Music in general - and jazz, in particular - is as various as the people who make it. Take the American jazz trumpeter and composer, Dave Douglas: on the first recording by his Tiny Bell Trio in 1993, he included songs about Bosnian children. With his interest in the music of the Balkans, it's hardly surprising events there might move him to react in the way he knows best - as an artist. But untrammelled as he is by musical boundaries, there's no hint that he would ever be seduced into simple agitprop; whatever the source of the inspiration, the recorded evidence suggests the response is invariably musical - and diverse.
Bass guitarist and composer, Ronan Guilfoyle, who heard him with the Tiny Bell Trio (the name comes from the little Bell Cafe in New York) in the Big Apple last summer, describes his music as "engaging, witty, humorous, spontaneous - and swinging. A Balkan folk tune can become Pannonica" - Thelonious Monk's tribute to an aristocratic European patroness - "and move back to a Balkan tune again, and then to a fast swing piece. What is extraordinary about him is his ability to move between eclecticism and out-and-out jazz, yet still retain his own musical personality. And the band is wonderful.
"He's going to be a major performer," Guilfoyle adds, "if he isn't one already." It's an opinion increasingly shared within the jazz community. In the latest downbeat poll, the prestigious American jazz magazine placed him first on trumpet in the "Talent Deserving Wider Recognition" category, and he has become a leading light in the highly innovative, downtown New York 1990s scene. Now in his mid-30s, Douglas has an impressively varied, high-quality track record. He has worked with, among others, the veteran bopper, Horace Silver, and on the eclectic John Zorn's Masada, which mixed jazz and Yiddish music, and the equally uncategorisable Anthony Braxton's Charlie Parker Project. The trumpeter's interests include European classical music - Webern, Stravinsky, Schumann and Bach, for instance - as well as the folk music of mitteleuropa.
As a trumpeter he identifies Miles Davis and Woody Shaw as major influences, but there's certainly a touch of the brilliantly individual, ill-fated Booker Little there, too. His command of the instrument is in the virtuoso class and there seems no limit to the range of sounds he can coax from it. But the virtuosity is invariably put at the service of the music, not vice versa, and no matter how complex the material or sophisticated the approach to it, there's no sense that what emerges is untouched by human hands.
His colleagues in the trio, guitarist Brad Shepik and drummer Jim Black, are equally one-offs. Shepik is also into Arabic, Baltic and North African musics and Black is regarded as one of the finest, most compellingly distinctive percussionists in New York. And their Tiny Bell music? Besides those sources already mentioned, it can come from anywhere - a hugely individual bop pianist such as the late Herbie Nicholls, Hungarian csardas, Kurt Weill, Germaine Tailleferre (the only woman member of Les Six, the group of composers who once set the 1920s classical music scene in Paris on its ear). Somehow, though, jazz - and fun - is always there, too.
The Tiny Bell Trio will play at the Temple Bar Music Centre on Friday, April 9th, in a concert or- ganised by The Improvised Music Company and at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast, on Saturday, April 10th, for the Moving On Music organisation
