E-Mail This Article to a Friend The future is now Dave Douglas progresses, Gary LeMel looks back BY JON GARELICK

Over the past couple of years, I’d begun to wonder whether my enchantment with Dave Douglas wasn’t coming to an end. When he emerged on the scene, after a stint with hard-bop god Horace Silver, he had it all: a great, idiosyncratic technique capable of a wide range of effects like slurs, shakes, and squeezed notes; a brilliant upper register; conversational phrasing that employed all these devices; and a compositional logic in his solos. As a writer, he was everywhere, absorbing Balkan and Burmese folk musics, hard bop, Mary Lou Williams, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Olivier Messiaen, Kurt Weill, Robert Schumann, and, eventually, electronica into a coherent personal vision. His music was often accompanied — in titles and liner notes — with an explicitly political subtext.

But I’d become weary of his recordings. A half-dozen albums have emerged on RCA/BMG since he began his association with that major label in 2000, all bristling with ideas, brilliant playing, new concepts. But Douglas’s wayward forms were demanding, and I began to yearn for the simple pleasures of soloists blowing improvisations over concise patterns I could get my mind around — 32-bar song forms, 12-bar blues, one-chord Coltrane vamps, the now-disparaged head-solos-head arrangements of conventional jazz performance. I missed the hooks that, say, a smart meat-and-potatoes jazz composer like drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts provides in his solo albums. If Douglas was so interested in form per se, and in micro-managed orchestrations, maybe he needed to chuck jazz altogether and move on to writing string quartets and large pieces for orchestra.

The performance by Douglas and his "New Quintet" a week ago last Wednesday at the Regattabar was not only reassuring but revelatory, not merely for the performances themselves but because they opened up the pieces on his new Strange Liberation (Bluebird/Arista). He also demonstrated once again that there’s more than one way to create a hook.

The quintet first recorded on 2002’s The Infinite, and it harks back to the Miles Davis of the mid to late ’60s with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Douglas combines the writing style of that line-up (whether Shorter’s originals or Davis’s arrangements of "covers" like Eddie Henderson’s "Freedom Jazz Dance" and Jimmy Heath’s "Gingerbread Boy"), with its odd phrase lengths, with a loose ensemble sound. With the addition of Fender Rhodes electric piano and the occasional funk backbeat, The Infinite at times bore an uncanny resemblance to Davis’s "jazz-rock" Filles de Kilimanjaro, from 1969.

Strange Liberation augments the quartet with guitarist Bill Frisell for a more impressionistic version of the guitar rock that John McLaughlin brought to Davis’s electrified band. But Douglas’s writing is more detailed, his forms more complicated than those of the Davis’s. There are themes and secondary themes, passages where a soloist has the choice of playing chord changes or playing "free." At the Regattabar, the band — Uri Caine on Fender Rhodes, tenor-saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist James Genus, and drummer Clarence Penn — stretched out the pieces from Strange Liberation. On record, "A Single Sky" is two minutes long, "Passing Through" a minute and a half. In concert, each pushed the 15-minute mark.

In lesser bands, with lesser material, that can mean a lot of indulgent soloing. But this was a case of superb players digging into challenging material. They varied dreamy out-of-tempo ensemble passages with skittering unison themes punctuated by odd stops, à la "Freedom Jazz Dance" and "Gingerbread Boy." There were passages of extended counterpoint between Douglas and Potter, as on Douglas’s lovely, medium-slow-tempo, "Blue Monk"–inspired "Skeeter-ism." In pieces like this, Douglas and Potter would trade roles, one paraphrasing the theme while the other wove counterlines around it. In his spare Fender Rhodes accompaniment, Caine outlined the form without overspecifying harmonies. Genus and Penn, meanwhile, created a Carter-Williams-like push-pull with the beat, a pulse capable of exploding in rolls and crashes under Potter’s Trane-ish warp-speed excursions or settling into a hard walking four for a Caine piano solo.

It was exciting to watch the band eat up Douglas’s forms, and the extended solos actually made those forms easier to hear. In the new, tentatively titled "The Sheik of Things To Come" ("sheik" pronounced like "shake"), they jacked up the intensity on every chorus, the crowd cheering the head every time it came around, and Penn, on one series of breaks, sending a drum stick flying off his red plastic cowbell. On "Seventeen," from Strange Liberation, a four-note bass vamp alternated with walking-four chord progressions, and the band worked that vamp obsessively. Potter in particular came through the vamp and stop-time head and into the straight fours like a Formula One driver changing gears through the "S" curve and then accelerating on the straightaway. By the time he got to the four-note vamp on the last chorus of his solo, he was honkin’ and screaming, alternating gutbucket riffs between his altissimo and his bottom registers.

It was also exciting to hear a club audience this audibly engaged from before the first note was even played, and shouting at all the right moments. Douglas responded in kind, and when, in the middle of his bravura a cappella introduction to one piece, someone fussed with a piece of plastic wrapping at a table down front, he took the trumpet from his mouth for a moment and, as if savoring the noise, said, "That’s nice," and moved on — not angry, just "in the moment," as actors and improvisers like to say.

IF DOUGLAS is in and of the moment, vocalist Gary LeMel is part of a time warp that seems to have encompassed his whole career. Now in his 60s, LeMel began as a jazz-and-pop singer inspired by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. In 1959, at the age of 21, he was touring with jazz great Anita O’Day. In 1964, he released The Gary LeMel Album on the independent Vee-Jay label. Vee-Jay, you’ll recall, also released a little number that year called "Please Please Me" by a British band called the Beatles.

For those who think the British Invasion’s effect on jazz has been overstated, Gary LeMel is here to tell you. "The Beatles came along and took everyone’s career like mine and threw it out the window," he says over the phone from New York, where the Californian is in town on business. "And they really did. It was like overnight. We were over and these guys were taking over. And even though the jazz players were all saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, it will only last a couple of months,’ I knew."

LeMel, after all, was only a few years older than the Beatles himself. With a young family to support, he realized that a career change was in order. "The good news was that the entire industry — very much like it is now — was affected. And you had these older guys running the companies who were scared to death, because they didn’t understand the Beatles and what was coming with the Rolling Stones — they didn’t have a clue. And they were looking for younger people. So I looked the part."

LeMel got a job with "this old man who ran a publishing company. He asked me to come over, and he said, ‘Maybe you can just help me if you hear a songwriter you think makes it for this kind of music.’ " So LeMel was in the music-publishing business, and that led to jobs with record labels, which in turn led to supervising movie music. His work on the mega-hit Barbara Streisand soundtrack of A Star Is Born brought him to Columbia Pictures and then Warner Bros., working with films like Ghostbusters, The Big Chill, St. Elmo’s Fire, The Bodyguard, Singles, Space Jam, and The Matrix.

These days, as a Warner Bros. senior executive, he’s responsible for all the music in the company’s films — original scores, songs, soundtrack albums. He works with directors to choose music. "It’s a very diplomatic job, because there’s not one director on the face of the earth who doesn’t have some ideas about music when he comes in. And sometimes the ideas are not good. Or in our opinion, they’re not good. And we know we’re going to have to live with this guy for a year and a half."

Early on, working with the notoriously difficult Streisand, LeMel learned, "It’s not true that if you tell an artist the truth, they’ll love you for it. Ninety-nine percent of artists don’t want to hear that."

Of course, there are some gigs where he describes himself as simply a facilitator — for instance, in his work with director Christopher Guest and the makers of A Mighty Wind, whose "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" is up for a Best Song Oscar this Sunday. "Those guys are so talented, they don’t need anyone’s help. I was on the set a lot, but as a fan. Then it became a matter of who can we make the best record deal with — strictly administrative stuff." The same was true with Martin Scorsese on GoodFellas. "I would get him a 45 of a Vic Damone song that he asked for, and then he’d look at it and say, ‘No, no, that’s a white label. It was the yellow label that was happening in Brooklyn.’ "

In recent years, LeMel has returned to his own music, beginning with Romancing the Screen for Capitol in 1994 and continuing with albums for Atlantic and Concord Jazz. Drawn from his previous albums, his latest, The Best of Times, shows him in extraordinary jazz company, with players like Steve Khan, Elvin Jones, Billy Childs, Roger Kellaway, and Lew Soloff. His still-boyish speaking voice transfers to an attractive light baritone when he sings. On The Best of Times, he’s chosen excellent material from the Great American Songbook as well as the lesser-known Sondheim "I Remember." He has classic phrasing — swing that highlights the words and their meaning — and a touch of Bennett-like vulnerability when he hits certain pitches.

So who does he like for the music Oscars? For Best Score, "I’d bet on Howard Shore [The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King]. He did a brilliant job, and he’s been winning everything leading up to it." If A Mighty Wind doesn’t win Best Song, LeMel says he’s going for "Belleville Rendezvous" from Les triplettes de Belleville. "I love that! It’s not going to win — too small. But the song is so integral to the film."