Dave Douglas Gifts Trio
Place and date: Conservatori del Liceu (31/X/2023)
Score: ***
The 55th Barcelona Jazz Festival had the pleasure of bringing an absolute premiere, which, as its main protagonist, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, said, we were the first to see perform. This is his new Gifts Trio in which he gives the alternative to two young musicians, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. Both have become famous in the alternative scene as members of the trio Son Lux, with a consistent discography in which they experiment with post-rock and electronics, in addition to making soundtracks.
With this background they have adapted perfectly to the proposal of the veteran and prolific Dave Douglas, a sixty-year-old trumpeter and composer accustomed to drinking from sources other than those of jazz without ever giving up his essence. He is also busy leading and collaborating in very diverse groups, such as John Zorn's Masada group with which he has achieved great international projection.
On this occasion, as he explained, he has been inspired by the legendary Billy Strayhorn, composer and pianist who was Duke Ellington's right-hand man, seen from the perspective of saxophonist Charles Lloyd. Thus, in the concert they played “Take the 'A' train” and sketches of other standard melodies, but taking the original swing towards an abstraction in which Rafiq Bhatia played a decisive role, using his guitar in a conventional, distorted and also synthetic way. , taking advantage at the same time to record certain parts and convert them into ambient loops. On other occasions, using the lower strings and the pedals, he created an effect full of groove, perfect for letting a trumpet expand, drawing on the sources of jazz and at the same time stringing together brief solos full of imagination, playing with the effect of playing. at various distances from the microphone and occasionally resorting to the mute.
The teacher drew the main coordinates of the melody and then let some outstanding students show off their skills, especially the drummer, marking the rhythm sometimes in a syncopated way and other times much more descriptive, using brushes or strings of bells. The concert was short since it barely lasted an hour, but luckily they gave an encore in the same vein; a swing that went from the melodic to the deconstruction, from the channeled to the temperamental, leaving room for instrumental soliloquies and that successful symbiosis between patterned swing, typical of a big band, and free improvisation.
