Douglas had a longer major-label run than anyone could have expected, squeezing out half a dozen discs at RCA before the inevitable. So he’s on the move again: mere months after Strange Liberation, here he is on Premonition with a thoughtful, modestly conceived quartet disc which hadn’t a hope in hell of getting released by his old label. In 2003 Douglas was musical director of the annual Workshop at Alberta ’s Banff Centre; at his invitation the faculty included the ubiquitous Vancouver pair of cellist Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan van der Schyff, and French clarinettist Louis Sclavis. Banff is a singularly beautiful environment in which to teach and make music; it must have resonated deeply with Douglas, whose current Mountain Passages project, devoted to “music inspired by the myths and the spirit of rural mountain culture,” recently led to his playing a gig at 9000 feet, in the Italian Dolomites. Bow River Falls (titled after the 30-foot falls near Banff Centre) is a collaborative project, set down quickly one afternoon at the Centre’s studio; all the players but van der Schyff contribute compositions. The tracks are mostly five minutes or shorter, and tend to wind down discreetly rather than building to an emphatic close. The chamberish textures recall Douglas’s Tiny Bell Trio and his “strings” quintet, though without those groups’ urgency and bite. The highlights are a brief, carnivalesque reading of the late Steve Lacy’s “Blinks,” and a revisiting of “Woman at Point Zero” from Douglas ’s Witness, potent even in this scaled-down form. The rest of the album is consistently handsome, full of light and air and good humour: scaled-down Ornette, the odd dab of minor mayhem, atmospheric little pastel sketches decorated with crackling from van der Schyff’s laptop. All told, it’s a very likeable disc, though in the larger scheme of things it’s a potboiler.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, March 2005