Customer Reviews

Witness

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From the very first note of "witness" you may think to yourself "what on earth!?!". The sounds that this cd produces are just awesome! Its so exciting and outrageous to listen to this and it makes me jump inside. The selections are incredibley well-written, emulating hints of different styles everywhere you look. I love "one more news" and "witness" personally. But i'll have you know that i've listened to the first 5 songs so much, i haven't really had a chance to go to the last part of the cd yet. But so far, this cd sounds like another masterpiece in Dave's seemingly never-ending list of music-changing albums. If you love strangely cool and highly immaginitive sounds with expressive and passionate melodies, you NEED this album. you CRAVE this album. GET this album

As I put this one on I was just awestuck by its beauty and complexity at the same time. The instrumentation is a mix of his sextet and string groups with some "extras." Up until the long, episodic "Mafouz" Witness was shining brighter than anything this already accomplished musician-composer had previously done. Perhaps its a personal prejudice, but mixing spoken word, no matter how compelling, with music usually doesn't work for me. Maybe it will grow on me, but I find that even when I like speaking on musical pieces at first, once I am use to it it grows old fast. These piece reminds me of Zorn's "Spillane." The music on this album is incredible, I still recommend it as highly as any other of Douglas' works. With out "Mafouz" this is at least 7 or 8 stars out of five. WHo knows I might change my mind!

this was the first recording by dave douglas i heard. since then i've listened to, and bought, more than a half dozen recordings by him as well as seen his recent group, his quintet, live. with witness, douglas was at the top of his game.

the political essay and names from current events are groaners if you came just for the music. politics, except for a title or 2, don't intrude on the music, except for tom waits' wonderful voice droning the prose of the writer, mahfouz, on the 23 minute track named after him, inaudibly, which functions operatically similar to a foreign language. i was reminded of political texts spoken, chanted and sung on recordings by luigi nono. the music mahfouz reminds me of gary burton's genuine tong funeral as performed by carla bley.

the other tracks are of a similar tone.

maybe this recording should not be categorized as jazz. world music might be a better category. then witness does nod toward late miles davis, particularly aura, and if aura can be classified as jazz...the important thing is the music is on disc, and well worth the listening experience.

This is a very good Miles-inspired album... It sounds Miles inspired to me anyway... The compositions are strong and the melody lines are often surrounded by creative improvising and just plain making sounds/noise. Ikue Mori is a bit loud in the mix, but other than that - no complaints. I like this one a bit more than his latest "Freak In" although that one is worthy of a purchase as well.
Most of all this album is innovated and has a sense of it's own importance. No punches are held and everyone is contributing to an idea that is both compelling and challenging.

I confess I didn't read the liner notes or even attempt to decode any political messages in the music. All art is influenced by politics (whether Homer or Shakespeare, Griffith or Eisenstein). The real question lies in whether the artist's sources of inspiration have resulted in the creation of truth and beauty. To my perhaps over-experienced ears "Witness" sounds less cutting edge than reactionary, as the polyphonic, polytonal textures evoke the serialism and aleatory music introduced by Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky almost a hundred years ago. The importation, from time to time, of doctored narration into the sound mix might evoke a later composer such as Stockhausen were it not so tame. Listeners who are attracted to this sort of thing should definitely check out some of Ken Nordine's "Word Jazz" (unaccountably ignored after decades of non-stop inventiveness). All in all, a pleasant and interesting if youthful compositional effort.

This music is complex, challenging, and always interesting. It is far from the schlock that often passes for jazz, and while it doesn't always have a rythmic center to guide the listener, it is never inacessible. Highly recommended for those who are interested in jazz and want to expand their horizons. As far as Douglas'politics are concerned, I'm not sure politicians and pundits or right-wing talk show hosts have a monopoly on political understanding. Just who does speak the political truth? One does not abrogate the right to political opinions when one becomes an artist and, frankly, I appreciate artists who have a social conscience- even if their views might be a tad simplistic at times. Still, this CD is about music- a language that transcends ideology. This CD will not disappoint.

There must be two Dave Douglases, one, a canny purveyor of brilliant post-modern world-jazz, the other a naive, clueless armchair leftist. Mr. Douglas, who records for Bluebird, a lable of the German multinational giant, BMG, has some rather unpleasant (not to mention totally ignorant) things to say about capitalist greed in the liner notes to Witness: "This whole thing [i.e., the songs on this disc] began on an Italian train near the Yugoslav border. I was reading a fairly boring newspaper article on the rising stock of American weapons makers during the NATO assualt on Yugoslavia [otherwise known as the war in Bosnia]. Not far away, half a million people were camped in a muddy field without much hope of escaping, or of going home. As usual, some people [like who??] were making a huge profit [perhaps a division of BMG??]. The idea made me angrier with each day of that "war" [why the quote marks??]. I felt so lucky and priviledged not to be out there in the muddy field--to be making music every night for an attentive audience. But the shock of what was going on made it hard to separate what we were doing from the horrible and persistent abuse of money and power that is at the root of these situations. Profit dictates our decisions on a global scale [but presumably nasty profit doesn't dictate the actions of our noble and pure artist, who just happens to record for a huge German-based corporation]. Most of us know this should not be happening." Etc. Etc. There's a lot more of this nonsense, but you get the idea.

Actually, there is one thing that's commendable about his otherwise noxious rant: an apparently genuine concern for victims. But the larger truth is that one would be wise not to get one's politics from artists, be it Barbra Streisand or Charlton Heston. This whole project just proves that great artists often have nothing of substance to tell us about the world outside their area of giftedness. One last observation: One of the all-time greatest songs ever written, in my view--If I Had a Rocket Launcher, by Bruce Cockburn--is informed by a politics too stupid to comment on. Nevertheless, it is full of energy, is splendidly put together, and sounds great. Go figure.

On to the music. Witness is far and away Dave Douglas's most accomplished recording to date. The only thing that comes close is Sanctuary, but that disc is much more uneven. For Witness he's assembled a brilliant collection of nimble and authoritative players. The colors, textures, and atmospheres they collectively achieve are nothing short of astounding. Amazingly, for such a political moron--and idiotic leftwing politics is the stated motivation behind this disc--Davis manages to find and establish the exact right mood for each of his world-music grounded pieces. Which just goes to show that multiculturalism works in music but not in politics.

At the center of the disc is Mahfouz, nearly 25 minutes of glorious shifting sounds dedicated to the brilliant and iconoclastic Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mafhouz. This piece, made up of many disparate musical motifs, as is its namesake's writing, nevertheless comes together almost magically to achieve a kind of sonic glory seldom encountered in any genre of music, let alone this kind of ecletic jazz. Tom Waits's underground vocal--an astonishing and unexpected touch--adds iconic mystery and depth to the proceedings.

But everything is working at the highest level; there's not a weak cut on the whole thing. My advice--obtain this posthaste, bask in its aural magnificence, and ignore the puerile politics.