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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By Nate Chinen
Dave Douglas dealt sparingly with the emotional back story at 92YTriBeCa on Wednesday night, in the auspicious first outing by his new quintet. During a concert built around the Protestant hymns on his gorgeous and contemplative new album, “Be Still” — due out on Tuesday on Greenleaf, his independent label — Mr. Douglas spoke of his motivation only in passing. The album, he said simply, “came about because all these hymns and songs were songs that my mother recommended that I play.”
His mother, Emily Douglas, died in August 2011 after a three-year struggle with ovarian cancer. During her final months, as talk turned to her memorial service, she handed him a list of eight traditional hymns — a poignant commission and in some ways a spiritual bequest.
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