Dave Douglas (composer, trumpeter) made his solo recording debut in 1993 with "Parallel Worlds" on the Soul Note label. Later that year he produced the Tiny Bell Trio's self-titled first recording. These two releases brought him to international prominence and led to appearances on concert stages around the world. In the years since, Douglas has released fifteen CDs with six different working ensembles. He has been named trumpeter, composer, and jazz artist of the year by such organization as the New York Jazz Awards, Down Beat, Jazz Times, Jazziz, and the Italian Jazz Critics' Society. He continues to compose and record in new contexts including a recent collaboration with choreographer Trisha Brown that will yield and evening length program to premiere at the American Dance Festival in June 2000. In May 1999 he signed an exclusive agreement for four recordings on the RCA Victor label.

Born March 24, 1963, in Montclair, New Jersey, Douglas grew up in the New York Metropolitan area. He started playing piano at age five and trombone at seven before discovering the trumpet two years later. He learned jazz and classical harmony in high school and began playing improvised music as an exchange student in Barcelona, Spain in 1978. From 1981 to 1983, Douglas studied in Boston at the Berklee School of Music and the New England Conservatory; he cites Igor Stravinsky, John Coltrane, and Stevie Wonder as primary influences on his music. Moving to New York City in 1984, he attended New York University, studying trumpet with Carmine Caruso. From 1987 to 1990 he toured internationally with Horace Silver, Vincent Herring, Dr. Nerve, and the Bread and Puppet Theater. He began to record in earnest in the 1990s and his discography includes recordings on the Hat Art, Soul Note, New World, Arabesque, Songlines, and Winter&Winter labels, as well as appearances on projects by Myra Melford, John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Don Byron, Uri Caine, Cibo Matto, Sean Lennon, Mark Dresser and Tim Berne.

As a composer, improviser, and trumpeter Douglas is committed to developing music which finds itself outside the traditional language of jazz. Never fitting comfortably into categories, he consistently works to dismantle the boundaries placed around his work. The diversity of his influences are reflected in the music he writes for his own ensembles: Charms of the Night Sky, the Tiny Bell Trio, Parallel Worlds (the String Group), a jazz Quartet and Sextet, the electric octet Sanctuary, as well as more recent projects exploring the meeting points of improvisation and Hindustani music, Musique Concrete, and an unperformed concerto for improvising trio and orchestra. He is also fascinated by the connections of music to the visual arts, including dance, video, and film.

Douglas has received fellowships for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust and more recently, Arts International, which helped finance a trip to India by his new Hindi-influenced group, Satya. In February 1996 Douglas toured as a guest with the Clusone Trio (Michael Moore, Ernst Reijseger, and Han Bennink), one of Holland's most exciting improvising ensembles. In November 1996, he took part in Southwest German Radio's "New Jazz Meeting", collaborating on pieces with Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil and French clarinetist Louis Sclavis.

Douglas' ensembles have toured worldwide since 1994, performing at major jazz and new music festivals in the U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, Austria, France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Slovenia, Switzerland, Finland, and Estonia. Multi-day overviews of his music have been presented at Gronigen Jazz Marathon, Koln Musik Trienale, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, and the New York Jazz Festival. Upcoming engagements include premieres at the Kennedy Center, Library of Congress, and the Village Vanguard. His latest recordings, "Soul on Soul: celebrating Mary Lou Williams" as his first release on RCA Victor/BMG and "Leap of Faith" as his last recording on Arabesque Recordings were both be released on February 8, 2000.

December 2001

Biography courtesy of Saudades Tourneen.