Who Cares What Purists Think?

One evening last month, trumpeter Dave Douglas and his sextet were blowing into the twilight at Lincoln Center’s North Plaza in Manhattan, a stone’s throw from the famous Jazz at Lincoln Center program that trumpeter Wynton Marsalis built. As even non-jazz fans know, Marsalis is the long-standing personification of a musical back-to-basics movement emphasizing fealty to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the near-metaphysical imperative of “swinging.”

Douglas, at 37 two years Marsalis’ junior, has become, if not a household name, a standard-bearer for a looser opposing set of “downtown” values. At Manhattan clubs such as the Knitting Factory, in the TriBeCa neighborhood, and Tonic, on the Lower East Side, “postmodern” improvisers have mixed and matched jazz with classical, world music and rock elements, to the displeasure of some. Two years ago at an awards ceremony, Jazz at Lincoln Center consultant and writer Stanley Crouch threw a punch at a jazz critic during an argument about Douglas’ merits. Today, a more “live and let live” attitude seems to reign.

“The jazz wars have ended for the moment,” says Douglas triumphantly a few days after the Lincoln Center gig, “and we won, meaning we’re allowed to do whatever we want to do.”

As Douglas prepares himself for a visit to the new Knitting Factory Hollywood on Sept. 15 and the Monterey Jazz Festival the next day, this would be a good moment to ask just what that would be and why do so many non-downtowners seem to like it.

The fact is, for a card-carrying member of the downtown jazz scene, the trumpeter has been making some impressively mainstream friends. Earlier this year he marked the release of his major-label debut, “Soul on Soul” (RCA Victor), with a sold-out weeklong gig at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard, that citadel of swinging respectability. Just last month, Downbeat magazine, a reliable arbiter of middle-of-the-road jazz taste, awarded Douglas a rare triple crown in its annual critics’ poll--jazz artist, trumpeter and, for “Soul on Soul,” album of the year.

That Dave Douglas, a shortish, balding and uncharismatic guy, should become downtown jazz’s ambassador to the rest of the world might not have been predicted. There are, however, reasons: a blazing musical intelligence, the work habits of a Puritan and, not to be underestimated, a diversified portfolio. His first album, “Parallel Worlds” in 1993, was a heady, high-culture brew of works by Webern, Weill, Stravinsky, Ellington and Douglas himself. It made a fine showcase for his intellectual fearlessness and a melancholy trumpet sound well-rooted in Miles Davis. As he says now, “I tried to include everything I knew.”

Later in the decade, Douglas hit on a different approach, spinning off separate groups that reflected the breadth of his musical interests. His string group with violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Erik Friedlander highlights the classical chops that abound on the downtown scene. His Tiny Bell Trio with drummer Jim Black and guitarist Brad Shepik is a Manhattan portal for the keening melodies and tricky meters of the music of the Balkans. (Balkan music, especially from the Gypsy or Romani culture of Romania and Bulgaria, is now in heavy downtown circulation.)

His newest group, Charms of the Night Sky, posed the question: What would a chamber group built around the virtuosity of New York accordionist Guy Klucevsek sound like? The answer is the most lyrical and unabashedly beautiful writing and playing of the trumpeter’s career. The group’s second album, “A Thousand Evenings,” comes out on RCA Oct. 10.

Then there is the Douglas Sextet, formed to record a series of homage albums to underappreciated jazz composers such as trumpeter Booker Little, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and, on the latest album, “Soul on Soul,” swing-era piano titan Mary Lou Williams.

In the hands of a curatorial genius such as Douglas, the jazz past is a different country, as ripe for exploration as the Balkans but, from the point of view of the general audience, much more accessible. Whether by design or not, it’s this group that has been his ticket to the jazz mainstream.

At the Lincoln Center plaza, an audience out to enjoy an unseasonably cool summer evening and whatever was on the musical menu that night was thoroughly charmed and moved by the sextet, a kind of downtown all-stars band. The leader’s trumpet work is striking in its dour tone and wide palette of timbral effects, but with pianist Uri Caine and tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy in the group, he’s often not the center of attention.

“I try to get people who are better than me,” he says. No matter. It is an arranger’s band passionately devoted to structure, his chance to deploy the troops in unexpected, sometimes jostling, combinations that defy the post-bop convention of endless rounds of solos.

That the starting point for much of the evening’s repertoire is Williams--or rather, Douglas’ idea of Williams embedded mostly in his own tunes--gives him permission to access a more traditionally swinging, bluesy part of the jazz vocabulary. Earlier this year, the Village Voice had wondered, “[He] can play Balkan jazz, klezmer jazz, even Egyptian jazz, but can he play, uh, jazzy jazz?” Douglas can, without resorting to the postmodern shortcut, pastiche, and that is one more feather in his downtown ambassador’s cap.

“I don’t like things to be cut-and-paste,” he says. “I like the boundary lines to be blurred.” Says an early and influential champion, scholar and composer Gunther Schuller, “He has an uncanny ability to integrate stylistic elements into a language that is still entirely his own.”

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The son of a Montclair, N.J., IBM executive, Douglas came to New York City in the late ‘80s. He had stints at Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory to prepare him and enough bullheaded drive to play on street corners for change until pianist Horace Silver tapped him to be a member of his working band.

While the trumpeter was toiling away in initial obscurity, alto saxophonist-composer John Zorn was already putting postmodernism and downtown New York on the jazz map. Beginning in the mid-’90s, Douglas would burnish his musical reputation as the resident WASP in Zorn’s Jewish folk-tinged Masada quartet, finding a mentor of sorts in the industrious and prolific Zorn.

If the cult of Zorn’s pugnacious personality helped launch the downtown scene, Douglas has advanced it by an unlikelier route, the cult of not much personality, or at any rate, a studious, awkward and sometimes thin-skinned one. (Success may have mellowed him. I interviewed him a year and a half ago, and he brushed off ill-informed questions with contempt. This time he fielded even nosy queries with tolerable humor.)

Zorn always projects unassailable confidence in whatever he does--Asian bar bands, thrash jazz, whatever. Douglas has become a man for our times, suffering the thoughtful doubts that befit an uncertain jazz age.

“I’m my own worst critic,” he says, taking stock of things from a Starbucks near his Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment. “I spent years and years practicing straight-ahead jazz, but it never seemed distinctive enough. It was like, ‘This could be Joe Blow down on the corner, what am I really trying to get at here?’

“I want to make a statement and not just be a mediocre or even an excellent hard-bop player. I feel like the string group and Tiny Bell Trio were my reaction to the feeling that there’s nothing new you can do with these [traditional jazz] instruments.”

Douglas goes so far as to say that he was probably “very afraid” to play straight jazz before he came up with the idea of channeling historical jazz muses such as Williams. “That was a way of making something unique and different enough that I wanted to do it,” he says.

His fears were hardly misplaced. Inspired by Wynton Marsalis’ initial commercial success in the ‘80s, the corporate record labels launched scores of less distinctive retro-boppers, most of whom were shot down by critical indifference and anemic sales. At the millennium, it is Douglas, the anti-purist, the musical equivalent of a promiscuous port town, who could be seen as the reasonable corporate bet.

Which is exactly the moment that the trumpeter, true to his idealist and perhaps somewhat contrarian nature, has decided to divert some of his energies into his own brand of pure jazz. He’s formed a quartet with excellent tenor saxophonist Chris Potter devoted to hard-blowing and open-ended improvising in the modernist tradition of the late John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. It is this group, whose second album, “Leap of Faith,” was released at the same time as “Soul on Soul,” that is coming to the L.A. Knitting Factory. It will take the stage without the cover afforded by those snappy sextet arrangements or the exotic (by jazz standards) instrumentation of Charms of the Night Sky. And without, Douglas hopes, illusion.

“When you hear trumpet and sax and bass and drums,” he says, “what can you do that wasn’t done in the ‘60s? It’s like the old lightbulb joke: ‘How many free-jazz musicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’ ‘We were doing that back in the ‘60s.’ But in a very real sense, for my generation, that’s a major problem. You can play. You can not play. You can throw your instruments on the ground. So I think it’s up to us to find a new way of combining the elements.”

For Douglas, failure wouldn’t be the end of the world. If he discovers the main jazz highway really is blocked, he’s already mapped out a score of fascinating side routes.

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The Dave Douglas Quartet performs Sept. 15 at 8 p.m. at the Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd. (323) 463-0204. $15.