Biography
In the early to mid-'90s, Brooklyn-based trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Dave Douglas launched his first independent recording and performance ventures, quickly revealing an ability to navigate Parallel Worlds across musical idioms. He assembled the Balkan-tinged Tiny Bell Trio, featuring drummer Jim Black alongside guitarist Brad Shepik (then performing under the surname Schoeppach), and simultaneously organized a sextet whose instrumentation followed more customary jazz lines yet remained distinctive; the trio debuted via its self-titled 1994 Songlines release, while the sextet appeared the next year on New World with In Our Lifetime, a program containing nine Douglas originals and three pieces by Booker Little. Douglas had already cut his actual first album, the 1993 Soul Note session titled Parallel Worlds, with an entirely different unit called the String Group, and that debut promptly drew notice from devotees of creative jazz as the work of an emerging figure worth following.
Gunther Schuller, the noted third-stream authority, began his album notes with the exclamation “Parallel Worlds indeed!” before cataloguing the record’s interwoven elements, among them the seamless fusion of improvisation and composition, tonal and atonal languages, and jazz with contemporary classical structures. To realize this vision, Douglas recruited an elite lineup that included violinist Mark Feldman, cellist Erik Friedlander, bassist Mark Dresser (of the Anthony Braxton Quartet), and drummer Michael Sarin (of the Thomas Chapin Trio), each of whom would later become prominent voices in New York’s downtown milieu. Although the album marked his first outing under his own name, Douglas approached the material with the assurance of an experienced leader, writing specifically for these timbres and integrating the players’ individual languages into both written and spontaneous passages rather than treating the strings as conventional background support. Most of the pieces were his own, yet the chosen covers—works by Webern, Weill, Ellington, and Stravinsky—underscored his intent to locate common ground among several pivotal modern-music innovators.
By the middle of the decade Douglas’s schedule had grown increasingly crowded with both leadership and sideman obligations; his initial appearance on John Zorn’s Masada, Vol. 1: Alef, surfaced on DIW in 1994, and a second Tiny Bell Trio album, Constellations, followed on Hatology in 1995. Consequently the String Group’s next Soul Note recording, issued in 1996, received the straightforward title Five. Douglas supplied every composition, dedicating each to Steve Lacy, Wayne Shorter, Mark Dresser, Woody Shaw, John Cage, or John Zorn; bassist Drew Gress, another mainstay of the New York creative-jazz community, had by then replaced Dresser.
The String Group’s third and last Soul Note album, Convergence, reached the market in 1999 and matched or arguably exceeded the breadth and caliber of its two predecessors; the set featured arrangements of music by Weill, Messiaen, Bob Dorough, and traditional Burmese sources, a tribute to Tony Williams, and dedications to victims of violence in Mexico and the Middle East during the First Gulf War. By this point the release constituted Douglas’s twelfth album as a leader overall; in the intervening years he had issued another Tiny Bell Trio recording, Live in Europe, and another sextet date, Stargazer (a homage to Wayne Shorter), both on Arabesque in 1997, plus the 1997 octet project Sanctuary on Avant and two 1998 releases—the Joni Mitchell homage Moving Portrait on DIW and the debut of his Charms of the Night Sky quartet on Winter & Winter, which again featured Feldman.
Douglas had already claimed the 1998 DownBeat Critics Poll honors for both Jazz Artist of the Year and Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, positioning him for broader recognition. RCA signed him and issued the sextet album Soul on Soul, dedicated to pianist Mary Lou Williams, in 2000; that recording earned the DownBeat Jazz Album of the Year award. Although the String Group and Tiny Bell Trio projects had concluded, Douglas continued to helm numerous distinguished ensembles, producing seven albums for RCA through the mid-2000s and many more thereafter on his own Greenleaf Music imprint. In 2012, after acquiring the Black Saint/Soul Note catalog, CAM Jazz compiled the six-CD box set The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, which contained Parallel Worlds, Five, and Convergence. Recognizing Douglas’s prominence, the label also retrieved three additional 1990s sideman sessions—Mark Dresser’s Force Green (1994), Rova’s rendering of John Coltrane’s Ascension (1995), and John Lindberg’s Bounce (1998)—and added them to the package. These discs stand as strong statements by their respective leaders and offer valuable documentation of Douglas’s trumpet work from the period, even though his own Soul Note output was limited to the three singular String Group albums.
Gunther Schuller, the noted third-stream authority, began his album notes with the exclamation “Parallel Worlds indeed!” before cataloguing the record’s interwoven elements, among them the seamless fusion of improvisation and composition, tonal and atonal languages, and jazz with contemporary classical structures. To realize this vision, Douglas recruited an elite lineup that included violinist Mark Feldman, cellist Erik Friedlander, bassist Mark Dresser (of the Anthony Braxton Quartet), and drummer Michael Sarin (of the Thomas Chapin Trio), each of whom would later become prominent voices in New York’s downtown milieu. Although the album marked his first outing under his own name, Douglas approached the material with the assurance of an experienced leader, writing specifically for these timbres and integrating the players’ individual languages into both written and spontaneous passages rather than treating the strings as conventional background support. Most of the pieces were his own, yet the chosen covers—works by Webern, Weill, Ellington, and Stravinsky—underscored his intent to locate common ground among several pivotal modern-music innovators.
By the middle of the decade Douglas’s schedule had grown increasingly crowded with both leadership and sideman obligations; his initial appearance on John Zorn’s Masada, Vol. 1: Alef, surfaced on DIW in 1994, and a second Tiny Bell Trio album, Constellations, followed on Hatology in 1995. Consequently the String Group’s next Soul Note recording, issued in 1996, received the straightforward title Five. Douglas supplied every composition, dedicating each to Steve Lacy, Wayne Shorter, Mark Dresser, Woody Shaw, John Cage, or John Zorn; bassist Drew Gress, another mainstay of the New York creative-jazz community, had by then replaced Dresser.
The String Group’s third and last Soul Note album, Convergence, reached the market in 1999 and matched or arguably exceeded the breadth and caliber of its two predecessors; the set featured arrangements of music by Weill, Messiaen, Bob Dorough, and traditional Burmese sources, a tribute to Tony Williams, and dedications to victims of violence in Mexico and the Middle East during the First Gulf War. By this point the release constituted Douglas’s twelfth album as a leader overall; in the intervening years he had issued another Tiny Bell Trio recording, Live in Europe, and another sextet date, Stargazer (a homage to Wayne Shorter), both on Arabesque in 1997, plus the 1997 octet project Sanctuary on Avant and two 1998 releases—the Joni Mitchell homage Moving Portrait on DIW and the debut of his Charms of the Night Sky quartet on Winter & Winter, which again featured Feldman.
Douglas had already claimed the 1998 DownBeat Critics Poll honors for both Jazz Artist of the Year and Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, positioning him for broader recognition. RCA signed him and issued the sextet album Soul on Soul, dedicated to pianist Mary Lou Williams, in 2000; that recording earned the DownBeat Jazz Album of the Year award. Although the String Group and Tiny Bell Trio projects had concluded, Douglas continued to helm numerous distinguished ensembles, producing seven albums for RCA through the mid-2000s and many more thereafter on his own Greenleaf Music imprint. In 2012, after acquiring the Black Saint/Soul Note catalog, CAM Jazz compiled the six-CD box set The Complete Remastered Recordings on Black Saint & Soul Note, which contained Parallel Worlds, Five, and Convergence. Recognizing Douglas’s prominence, the label also retrieved three additional 1990s sideman sessions—Mark Dresser’s Force Green (1994), Rova’s rendering of John Coltrane’s Ascension (1995), and John Lindberg’s Bounce (1998)—and added them to the package. These discs stand as strong statements by their respective leaders and offer valuable documentation of Douglas’s trumpet work from the period, even though his own Soul Note output was limited to the three singular String Group albums.
Albums