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DAVE DOUGLAS
WITNESSING WITNESS


The musical impressions left by Dave Douglas’s recent Witness (RCA) are of its wealth of orchestral color, its enhanced atmospherics, and its long, melancholy, sometimes agitated melodic lines. For the album, Douglas employed a variety of strings, brass, and reeds, vibes and marimba, electronics, and even Tom Waits kicking in some semi-audible recitation. And, yes, the CD also comes attached with a political agenda, from its title to Douglas’s liner notes, in which he explains that these original compositions were dedicated to particular figures of social protest from the worlds of politics and literature.

At the ICA a week ago Wednesday, Douglas brought in a reduced version of the Witness ensemble — his own trumpet along with Chris Potter’s tenor sax and bass clarinet, Craig Taborn’s electric piano, Brad Jones’s bass, Ikue Mori’s electric percussion, and Michael Sarin’s drums (originally scheduled second pianist Jamie Saft did not appear because of a death in the family). The result, in the second of the evening’s two sets, was atmospherically rich, with plenty of free-tempo impressionistic passages, but there was also a lot more forward drive in the form of good ol’ eighth-note swing. The contours of Douglas’s writerly designs on Witness were apparent, but so was rhythmic explosiveness.

The band started with the album’s title cut, the proceedings coalescing from a mist of gongs and chimes and loops, tinkling celesta, and gargling backwards tape into the stately, vaguely Middle Eastern theme delivered by Douglas’s trumpet with counter-lines from Potter’s bass clarinet. An ostinato bass figure and the tock of Sarin’s drums grounded the ensemble in straight time, Douglas firing off boppish runs over a fast tempo, Taborn backing him with syncopated Fender Rhodes chording.

Taborn’s playing was both free and funky. He worked up spectacular heat in his extended features with the rest of the rhythm section (in which Sarin was a continuous marvel). Potter, after making brief accompanying statements on bass clarinet, finally got to fly with a tenor solo that began with slow deliberation in the lower register before building to a high-pitched shouting climax. Douglas’s extended blowing offered fast-tempo runs punctuated and propelled by strategic silences, low-end growls, and half-valved smears. The music was unbroken except for a short band introduction by Douglas and a statement of the project’s political intent. Or, as he says in his liner notes, "Enjoy this purely as music. Or find out more about these inspirations and dig into them."

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: January 31 - February 7, 2002
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