This review appears in the March 2011 issue of The New York City Jazz Record:
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Dave Douglas & Keystone
Spark of Being: Soundtrack/Expand/Burst (Greenleaf)
By David R. Adler
Something about trumpeter Dave Douglas’s electric band Keystone lends itself to film projects. The first two records, Keystone (2006) and Moonshine (2008), took silent film icon Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle as their point of departure. Spark of Being, the strongest Keystone effort to date, is also the band’s first collaboration with a living filmmaker, Bill Morrison.
This time the subject matter is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In his album notes, Douglas explains the work as “a meditation on humanity and technology,” a look into “human invention … from the profound to the quirky, from the benign to the disastrous.” Douglas also means to address the role of science in the arts, so it follows that these sounds were birthed in part from computer software (GarageBand, Ableton Live), with ample sonic wizardry from DJ Olive on laptop and turntables and Adam Benjamin on processed Fender Rhodes.
But Benjamin, along with Douglas on trumpet and Marcus Strickland on tenor sax, also plays a pronounced melodic and single-note improvising role. He gets a fabulously rich tone and comps like a straight pianist when he’s not offering up clouds of abstraction. Brad Jones, too, is rock-solid on Ampeg baby bass, and Gene Lake brings endless pulsing energy and textural subtlety on drums. Amid all the ambient noise (wolf cries, monster growls and so forth), we hear the unmediated push and pull of a live band — hats off to engineer Geoff Countryman for capturing that balance and getting such a nuanced, resonant sound.
A skeptic might fault Douglas for redundancy with this boxed set: Isn’t it just the same album three times, with minor differences? But part of the trumpeter’s goal was to create burgeoning possibilities from small amounts of material. Thus there are a number of ways to experience Spark of Being in its totality.
You could listen to each disc by itself, in which case Soundtrack is the most head-turning and fulfilling, Expand is shorter and methodologically the closest to a jazz record, and Burst is akin to a “remix” with some tantalizing bonus cuts (“Leaving London,” “Vitalism”). Or you could put the set on “shuffle,” so to speak, and dig around inside successive treatments of “Chroma,” “Observer,” “Travelogue” and “Creature Theme,” among others. The differences can be vast — harmony stripped away, tempos and feels radically altered — or subtle, as with “Spark of Being” in its two versions (the first is dreamier, the second full of tight and scrappy rhythm, with muted and open trumpet respectively). Nothing comes across as a throwaway. And quite apart from Morrison’s film, the music stands up and takes on a life of its own. That’s Frankenstein for you.
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