Other Worlds (Greenleaf Music)
Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas’ Sound Prints
Released May 7, 2021
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
Arts Fuse 2021 Jazz Critics Poll Top 30 New Album
YouTube:
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About:
Saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave
Douglas debuted their extraordinary Sound Prints quintet on Blue Note Records
in 2013, the year of Wayne Shorter’s 80th birthday, and from the outset the
group had a joyful but somewhat imposing mandate: to lift up Shorter’s legacy
through the writing and performance of new music conceived in his risk-taking,
fearlessly inventive spirit. Supported by a powerful multi-generational lineup
of pianist Lawrence Fields, bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Joey Baron,
the group debuted with Sound Prints: Live at Monterey Jazz Festival, which
included world-premiere performances of two brand-new Shorter pieces.
Scandal, the group’s 2018 follow-up on Greenleaf Music, featured the same
personnel on a new book of Lovano and Douglas originals as well as fresh
arrangements of “JuJu” and “Fee Fi Fo Fum,” two Blue Note-era Shorter classics.
With Other Worlds, recorded just days after a triumphant weeklong run at the
Village Vanguard in January 2020, the Sound Prints quintet achieves another
first, a full album of original compositions. But while no Shorter tunes
appear, Shorter’s far-sighted philosophic vision of modern jazz animates these
great players in every measure. “Wayne inspires us to think about our place in
the universe,” Douglas maintains. “You can’t divorce that from the music.”
Almost every track on Other Worlds is a first take, thanks in no small part to
the bandstand chemistry that Sound Prints achieved in set after set at the
Vanguard. “Everybody brought their own self but also their Sound Prints self,”
Douglas says. “We played a different set list every night, every set, because
the order you play things in has a big influence on how they develop. So each
night, different tunes would bump up against different tunes. We really figured
out the dynamics of the whole thing, and by the time we got to the studio, we
knew.”
“The way Dave and I set up together,” adds Lovano, “the way we’d play the
themes and improvise together and trade, we were right there next to each
other, so we were feeling what each other was playing. Dave and Joey and I have
a deep history playing together: I go back to the ’70s with Joey, and the ’80s
with Dave.”
Douglas adds: “Joey was on all my sextet records, and then of course he and I
were in John Zorn’s Masada for many years together.” Oh, who came onto Douglas’
radar as a student at Banff, has logged many hours in Douglas ’ quintet (not to
mention Pat Metheny, Kenny Barron, Fabian Almazan and Vijay Iyer, among many
others). Lovano encountered Fields as a student at Berklee; he’s since done
high-profile work with Nicholas Payton, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, Jeff
“Tain” Watts and more.
“The whole concept of the band is dialogue and interaction,” Douglas notes.
“And when you play that way, nobody can retreat into the role of their
instrument. Everybody’s playing everything, all the time. Some pieces don’t
have any chords, others have a lot of chords, and so you look for the piano to
provide a balance so it’s not all one thing or the other. Both the free context
and the chordal context have the same level of dialogue and conversation.
Something new with this book is that we’re writing specifically for that
chemistry, whereas in the beginning we were sort of imagining it, letting it
unfold.”
Lovano’s “Space Exploration,” “Shooting Stars” and “The Flight” together make
up the “Other Worlds Suite,” which appears noncontiguously (much like it might
have at the Vanguard). “Those three pieces came together as a sequence of
events,” Lovano explains, “and everyone captured the essence of that idea. The
quintet is on a voyage together, and so the title ‘Space Exploration’ is about
the music too, it’s about this certain way of playing together, not just
writing a theme and playing on it, but a flow of ideas.”
It was “Sky Miles,” the first of Lovano’s pieces, that set the album’s space
theme in motion, and Douglas was easily able to connect that to his recent
interest in the study of antiquity. “I was doing a lot of reading about the
period 2500-3000 years ago,” he says, “thinking about Pythagoras and the growth
of science. Antiquity can be directly connected to the continuing movement of
humanity through countless discoveries, and the cultural growth as we all
discover each other around the globe and figure out how to work together and
live together.”
In a brief liner note to the band’s 2013 debut, there appears a verse from Sir
Alfred Lord Tennyson that begins, “… come, my friends, / ’tis not too late to
seek a newer world.” These lines ring all too true today, as music and the arts
begin what is sure to be a long recovery process. “The music is moving forward
whether we choose to jump on the train or not,” Douglas avers. “We’re
incredibly lucky that we recorded Other Worlds when we did — we had talked
about doing it later. But one thing led to another and there was no reason to
wait. We went right on into it and I’m so glad we did.”
Track Listing:
1. Space Exploration (Joe Lovano) 09:59
2. Shooting Stars (Joe Lovano) 01:04
3. Life on Earth (Dave Douglas) 07:34
4. Manitou (Dave Douglas) 05:59
5. Antiquity to Outer Space (Dave Douglas) 07:44
6. The Flight (Joe Lovano) 08:31
7. The Transcendentalists (Dave Douglas) 05:42
8. Sky Miles (Joe Lovano) 07:32
9. Pythagoras (Dave Douglas) 08:23
10. Midnight March (Joe Lovano) 07:25
Personnel:
Joe Lovano: tenor saxophone
Dave Douglas: trumpet
Linda May Han Oh: bass
Lawrence Fields: piano
Joey Baron: drums
Recorded
January 31, 2020, at Bunker Studios, Brooklyn, NY, by Tyler McDiarmid and Geoff
Countryman
Assisted by Todd Carder
Mixed and Mastered by Tyler McDiarmid
Musician photos by Geoff Countryman
Artwork by Dave Chisholm
Layout by Lukas Frei
Produced
by Joe Lovano & Dave Douglas
Executive Producer: Dave Douglas
Review:
Wayne Shorter continues to glimmer as the lodestar for Sound Prints, a superb combo that excels at trumpeting its honoree’s expansive artistry without losing its own identity. That’s largely because the copilots of Sound Prints — saxophonist Joe Lovano and trumpeter Dave Douglas — have already cultivated their own respective voices, in terms of improvisation and composing. Bassist Linda May Han Oh, pianist Lawrence Fields and drummer Joey Baron bring the idiomatic knowledge and the improvisational wit required to interact with Lovano and Douglas and make the music leap off the sheet. Unlike Sound Prints’ previous two albums, the new recording showcases all originals. Still, Shorter’s musical DNA is noticeable throughout, especially in the album’s stargazing theme, in its philosophical undertow and in the mutable dialogue and spatial awareness conveyed by the quintet. Douglas’ undulating “Pythagoras” sounds as if it could have been included in Shorter’s orchestral Emanon, while still taking full advantage of the trumpeter’s oblique phrasing and Lovano’s flowering passages. Douglas also contributes the luxuriant “The Transcendentalists,” on which he and Lovano issue a beautiful unison melody atop levitating rhythmic momentum. Other Worlds opens with “Space Exploration,” “Shooting Stars” and “Life On Earth,” a suite composed by Lovano that emphasizes the telepathic push-pull that marked both Shorter’s longstanding acoustic quartet and Miles Davis’ mid-’60s quintet. Sound Prints, however, engages in an open, improvisational freefall toward the end of “Space Exploration,” then gradually issues fragmented melodic pieces on “Shooting Stars,” embarking on a loose excursion that differs from Davis’ or Shorter’s flights of fancy. Things coalesce brilliantly on the driving “Life On Earth,” on which Fields delivers his most wondrous improvisational moment on the disc. Other highlights includes Douglas’ “Antiquity To Outer Space,” featuring some splendid arco bass from Oh, and Lovano’s suspenseful “Midnight March,” which finds the connective tissue between Shorter and Ornette Coleman. Indeed, Other Worlds simultaneously applauds Shorter’s legacy and cultivates one of its own.
John Murph (DownBeat)
