Dave Douglas :: projects :: El Trilogy
Dave Douglas' music comes out of the American jazz tradition, drawing on his background and education as a trumpeter, composer, and improviser in the jazz language. The music he has developed over the last ten years, however, includes a much broader range of sounds, welcoming such elements as folk musics, contemporary music, free improvisation, popular music, and electronics into the basic vocabulary of jazz. Indeed, Dave considers his primary influences in music to be John Coltrane, Igor Stravinsky, and Stevie Wonder.
With fifteen recordings documenting this approach, Dave is on the forefront of a new movement which rejects easy categorizations of the music and attempts to warmly embrace all of our musical traditions on an equal and honest level. The synthesis of musics in his scores for Trisha Brown engage these issues on many levels while retaining the freshness and spontaneity of America's great jazz composers and improvisers.
Discussions on jazz improvisation, structure, and strategy with Trisha Brown deeply influenced the creation of the Trilogy. The potential for overlap between the two art forms is a particularly exciting result of this collaboration.