special announcement from
@rafiqbhatia :
Next week at THE VILLAGE VANGUARD—the Dave Douglas Gifts Quintet, w/ Tomeka Reid, James Brandon Lewis, Ian Chang, and yours truly.
When I was 18, I went to the Village Vanguard for the first time to hear the Paul Motian trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano. The music that roared to life from the stage was wholly different from the pristine stillness of the band’s latest record, and the tentacled masses of sound emanating from Frisell’s amps that night signaled a vision of the future that is still burned into my sense memory. It was the first of many nights at the Vanguard where I would be changed and rearranged by sound. That room had always been one of my—and one of *the*—primary sources.
In the aftermath of that experience, I looked for every record of Frisell’s playing that I could find. One of those—which I listened to so many times that the CD stopped playing—was Dave Douglas’ “Strange Liberation.”
Almost exactly a year ago,
@chrispattishall and I went to MoMA to experience a career retrospective of the artist Jack Whitten. Whitten’s meticulous shaping of pixels (each cut and (re)arranged *by hand*), the cleaving away of layered paints to reveal layers upon layers of depth, the ceaseless searching documented across years of collected journals—like a good night at the Vanguard, I was changed and rearranged.
Next week at the Vanguard, Dave, James, Tomeka, Ian and I will be celebrating the release of a new album called “Transcend,” inspired by Whitten’s work and the Sacred Concerts of Duke Ellington—my (and your and our) primary sources’ primary source. I am so honored and grateful to be creating on that stage for the first time in the company of these beautiful musicians and people. To dream—as Duke says—in sound, to scrape through the layers in search of the unknown.
