Dave Douglas (b. 1963, USA) is a highly prolific and inventive musician with a solid career during which he recorded more than forty albums as leader and collaborated with some of greater names of contemporary music, such as Don Byron, Uri Caine, Joe Lovano or Tom Waits, among many others, and of contemporary art, such as the choreographer Trisha Brown and the filmmaker Bill Morrison. Douglas’ artistic development was decisively marked by his work with the band Masada, led by John Zorn, a group which presented an innovative fusion of jazz and Jewish music. Since then, the trumpeter has maintained an intense activity both as composer and leader, which began in 1993 with the release of the album Parallel Worlds, building up a heterodox musical identity based on the intersection of influences of classical music and non-occidental musical expressions with jazz, while at the same time integrating in his compositions elements of literature, contemporary dance and electronic music. After three decades of tireless work, Douglas remains as prolific and disquiet as ever, collaborating regularly with some of the emergent musicians of the new generation of jazz, such as Vijay Iyer, Linda Oh or Mark Guiliana, and working in his owns groups such as the quintet Soundprints, an artistic partnership with Joe Lovano.

Uplift’s sound is based on a fusion of jazz with rock and the most recent trends in experimental music. This group features, among other important contemporary musicians, the influential bassist and producer Bill Laswell, a musician with an unparalleled artistic career, fragmented through countless musical territories and languages (jazz, dub, funk, world music), and who, besides his work under his own name or in collaboration with other musicians, was a member of several seminal projects, such as the avant-garde bands Painkiller (with John Zorn), Golden Palominos and Massacre (with Fred Frith and Charles Hayward). Considered nowadays as one of the most influential musicians of contemporary music, Laswell will perform in Guimarães Jazz for the first time with the band Uplift, in a concert where Joe Lovano will be replaced by the saxophonist Jon Ibaragon, which some will probably remember from the memorable performance of the group Mostly Other People Do The Killing in the last year’s edition of Guimarães Jazz.

Considering the excellence of the musicians who form this band and the spirit of rebellion and disquietude behind the band’s artistic purposes, assumed by his leader and explicitly manifested in the title of their album – Twelve Pieces for Positive Action –, and towards a convulsive political and social reality which is negatively interfering with several domains of both collective and individual life, it is legitimate to expect from this concert a nonconformist music, in search for new creative ideas. Uplift is the way Dave Douglas found to remind us that the mission of art is to choose hope, and that this is the only possible message of any artistically innovative proposal.