Dave Douglas - Transcend

For Duke: Music is my faith.

Whatever it was that Duke Ellington connected with in creating his Sacred Concerts, it burst forth with extraordinary new music. There is much scholarship on Ellington’s spiritual journey. In the music, his explicitness with the holy, the sacred inside and outside the church, his humor and grace in the face of the human condition—this is the legacy of a towering artist of Black American music who knew these would be among his last works. He chose to share a vision of humanity that nourishes our life together on the planet. He said music was his mistress. It was also his faith.

The Sacred Concerts are a grand reconciliation between the spirit and the craft, between the individual and a community. The visual artist Jack Whitten negotiates a similar path: fascinated by diagrams, grids, and “non-artistic” images, he imbues them with human gesture and improvisation. In the slab paintings of the early 1970s, Whitten applies gallons of acrylic paint, manipulates it around the canvas, and creates a blur of pathos and a cry of feeling. Whitten dedicated one of his slab pieces to Ellington, and in turn several of my compositions here are inspired by Whitten and his process. In his painting “Golden Spaces,” Whitten drew inspiration from a conversation with John Coltrane, about waves and a search for sheets of light and energy fields. The spaces in these paintings represent an experience, a mindfulness, a consciousness of the humming and infinite universe. Unique in the art of its time, Whitten’s work creates a sense of movement and flow that has an analog in the endless invention of Ellington.

The feeling that you are part of the holy, the numinous, that art is a communion with that mysterious spirit. No matter how mundane the circumstance, there is always deep love and meaning. You always want to be trying new things, learning. Music is our path to a romance with the universe. 
Personnel:
Dave Douglas, trumpet
Tomeka Reid, cello
James Brandon Lewis, tenor sax
Rafiq Bhatia, guitar
Ian Chang, drums