Dave Douglas - The Silver Silence
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Trumpeter Dave Douglas has taken the film legacy of silent movie star Fatty Arbuckle whose career was ruined when he was accused, then later acquitted, of the rape of an aspiring actress at a party he threw at a San Francisco hotel in 1921, as the inspiration for his new live album Moonshine. The native New Yorker talks to Stuart Nicholson about the search for Fatty, the process of gaining inspiration to write for film and how he’s pushing recording industry boundaries by recording at a club and then releasing the music for download the next day.
We’re all looking for a way forward in jazz,” says trumpeter Dave Douglas. “There are as many different paths as there are musicians.” He’s talking about his latest album Moonshine with his Grammy-nominated band Keystone. On it, he moves further into the electronica, funk and jazz territory he opened up on 2005’s Keystone.
Using the sound of 1960s electric Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters as a jumping-off point into the future, it prompted The Chicago Tribune to praise him as “an original thinker blessed with a seemingly bottomless well of intriguing ideas.”
Recorded for broadcast last year at Mermaid Arts during the Bray Festival in county Wicklow by festival partners RTE LyricFM, Douglas and his Keystone project were in peak form after more than a month of European dates. Securing the recordings of the concert, he took them into the studio to touch up. “We did quite a bit of post-production,” he explains. “The Mermaid had a sound that was kind of like a recording studio, so you don’t hear the audience, it sounds like a studio album and I consider it a studio release.”
A key figure on the album is DJ Olive on laptop and turntables, who along with saxophonist Marcus Strickland, Adam Benjamin on Fender Rhodes, bassist Brad Jones, drummer Gene Lake and the leader’s trumpet create constantly shifting moods and textures on tracks such as ‘Dog Star’, ‘Flood Plain’ and ‘Tough’. Here, powerful improvisations emerge from the minimalistic themes and are played out against a sonic backdrop coloured by fragments of electronic sounds, rhythms and samples swimming through the music. “One of the big things for me is the interaction with technology,” continues Douglas.
“I felt there were people around me doing interesting work in that regard and I wanted a way to bring it in to make some exciting music that you could still call jazz where you had the spontaneity and the improvisation, but where you could also in a very real sense use the available technology that is very difficult to blend with live players.
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