Dave Douglas GIFTS Quintet

Dave Douglas has been a vital voice in New York’s jazz scene for nearly four decades, his trumpet the capable and curious connective tissue between the city’s straight-ahead and outbound enclaves. A longtime bandleader with an insatiable sense for enlisting new partners, from Bill Laswell and Yuka Honda to Chris Potter and Mary Halvorson, Douglas was John Zorn’s longtime counterpart in the ground-breaking Masada. Aside from his playing, which can shuttle quickly between the seamless and the warped, Douglas’ true power may be his ability to spy fresh talent and fold it into his own ideas, or let that talent inform those ideas. Jeff Parker, Shigeto, Aoife O’Donovan: They have all figured prominently if unexpectedly into Douglas’ most recent decade.

The new Gifts Quintet is a testament to Douglas’ enduring enthusiasm for others. He has long worked with Rafiq Bhatia, the Son Lux guitarist whose music often wields the recording studio as the world’s largest instrument. Bhatia recruited his Son Lux bandmate, the drummer Ian Chang, into the fold, alongside ANTI- labelmate and borderless saxophone iconoclast James Brandon Lewis. Recorded in a single Brooklyn December day, their self-titled 2024 debut paired spring-loaded or spacious Douglas originals—like “Gifts” and “Third Dream,” respectively—with four Billy Strayhorn cuts (including a toughened take on “Take the ‘A’ Train”). The centerpiece, though, is an eight-minute “Blood Count,” where their somber if sentimental sway steadily spills into feedback and clatter, Bhatia’s acidic tone cutting against Chang’s weaponized Elvin Jones-like drum rumble. At Big Ears, the Gifts Quartet grows to five with the addition of mighty cellist Tomeka Reid.