Dave Douglas and ensemble charm the night sky at the Pillow

by Seth Rogovoy

(BECKET, Mass., July 11, 1999) - Fresh from a sweep of this year's Jazz Awards in New York, composer, trumpeter and bandleader Dave Douglas was in residence at Jacob's Pillow last week to perform a specially-commissioned work with the Trisha Brown Dance Company. Fortunately the powers-that-be at the Pillow had the good sense to make the most of the opportunity, and thus an audience packed into Studio I on Friday night had the great fortune to hear a concert - rare for these parts -- by this man-of-the-musical-moment and his Charms of the Night Sky ensemble.

The group, featuring Douglas along with violinist Mark Feldman, accordionist Guy Klucevsek and bassist Greg Cohen - all of them ubiquitous on the downtown avant-garde scene - played a gorgeous, wistful set of original tunes rooted in a fusion of Eastern European folk, classical impressionism and experimentalism and chamber jazz. With its unusual instrumentation, its painterly tone, its gentleness of expression and its expansive stylistic palette, the group's aim seems to be nothing less than that of an all-encompassing Post-Modern Jazz Quartet.

Indeed, in many ways Douglas's ensemble is to contemporary jazz what the Modern Jazz Quartet was to jazz in the '50s. Like that group, Charms freely mixes styles and genres, seeing no boundaries between high and low, art and popular, classical and folk music. Yet Charms doesn't merely mix it all together into some kind of messy stew. The group has a particular, unique sound and aesthetic - think Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" as played by a sophisticated group of Gypsy musicians well-versed in John Cage - and filters all its varied influences through a romantic gauze that can embrace Louis Armstrong, bebop and cartoon music while rarely straying from the simple dance music of the Balkans.

Douglas is a remarkable trumpet player who, while he can blow with the best of them, chooses in this framework to play softly, approaching his tool more like a stringed-instrument than a horn. He paints in long, brushed notes full of sweeping sustain. He colors the room with air - figuratively and literally, as sometimes he chose simply to blow air through the horn without playing "notes," although his air was just as expressive as pitched tones. He also gets a full range of mute-like effects from his instrument simply by varying the placement of his lips on his mouthpiece.

Douglas's virtuosity and invention were matched by Mark Feldman's, who on a typical number would echo a Douglas solo with his own wit and pyrotechnics, sometimes a wild Gypsy fiddler, other times a refugee from a contemporary classical quartet. On "Twisted," which borrows a staple chord progression from the klezmer repertoire, Douglas and Feldman traded fours, each one questioning and answering the other, raising the stakes through mimicry and one-upsmanship until the piece came to a vital, organic conclusion.

The genius of this group doesn't end there. Guy Klucevsek may well do for the accordion in jazz what Milt Jackson did for the vibes - he simply left a listener wondering why more jazz groups don't feature the accordion. At least in his hands, its ability to sustain drones while playing percussive rhythmic lines made it indispensable to the chromatic foundation of the ensemble. Paired with Greg Cohen's bass, the instruments kept the music firmly rooted in the Balkan dance traditions at the heart of most of the compositions.

The ensemble's concert stuck closely to the program on its eponymous "Charms of the Night Sky" recording - plaintive, mournful melodies balanced against frenzied, bebop-inspired improvisations. The group's work for the Trisha Brown dance, "Five Part Weather Invention," was - somewhat surprisingly -- much more abstract and experimental. While it contained the same basic aesthetic of the Charms material - Douglas playfully interpolating quotations ranging from "Danny Boy" to the William Tell Overture - it made more use of experimental strategies, including the noise of coughing and chairs scraping against the floor.

A word about live music and dance is in order, as Jacob's Pillow is making a concerted effort to reunite these two long-lost but ultimately inseparable brethren. While dance people might strongly take issue with this point of view, dance can very much be seen as simply the choreographer's visual fulfillment of music, one that completes the suggestions of gestures and color that music insinuates. At the very least, both music and dance share a common goal in making order out of chaos - in dance's case, by structuring space with movement, and in music's, by punctuating time with sound.

In any case, music fans might want to venture to the Pillow at some point this summer to hear some of the best music being played in the Berkshires, with the additional treat of seeing someone's vision of the music's physical attributes as embodied by dancers on a stage.

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