Dave Douglas

The Tiny Bell Trio

“…romps through an hour of Eastern European ‘folk’ musics with improvisational wit, energy and respect…A challenge at all levels.”

— Andy Bartlett, Earshot Jazz

First outing for acclaimed trumpet player’s cut-loose downtown group, playing original compositions with a Monkish tinge plus Weill, Kosma and Tailleferre. Several pieces demonstrate a unique take on traditional music of the former Yugoslavia, combining Balkan and rock or classical elements with jazz. One of New York’s most remarkable trios. Audiophile analogue recording on Sear Sound’s Ampex 300 two-track recorder.

Douglas, whom critic Harvey Pekar has named “among the great trumpeters of the past few decades” (Isthmus), is active in many different areas of jazz and new music. He leads the Dave Douglas String Group (CD, Parallel Worlds, on Soul Note), Sextet (CD, In Our Lifetime, on New World), and Dave Douglas’ Sanctuary. He is a member of the collective quintet New and Used (CDs on Knitting Factory), and plays and records with John Zorn’s Masada, Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz, Mark Dresser’s Force Green and the Mark Dresser Trio, the Quintets of Myra Melford, Fred Hersch, and Kenny Werner, and Nick Didkovsky’s Doctor Nerve. He can be heard on disc playing with Orange Then Blue, Michael Formanek and Vincent Herring, has toured with Herring, Horace Silver, Tim Berne and Thomas Chapin, and has performed with Jack McDuff, Anthony Braxton, Gary Thomas, Han Bennink, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, Rashid Ali, Jimmy Cobb, William Parker, Bobby Previte, Mark Helias, Mark Whitecage, Marty Ehrlich, and Joey Baron, as well as creating music for poetry, theatre, and dance.

Guitarist Brad Shepik leads his own trio, co-leads the jazz/new music collective BABKAS (three CDs on Songlines), and is a member of Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, Andy Laster’s Hyrdra (Songlines) and Matt Darriau’s Paradox Trio. Jim Black, one of the most inventive young drummers on the scene, co-leads Human Feel, and performs in Tim Berne’s Bloodcount as well as groups led by Ellery Eskelin and Ben Monder (both Songlines), among many others. Jim and Brad are also founding members of Pachora, a group which explores new approaches to Greek and near eastern traditional musics.

**** “An outstanding player, gifted with a wonderfully fluid style and a deep bag of tonal and timbral effects, he’s also a terrific writer and arranger.” — John Corbett, Down Beat

“Their wonderful new album is an extra-jazzy playground of modern, cabaret-klezmer new music attitudes and vintage Eastern European sonorities. If Schoenberg wrote soundtracks for Porky Pig, as played by jazzers, it might sound something like Douglas’s ‘Head-On Kouvlodsko’. Although most of the music is by Douglas, we also hear Schoeppach’s languid ‘Felijar’, a haunting reading of Kurt Weill’s ‘The Drowned Girl’, and a raucous inside-out take on the traditional Hungarian tune ‘Czardas’ to close.” — Josef Woodard, Jazziz (top pick, best of ’94)

“Sometimes cartoonish, occasionally serious, the trio parades through musical space like a drunken New Orleans marching band…Douglas leads the trio on a wild goose chase of a ride through every conceivable musical terrain…Calling this music ‘jazz’ is way too limiting…What makes this disc even more special is the superb analogue sound: Douglas’s trumpet is captured with all the burnished brass and bite of the real thing.” — Michael Fremer, The Absolute Sound

“A  remarkable CD…All three men improvise brilliantly.” — Harvey Pekar, The Riverside Times

“Douglas thinks beyond musical category, plays his instrument with vast facility, and possesses a wit both dry and bent…The blend is stark, intellectually unsettling, and profoundly elusive…” — Thomas Conrad, CD Review

“An impressive debut…explores a strange middle European terrain of bright rhythm and acrid melody, establishing a sui generis mood.” — Gary Giddens, Village Voice

“Luminously elusive improvised chamber music for the ages.” — Mathias Bäumel, Sächsische Zeitung