Dave Douglas

Dave Douglas (born March 24, 1963) is an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator.

His career includes more than fifty recordings as a leader and more than 500 published compositions.

His ensembles include the Dave Douglas Quintet; Sound Prints, a quintet co-led with saxophonist Joe Lovano; Uplift, a sextet with bassist Bill Laswell; Present Joys with pianist Uri Caine and Andrew Cyrille; High Risk, an electronic ensemble with Shigeto, Jonathan Aaron, and Ian Chang; and Engage, a sextet with Jeff Parker, Tomeka Reid, Anna Webber, Nick Dunston, and Kate Gentile.

He has won a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland award, and received Grammy Award nominations.

In the late 1980s, Douglas began playing with bands led by Don Byron, Tim Berne, Marty Ehrlich, Walter Thompson, and others in New York.

He played in the composer collectives Mosaic Sextet and New and Used.

He also toured with theater companies including the world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater and the Swiss ensemble.

After graduating from high school in 1981, he studied at the Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory, both located in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 1984, Douglas moved to New York to study at New York University, to study directly with Carmine Caruso, and he finished a degree in music.

Early gigs included the experimental rock band Dr. Nerve, Jack McDuff, Vincent Herring as well as street bands around New York City.

He played with a variety of ensembles and came to the attention of the jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader, Horace Silver, with whom he toured the US and Europe in 1987.

Since the mid-1990s, Douglas has led a variety of groups simultaneously.

In March 1993, Douglas got the opportunity to record his first album as a leader, Parallel Worlds (Black Saint/Soul Note), which featured his String Group with Mark Feldman (violin), Erik Friedlander (cello), Mark Dresser (bass), Michael Sarin (drums).

The album is a collection of original pieces, some using serial composition techniques, and arrangements of Webern, Ellington, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky.

This first recording was followed in quick succession by the debuts of two groups, the Tiny Bell Trio (Songlines) with Brad Shepik and Jim Black and The Dave Douglas Sextet, with Chris Speed, Josh Roseman, Uri Caine, James Genus and Joey Baron, which recorded an homage to Booker Little called In Our Lifetime (New World).

This began a period during which Douglas recorded widely as a side musician and as a member of many new jazz groups.

Douglas also began touring extensively worldwide both as a leader and as a side musician.

In 1993, Douglas also began performing with John Zorn in his Masada quartet, with Greg Cohen and Joey Baron.

The group, which still occasionally performs, deals with Jewish and diaspora culture and heritage through Zorn's original compositions.

As such, it is an amalgam of jazz, new music, klezmer, and purely improvised styles.

The band became one of Zorn's most long-standing and popular ensembles, and brought Douglas wider attention.

In 1996, Douglas recorded Sanctuary with Cuong Vu, Anthony Coleman, Yuka Honda, Dougie Bowne, and other musicians of the New York downtown scene of the time.

The group involved sampling and DJ improvisations in addition to jazz.

In 1997, Douglas started a quartet featuring trumpet, violin, accordion, and bass (with Guy Lucevsek, Mark Feldman, and Greg Cohen) which recorded Charms of the Night Sky, incorporating sounds of Eastern European and Argentinian folk musics as well as jazz influences on the music, which is generally mellow and relaxed.

The album included a number of tracks with Douglas and accordionist Guy Klucevsek performing as a duo.

Also in 1997, Douglas founded a jazz quartet with Chris Potter, James Genus, and Ben Perowsky.

This group recorded two albums in this period, Magic Triangle and Leap of Faith.

Both were originally released by Arabesque Recordings, and have subsequently been reissued on Douglas's own imprint, Greenleaf Music.

Greenleaf has also released sheet music containing all of the original compositions from these albums.

A second album by the Charms of the Night Sky group, A Thousand Evenings was released in 2000.

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 of the Festival of New Trumpet Music in New York with trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr.. Since 2003, Douglas has served as director of the nonprofit festival.

He is on the faculty at the Mannes School of Music and is a guest coach for the Juilliard Jazz Composer's Ensemble.

In 2005 Douglas founded Greenleaf Music, a record label for his albums, sheet music, podcasts, as well as the music of other modern jazz musicians.

Greenleaf has produced over 70 albums.

Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Douglas grew up in the New York City area and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, a private high school in New Hampshire.

He was introduced to jazz by his father, Damon Greenleaf Douglas Jr., and as a young teen was shown jazz theory and harmony by the pianist Tommy Gallant.

Douglas began performing jazz during his junior year in high school while on an abroad program in Barcelona, Spain.

As a composer, Douglas has received commissions from the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Essen Philharmonie, The Library of Congress, Stanford University and Monash Art Ensemble, which premiered his chamber orchestra piece Fabliaux in March 2014.

In 2016, he accepted a four-year appointment as the artistic director of the Bergamo Jazz Festival.