Jazz breaking news: Royal Academy of Music Appoints Dave Douglas As Its International Jazz Artist

The appointment runs through the academic year of 2011/12 and begins with a week in January followed later in the month by a public masterclass on 25 January and a concert on 26 January with the Academy Big Band both in the conservatoire’s Duke's Hall.

The appointment follows that of Django Bates, announced as visiting professor of jazz last year, which was immediately preceded by the appointment of trumpeter Nick Smart as head of jazz programmes, succeeding Gerard Presencer.

Commenting on the appointment of Douglas, whose Songs For Wandering Souls won Jazzwise album of the year in 1999, and whose key albums include Sanctuary, Charms of The Night Sky, The Infinite, Freak In, Keystone and the 2007 live album Moonshine, Nick Smart, says in a statement: “It is a tremendous privilege to have Dave Douglas take on this role. For nearly 20 years he has been, and continues to be a major influence and inspiration to musicians around the world, not only with his music, but also his visionary approach to his many projects, his portfolio career, various festivals and music distribution.”

Douglas, 48, who grew up in New York, and studied at Berklee, the New England Conservatory, and NYU began his distinguished career touring with the great Horace Silver, and aside from Douglas’ own award winning work as a bandleader and recording artist runs the New York trumpet festival FONT, his own label Greenleaf, and is a member of Masada.

FONT, the festival of new trumpet music which Douglas co-founded with Roy Campbell Jr in 2003, later this month celebrates Kenny Wheeler with concerts at the Jazz Standard.

The Royal Academy of Music this year also launched the inaugural Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize and its winner Josh Arcoleo releases his first album in early-2012.

A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005, Dave Douglas' bands include his long standing quintet, the electronic sextet Keystone, mixed chamber ensemble Nomad and the brass quintet Brass Ecstasy. He is also the artistic director of the workshop in jazz and creative music at the Banff Center in Canada.

Dave Douglas regularly performs in the UK and at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in 2009, for instance, played a new piece called ‘Campaign Trail’ during his concert at the Everyman Theatre in a well-received set, written the previous year during the US presidential race which he told the audience, as Jazzwise reported at the time, initially was to have finished in a minor key but now finishes in a major one.

In 2006 his composition 'Blue Latitudes' based on a book about Captain Cook’s pioneering expeditionary voyages in the eighteenth century was performed at the Birmingham Conservatoire with bassist Mark Dresser, percussionist Susie Ibarra and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with the classical musicians charged by Douglas to partly improvise and where he held open rehearsals of his work-in-progress. He told Jazzwise’s Alyn Shipton at the time, and it's indicative of his approach overall: “I’m experimenting with a compositional language that’s trying to integrate contemporary classical music with jazz and improvised music. That’s not an easy thing to do, either, given that the majority of my writing experience has been for small improvising ensembles of players whom I know well.”

– Stephen Graham