Jazz is supposed to be many things, but it is not supposed to be boring. It's no good pointing this out to the major recording companies which have been pumping out album after album from by-the-book young neo-conservatives for the last 15 years or so. Offering no more than virtuostic recapitulation, these young prophets facing backwards have simply been regurgitating what has been done decades before, and better, on recordings by the hard bop masters of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as an Art Blakey, a Wayne Shorter or a Lee Morgan.
It's as if every young artist suddenly started painting in the style of Picasso or every young sculptor started working in the style of Henry Moore, and inevitably this poses the question of whether we were dealing with art or artefact. Traditionally, great jazz has usually been expressed as a flight from the status quo, in sharp contrast to this last decade which has been characterised by a flight back to it.
Curiously, the hard bop renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s has lasted longer than the original style did more than 40 years ago and it has brought about a curious paradox. Like all art forms, jazz has seen its audience diminish at each new stage of its evolution. But for the first time, fans have been rejecting the "new" jazz of the young neos, not because it's too far out or radical, but because it isn't. The so-called "sound of surprise" has not been sounding very surprising of late, but all that seems set to change with the signing of trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas by recording giant RCA Victor.
Suddenly, there is a buzz in the air. Douglas, who has toiled in quiet humility in the relative obscurity of small independent jazz deals and self-produced concerts to find a genuinely different voice, represents a wakeup call for a jazz mainstream that has been sliding inexorably towards stasis.
He has found himself featured in the glossy American magazine Jazz Times, the pages of The New York Times and even US style magazines.
Such recognition is a far cry from playing in the street to earn a living, which is precisely what he had to do when he graduated from the New England Conservatory and New York University in 1986. "It was kind of an interesting time," he says between mouthfuls in a Greenwich Village restaurant. "I was producing concerts at art galleries, book stores, places that didn't ordinarily have music, in order to play my original music."
What Douglas realised was that in jazz it is now no longer sufficient to simply aspire to high levels of executive fluency on your chosen instrument. Virtuosity goes without saying among today's crop of conservatory trained jazz musicians. The challenge today is to create an original, challenging context in which to feature jazz improvisation.
Translating the putative opposites of improvisation and composition within strikingly original ensemble textures has occupied Douglas for the last decade and it is this that sets his music apart. Technically assured, he could easily have settled for the soft option of playing in the adopted style of jazz's posthumous heroes of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1980s he toured with the Horace Silver Quintet and recorded with the Cannonball Adderley sound-alike Vincent Herring, "That was really my upbringing, straight ahead jazz, standards," he says, "but by 1991/'92 I just couldn't see a way for jazz to go forward."
His answer to the problem was to look beyond the horizon for answers. "In 1991 I toured eastern Europe with a theatre group," he says, "When I returned, I developed an eastern European repertoire for a gig I had at the Bell Caf, we mixed Thelonious Monk and Balkan folk tunes. It was a kind of off-beat caf and we could take this music as far out as we liked as long as it wasn't too loud." The group toured and recorded as The Tiny Bell Trio and helped establish Douglas in New York's Downtown underground jazz scene.
The unusual line-up of the Tiny Bell Trio forced each musician to reappraise his role within the conventions of the new ensemble. "In my trio we have trumpet, guitar and drums, and each player has to think differently about the way he functions in the ensemble. I find that fascinating. I stretch myself to find new ways we can approach improvisation and find new sounds."
Then followed a series of ensembles that shared these strategies. "I formed a string group to combine classical music and improvisation which I called Parallel Worlds, moving away from strictly jazz-based music. Then I formed a chamber group called Charms of the Night Sky with a violin and accordion in the line-up to give it a European cafe feel and in 1997 I formed my sextet."
It is his sextet which features on Soul on Soul, comprising the Downtown scene's finest musicians including pianist Uri Caine and drummer Joey Barron, who has played with everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. "The music we play is inspired by the jazz great Mary Lou Williams," explains Douglas. "I don't recreate her music, but perform her pieces and my own originals in new renditions, refilter them through my own sensibilities, which are the sensibilities of a modern improviser who has a much broader language to call upon than Mary Lou did in her time."
In Douglas's hands jazz once again becomes a living, developing art form. The relief is palpable. His recent week-long engagement at the famous Village Vanguard jazz club in New York was greeted by crowds queuing around the block for each of the three sets he played nightly. On the final night, the somewhat phlegmatic doorman eyed the milling crowds outside, far more than the club could hold, and was heard to say that throughout that week he'd never had to turn away so much business. A small sign to be sure, but Dave Douglas has arrived.
Dave Douglas's new album Soul on Soul is on the RCA Victor label.