Dave Douglas’ Freak In is a difficult album
to get a handle on, and I’ve been listening on and off
to its nearly hours worth of music for several months and
still feel that it’s a difficult album to discuss. There
is something at work here that is not the usual electro-jazz
genre mixing, yet it is at least partly highly influenced
by electronic Miles Davis. The only track that comes close
to really imitating Miles, though, is “Black Rock Park,”
which seems to be the favorite track of many listeners. To
me it simply sounds like a Miles outtake from Live-Evil
with Marc Ribot trying his best to do a John McLaughlin thing
and not quite succeeding.
The rest of the album is a series of varied landscapes that
somehow manages to coalesce into a whole. “Freak In”
is a powerhouse track that includes some tabla and some neat
ensemble work by Douglas and saxophonist Seamus Blake. “Culver
City Park” is quieter and meditative, highlighting woodwinds
by Chris Speed and lush Mediterranean guitar work by Romero
Lubambo. In many ways, the album is a bit like a movie soundtrack,
with pieces that convey a certain solidarity of mood while
managing to sound vastly different taken individually. Douglas’
trumpet playing is the element that really brings the whole
thing together, whether he is playing ferociously on the title
track, lyrically on “Culver City Park” and “November”
(easily the most beautiful track on the album) or playing
in a fairly straightahead post bop fashion, as on “Hot
Club of 13th Street.” In addition, he uses the recording
studio as an instrument, not merely to cut and past sections
of music together, but also to change the actual sounds of
various instruments. This is nothing new in many musical genres
(certainly Brian Eno has been doing it for ages), but for
jazz artists it definitely represents new terrain.
Ultimately, this is much more like a rock or pop album in
its structure, look, and feel than it is like a jazz album.
It is far too easy to hear electronics and trumpet and think
“Miles,” and indeed Freak In manages to reference
all kinds of musical trends from the past thirty or so years.
There is rock, electronica, all kinds of ethnic musics, fusion,
jazz-rock, free jazz, ambient—it’s all here. In
the final analysis, what probably makes me more certain than
anything else that Freak In is an important album
is the fact that it is so damn hard to talk about. In the
past, with albums like Kind of Blue, Headhunters, A Love
Supreme, you knew that you were in the presence of something
great precisely because you couldn’t quite name the
direct antecedents; the work seemed to come largely from its
own time and place. Well, Freak In is exactly like
that, and that’s one reason I think people will still
be listening to this album years from now.
