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Dave Douglas is a prolific trumpeter, composer, educator and entrepreneur from New York City known for the stylistic breadth of his work and for keeping a diverse set of ensembles and projects active simultaneously.
His unique contributions to improvised music have garnered distinguished recognition, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland award, and two GRAMMY® nominations. While his career spans more than 40 recordings as a leader, his active projects include his Quintet; Sound Prints, a quintet co-led with saxophonist Joe Lovano; Riverside, a quartet co-led with Chet Doxas; a duo with pianist Uri Caine; and, debuting in 2015, High Risk, an electronic music-influenced quartet with Mark Guiliana, Jonathan Maron and Shigeto.
Two 2015 projects demonstrate his virtuosity as well as his penchant for wide ranging explorations of new genres and creatively enriching partnerships with other musicians. High Risk, released June 2015, is a collaboration with electronic music artist Shigeto, backed by Jonathan Maron on bass and Mark Guiliana on drums. According to Seth Colter Walls in Pitchfork: “Simultaneously chill and surprising, it’s the sound of a group discovering a valid language, and then proceeding to push the limits of that new aesthetic.” Sound Prints: Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival captures the Wayne Shorter-inspired collaboration between Douglas and Lovano. Martin Johnson of the Wall Street Journal calls the music “diverse, abstract and yet highly accessible” while Fred Kaplan wrote in Stereophile: “They’re among the most vibrant, dizzying jazz bands around. Douglas and Lovano bounce off each other with an energy and virtuosity I’ve rarely seen either sustain in other settings (and that’s saying a lot).”
Douglas introduced his new quintet with a debut recording, Be Still, in September 2012. Featuring singer Aoife O’Donovan, Be Still marked the first time Douglas featured a vocalist on a recording. The album received critical praise, with the New York Times heralding it as “gorgeous and contemplative” and Fred Kaplan in Stereophile proclaiming it “one of the best-sounding new recordings that I’ve heard by anybody in quite a while.” The follow-up recording, Time Travel, was released in April 2013. In it, Troy Collins for AllAboutJazz.com wrote: “the quintet soars…Unconstrained by thematic concerns, Douglas demonstrates his all-encompassing aesthetic, revealing a broad capacity for expressionism.” Together with a sextet album called Pathways, Be Still and Time Travel were packaged with a DVD of studio performances and music videos as well as unreleased tracks and outtakes and released as part of a commemorative 50th Birthday Recordings box set in September 2013.
Since 2005, Douglas has operated his own record label, Greenleaf Music, releasing his own recordings as well as albums by other artists in the jazz idiom. Through his artist-friendly approach and innovative practices, he continues to prove himself a pioneer among artist-run labels.
Douglas has held several posts as an educator and continues to be very active as a director and programmer. He has been named the Artistic Director for the 2016 season of the Bergamo Jazz Festival, which occurs every year in March. Starting in 2012, Douglas was engaged for two years as International Jazz Artist in Residence at the Royal Academy of Music in London and launched his own Jazz Workshop, dedicated to enriching the musical experiences of younger players. From 2002 to 2012, he served as artistic director of the Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music at The Banff Centre in Canada. He is a co-founder and director of the Festival of New Trumpet Music, which was founded in 2002 to support new music by a diverse community of trumpet and brass players. He also co-hosts, with Michael Bates, a podcast called Noise From the Deep which was named the top jazz podcast by the JazzTimes critics poll in 2014.