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Genre:
Jazz
Release Date: 01/27/2004
On
Strange Liberation -- a play on a phrase of
Martin Luther King's; he once said that the Vietnamese must have seen Americans as "strange liberators" -- trumpeter and composer
Dave Douglas expands his quintet to realize a long-held ambition: to have guitarist
Bill Frisell in the ranks of his group.
Douglas has once again stepped back from the precipice of his intense gaze at the musical landscape of American culture and turned his focus directly and intensely toward
jazz for this set. Along with
Frisell, pianist
Uri Caine, saxophonist
Chris Potter, bassist
James Genus, and drummer
Clarence Penn join
Douglas for an electric
jazz outing that falls far outside the purview of "
fusion."
Douglas has obviously composed these works with
Frisell in mind, and this is his most saturated
jazz date in some time. His playing here is front-line and full of his trademark counterpoint and atmospheric fills, as
Douglas engages both the pastoral nature and the complexity of his harmonic view, making
Caine a conflating bridge between the horns, guitar, and rhythm section. The album starts with a sparse melodic figure that borders on
modalism in
"A Single Sky," Frisell's microphonics holding the edges of the piece in check as
Douglas and
Potter weave through
Caine's beautiful chord voicings in a minor progression. The title track uses a
blues framework that allows
Caine to play a skeletal
funk vamp on his Rhodes in order to bring
Douglas and
Potter into the fore as
Frisell paints the backdrop deep blue until it's his turn to solo. There are silences in the margins and they are used as an
improvisational device, imposing themselves from outside on the players.
"Frisell's Dream" and
"Mountains from the Train" could have been on one of
Frisell's own recordings. The latter is a mellow, pastoral soundscape with guitars played backwards and forwards and harmonics floating freely in the solo spaces that surround the melody -- a languid and unhurried line full of color, space, and texture played by the horns.
Frisell's melodicism is played inversely here, and
Caine fills in the dots. On
"Frisell's Dream," an elegant
jazz classicism is evoked in the head where
blues,
swing, and
Aaron Copland's wit are on display in a knotty little melodic figure that gives way to an open-chorded
Americana that is now
Frisell's signature. And on
"The Jones," the funky mischief of
Thelonious Monk is touched upon in the melody as
Caine muscles up the middle and punches through
Douglas' lines as
Penn's rim shots accent the edges of the time signature.
Potter too climbs aboard the melody and
Frisell once again becomes the guitarist as impressionist painter before
Caine deftly wraps a knockout heavily arpeggiated solo through the entire proceeding and changes the pace.
Strange Liberation is a laid-back record in terms of its dynamics, but in its imagination and depth it is one of the high marks of
Douglas' thus far prolific career. Compositionally it is head and shoulders above most of the stuff out there, and in terms of the taste in its performance and elocution it is virtually untouchable.
~Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
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