpet-tenor melodic concept in fresh and unexpected ways.

Autodidacte, il se lance dans la programmation, et devient compositeur. Il signe ses tous premiers titres sur le 1er album de Tonton David « le blues des racailles ».

To hear many hard bop hard-liners tell it, all avant-garde jazz is nothing more than atonal screaming. The problem with such sweeping generalizations is that some avant-garde jazz is, in fact, quite musical. A perfect example is Dave Douglas' Convergence, an experimental, adventurous outing that incorporates everything from classical and chamber music to Jewish, Middle Eastern, and East European music.

Trumpeter Dave Douglas and pianist Uri Caine continue their long-time musical association with a new album featuring master drummer Andrew Cyrille. The sequel to the 2014 Douglas / Caine album Present Joys that centered on renditions of Sacred Harp tunes and which the New York Times called, an album of duologue that manages to be at once intimate, soulful and irrepressibly buoyant, Devotion features new original compositions by Douglas in devotion to many of todays greatest composers including Carla Bley and Franco DAndrea.

The one-hit wonder behind the disco novelty smash "Kung Fu Fighting," Carl Douglas was also the first Jamaican-born artist to score a number one single in the United States. Douglas was raised in both California and Jamaica, and eventually moved to England to study sound engineering. In 1964, he formed a group called the Big Stampede, which released a couple of U.K. singles; two years later, he formed the Explosions while living in Spain. Upon returning to England, Douglas teamed up with a band called Gonzales, which quickly led to his becoming a session vocalist for Pye Records. In 1972, Douglas worked with Indian-born producer Biddu on the soundtrack to the Richard Roundtree film Embassy; so, two years later, when Biddu was searching for a vocalist to record the Larry Weiss composition "I Want to Give You My Everything," he contacted Douglas. Needing a quick B-side, Biddu set a melody to some lyrics Douglas had written about the kung fu craze sweeping pop culture courtesy of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon and David Carradine's TV series Kung Fu.

This is Volume 4 in Barry Douglas’s monumental project to record the complete works for solo piano by Johannes Brahms. Each volume has been released to critical acclaim, the first one, in 2012, being seen by BBC Music as ‘a triumph of Brahmsian thought, with playing that gets right to the heart of the composer’.

Dave Douglas writes a brand new suite for Monash Art Ensemble, an improvising chamber orchestra including some of Melbourne’s finest players. Scored for four winds, four brass, four strings, and four percussion, including electronics, Fabliaux introduces new language into the vernacular of contemporary improvised music, looking forward while looking back.