Dave Douglas & Joe Lovano: Sound Prints 
The Village Vanguard 
Through Sunday, September 1, 2024

Dave Douglas
‘Gifts’
Greenleaf Music

About 50 minutes into the opening set of the week at the Village Vanguard, trumpeter Dave Douglas announced to the crowd that this quintet, Sound Prints, was originally formed by himself and co-leader, tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, as “an homage to Wayne Shorter — the inspiration, the music, the philosophy, and the life — and we still feel that way.” 

Sound Prints, which has been together since 2013, was in the vanguard, in more than one sense of the word. Ever since Shorter’s death in March 2023 — by coincidence the quintet happened to be playing the Vanguard that very week — it now seems like everybody is paying homage to Shorter.

In addition to the ongoing inspiration of the Shorter canon, though, there are two other composers — icons who have recently played a large role in the ongoing creative journey of Mr. Douglas. Coincidentally, they’re both connected to books of the author David Hajdu. In 1996, Mr. Hajdu gave us one of the great jazz biographies, “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” — I was pleased to review it for the New York Times back in those pre-New York Sun days. 

Mr. Douglas, a gifted and prolific composer, generally plays his own originals and those of his collaborators — nearly all of Tuesday’s early set was by Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lovano. He has also spent time exploring the works of significant earlier composers, though. Two of my favorites are his 2000 album “Soul on Soul,” inspired by Mary Lou Williams, and “Blue Nile,” inspired by Randy Weston — the latter is represented by videos on YouTube rather than a traditional album. Other Douglas projects cite the idioms of Joni Mitchell and even Fatty Arbuckle as their point of departure.

His new album, “Gifts,” featuring saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang, includes four tunes by Strayhorn, surrounded by the collective’s originals. There are playfully post-modern interpretations of “Take the A Train” and “Rain Check” but also an anguished reading of the composer’s end-of-life contemplation “Blood Count.” He finishes this mini album-within-an album with a decidedly non-dreamy, high-energy take on “Day Dream,” rendered mostly as a duet with Mr. Chang.

At the Vanguard, Mr. Douglas climaxed the opening set with a piece inspired by another work of Mr. Hajdu, the author’s 2020 highly-entertaining satirical novel, “Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction.” As the trumpeter told the house, “We have a whole new passel of music that we’re playing for you. And it’s kind of a special dedication from me, it’s music that I found.” 

Mr. Douglas explained that “one of his books is about a musician named Adrianne Geffel,” a fictional character, “who was here in these streets in the ‘80s and ‘90s.” He continued, “she played a lot of music but left scant little information. Anyway, some transcriptions of her work have been discovered. So this music is called ‘Geffel,’ and it was pieced together from fragments of her work.” 

Up to then, it had been a typically high-caliber set by Sound Prints, the current rhythm section being pianist Lawrence Fields, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Rudy Royston. The mostly new and original works by the two leaders began with an ambitious, two-part composition by Mr. Lovano, “On The Rise.” 

Mr. Lovano also offered “On Pebble Street,” from the band’s second album, the 2017 “Scandal.” This was a modal-sounding piece that featured the composer on one of the most unusual horns ever constructed, a G mezzo soprano saxophone, which has a different sound from the customary soprano sax pitched in B-flat.

Most of the tunes played at the Vanguard also suggested a bridge between the canon of Shorter and that of Ornette Coleman: a music that suggests the most far-out and free-form playing of Shorter and, at the same time, the most traditional but still anything-but-conventional works of Coleman. “Geffel” however was its own piece entirely. It started almost like a parody — or an ironic take — on so-called “avant-garde” jazz, in which all five musicians played chaotic but highly rhythmic splotches of melody. 

At times, the soloists were playing off the line, in the classic Coleman “Free Jazz” tradition, at times they were playing from chords or scales. There were some glorious ensemble passages and other moments that suggested Jackson Pollock translated in audio terms in sections that were designed to seem completely random. It’s an entirely worthwhile, ten-minute work that I hope Sound Prints will include in their next album.

Sound Prints ended with Mr. Douglas’s “Life on Earth,” from their 2020 “Other Worlds,” one of the group’s most mainstream-styled boppish numbers, a piece that would have been at home on any of Shorter’s classic mid-1960s Blue Note albums. The live performance was more raw and aggressive, a hard-driving rendition that brought the crowd to its feet. 

To me, Mr. Douglas’s trumpet has a distinctive, bright tone, no matter even when he’s playing “inside,” or relatively traditional material. Conversely, Mr. Lovano’s lineage represents the warm side of the tenor, closer to Ben Webster and Stan Getz rather than the more aggressive saxes of the 1960s; even when the music he’s playing is angular and angry, Mr. Lovano, to me at least, always plays with a certain sweetness. Together they make a great team, whether the inspiration is Shorter,  Strayhorn — or even Adrianne Geffel.