American master trumpeter Dave Douglas’ Alloy was created for The Festival of New Trumpet Music, and it celebrates twenty years of Douglas’ label, Greenleaf Music. Douglas leads a new sextet, with two young and promising trumpeters, now living in New York – British Alexandra Ridout and Dave Adewumi, and a rhythm section of vibes player Patricia Brennan, Australian double bass player Kate Pass, and long-time collaborator, drummer Rudy Royston. The album was recorded at Samurai Hotel Recording Studio in Queens in January 2025.
The album’s title references the blending of elements to create a new and stronger substance in metallurgy. Douglas’s sonic equivalent is the alchemical sound of three distinct and strong-minded trumpeters playing together. But Alloy is not only about the lyrical, reserved music Douglas composed for this unorthodox sextet, or its organic dynamics. It speaks to our need to live and breathe together as a unit, in a democratic, solidarity community with many, contrasting, challenging voices resonating and feeding each other. To cohere and coexist. The cover artwork by German painter Heiner Binding, «But Beautiful» (2019), intensifies this notion by conjuring up a fragile pictorial architecture of distant memories in new contexts.
The opening piece, «Announcement: Vigilance». sets the album’s spirit, with Douglas, Ridout, and Adewumi improvising together over the soulful, bluesy, and plea-like theme, suggesting that individual, musical diversity contributes to democratic vigilance in times of an authoritarian regime. The following, «Friendly Gargoyle», grew from a compositional challenge Douglas shared with his master’s student seminar, and challenges the listener to think anew about the current times, and check if the gargoyle in question can be friend or foe. The ambitious and complex pieces, «The Antidote», «Future Community Furniture», and «Standing Watch», offer the medicine by allowing Douglas, Ridout, and Adewumi to stretch and color these compositions with their distinct sonic palettes, as a vivid but bluesy, always-evolving canvas.
Eyal Hareuveni
Dave Douglas (trumpet), Alexandra Ridout (trumpet), Dave Adewumi (trumpet), Patricia Brennan (vibes), Kate Pass (double bass), Rudy Royston (drums)
