After taking time to reflect, Dave Douglas trumpets his return

NEW YORK -- Dave Douglas has taken a two-month vow of silence from the trumpet. After a decade of voluminous productivity and unexpected acclaim, Douglas decided it was time to take a hiatus from his position as a poster boy of postmodernism.

By this time last year, Douglas had acquired a reputation for eclectic globe-trotting and relentless experimentation. At one time, the 41-year-old trumpeter, composer, and bandleader was juggling a dozen different projects: the Balkan chamber ensemble Charms of the Night Sky; the gypsy folk outfit The Tiny Bell Trio; the electronica collage of his Witness group; and his duties as sideman in John Zorn's klezmer free jazz quartet, Masada.

He has since walked away from them all, focusing on the working quintet featured on his most recent CD "Strange Liberation," appearing at the Regattabar this week. Douglas has been all over the musical map, but after mourning the unexpected death of his father and making the transformation from bohemian wunderkind to seasoned innovator, he needed a moment for reflection.

And when he broke that silence at New York's Village Vanguard last week, the Douglas who emerged from exile was out to confound the conventional wisdom around him. Anyone who generates Douglas's kind of accolades will also be subject to critical backlash, and in his case, his virtues are often turned against him: a polymath to his champions and dilettante to his detractors, a visionary conceptualist to his fans and, to his harshest critics, a clinician who hides a strained technique behind fancy ideas.

This rap hardly mattered at the Vanguard when he detonated these canards with a brassy bravado and a surprising warmth. As Douglas chatted and joked with the audience and left plenty of breathing room for his telekinetic rhythm section, his band seemed liberated by the loosening of the conceptual bow. The unit was not pushing a grand idea but rather taking some well-wrought tunes -- blues-based riffs with rhythmic flights indebted to Ornette Coleman and harmonic surprises in the spirit of Wayne Shorter -- and letting them fly.

This night Douglas was not a man out to lead a movement but simply a musician finding a groove with his friends. Fashionably bespectacled and impeccably color-coded, Douglas looks as if he could be on the "after" segment of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Douglas's image is marketable for an industry hungry for generational definition, but he is more comfortable in the cocoon of his music than in the glare of the public eye. "It's been such a wild ride this past decade -- very surprising, not where I expected to be," he said in an interview before the show. "I didn't expect it to be as contentious a career as it has been so far."

Douglas has gotten mixed up in the most ferocious racial debate the jazz world has seen in recent memory. As a WASP Exeter graduate, Douglas was attacked by professional provocateur Stanley Crouch as a symbol for a white-dominated critical establishment more willing to reward a familiar persona -- the culturally refined, conservatory-trained bohemian, blunting the blues and swing with the European avant-garde -- than the trumpet chops of many black musicians Crouch deemed superior.

Crouch, one of the few African-Americans writing on jazz, was fired from his column in JazzTimes last spring after attacking Douglas's ascension as a symptom of racially insecure white jazz critics interloping in a predominantly black art form. (In that column, he did single out white musicians including Stan Getz and Joe Lovano for mastering the idiom.)

"White jazz critics have tried to make Dave Douglas into the Miles Davis of upper middle class New Jersey," Crouch said in an interview. "He's not a bad player, but you can't compare him to any first-class trumpet player in jazz of any style. A lot of these critics, they're just nerds. And Downtown Dave reminds them of themselves."

The attacks hurt Douglas, but he saw the critical tempest as a call for racial healing. "Of course, being insulted wasn't a joy, but Stanley's entitled to his point of view, and if it causes more discussion about something that's important, then I think it's fine. It did cause a lot of people, myself included, to think about the issue of race, certainly one of the biggest problems in American life."

It is not surprising that Douglas's preferred response to political clangor is music, and "Strange Liberation" takes its title from a 1967 Martin Luther King Jr.speech in which King remarked that the Vietnamese must see American soldiers as "strange liberators."

" 'Strange Liberation' means two things for me," says Douglas. "One is the liberation of the music, that free jazz isn't complete chaos and freedom like it was in the '60s, but now very much integrated composition, hence a strange way of thinking about freedom."

Douglas's other meaning places the music in this particular political moment, especially in regard to Operation Iraqi Freedom. "It seemed so overwhelmingly naked, the unfairness with which our government is acting, and this music comes out of that environment," he said. "But I wouldn't say this is a political record."

Of course, any record made in the contentious realm of jazz involuntarily becomes a political record, but Douglas would rather leave the polemics to his trumpet. With guest guitarist Bill Frisell's reverb chiming in perfectly with Uri Caine's electrified harmonics, James Genus's upright bass anchor, and drummer Clarence Penn's meticulously aimed rim shots, the band revels in the free space provided by the lack of an overriding concept, rendering the so-called divide between uptown and downtown New York musicians -- needlessly and damagingly played along racial lines in the jazz press -- increasingly irrelevant.

On the Monkian "Skeeterism," the elegiac groove of "A Single Sky" (a post-Sept. 11 rumination on the empty skyline in Lower Manhattan), and the muted, infectious wandering of "Just Say This," Douglas the musician has profited by letting Douglas the conceptualist take a rest.

It's a relief for him to retreat into his music, blissfully away from the tabloid fever.

"There's a lot of talk about why jazz isn't in the mainstream the way it used to be," said Douglas. "I don't think you should talk about jazz in terms of what it should or shouldn't do. Art moves along at its own pace, and organic growth happens through the musicians."

David Yaffe is the author of "Fascinating Rhythm," a forthcoming book about jazz and American writing.