Douglas.
The band members stood at a 90-degree angle from the audience at Firehouse 12, facing stage right. Bassist Dezron Douglas held a clave, and played a simple, piercing rhythm that was a call to attention to the audience. Everyone fell silent. Douglas continued with the rhythm. Nazir Ebo picked it up on drums. Douglas then moved to his bass. George Burton sat at the piano. Lummie Spann took up his alto saxophone, and they began.
For bassist, composer, and producer Douglas, playing at the Crown Street jazz mecca was something of a homecoming. Raised in Hartford, he dived into jazz young, attending Litchfield Jazz Camp, the Hartford Conservatory of Music, and the Hartt School. Since 2004 he has carved out a singular path, playing with the likes of Pharoah Sanders and Ravi Coltrane — among many others — and in his genre-hopping has recently signed up as the bass player for the Trey Anastasio Band, replacing Tony Markellis, who died in April. He has toured across the country and internationally. But as he said after the first song the band played, he is always glad to return.
“It’s so good to be here. As soon as I cross the state borders, I know where to go,” he said, from the clubs he likes to revisit to the restaurants he wants to eat at. “Soul food,” he said. “Home.” As he looked out across the audience — all vaccinated and masked, but now sitting close together — he was humble. “God has superiorly merciful. Life has persisted in ways unimaginable.” Looking at the musicians that comprised his band, he continued. “This quartet — this vibration — was created within that.”
Much of what Douglas talked about — in leaving and returning home during tumultuous times — was reflected in the music itself. In the first piece, Douglas settled into a simple two-bar bass line that kept the groove going, using a half step to push it along. The rhythms created were enough to let Spann take flight on sax. Burton then disrupted that rhythm with a powerful attack on the piano, and Ebo followed him on drums. For a moment, Burton and Ebo were churning waves in a stormy ocean, and Douglas was their lighthouse, staying put and holding it down amid their energy. The piano and drums subsided, and the audience spontaneously applauded; the catharsis was palpable.
In the second song, the Douglas original “More Coffee, Please,” Douglas switched to upright bass and began with a solo, a brooding line that first walked, then ran around the fingerboard, before dropping into a hard, syncopated groove. The band jumped on it at once. Burton stuck to short, stabbing chords, while Spann unleashed first short bursts, then long lines of phrased notes and Ebo swung hard on drums. As Douglas thundered out offbeats on the bass, the band created moments of almost violent creation. Burton in particular cut loose with a highly chromatic set of blistering figures, phrases started and cut short, then ripped up again. But again, when it seemed that the piece had been torn apart, possibly beyond the point of return, Douglas emerged with the syncopated figure that started it, and the music continued. It was about going far away and coming back to the same place, but changed.
In between songs, Douglas chatted amiably with the audience. “I’m still playing out of tune, y’all!” he called out as he tuned his bass at the end of “More Coffee, Please.” “I swear I was good before they tuned the piano,” he added, which drew appreciative laughter. He dedicated the next two songs to “two Marios.” One, Mario Guidi, was an Italian promoter who passed away at the end of 2019. The other, celebrated bassist Mario Pavone, “meant a lot to me and I’m sure meant a lot to you.” The murmurs and sighs of recognition were audible for Pavone, who died this May. Douglas said that he had connected with Pavone as a young man while attending Litchfield Jazz Camp, where Pavone was an instructor. Pavone was telling him a story about a luna moth, when a member of that very species appeared and startled them both. “I was still in high school football-playing weight,” Douglas said, “but you can bet I ran.”
The pieces for the two Marios were suffused with emotion. As Douglas laid down a tango-like rhythm, piano and drums provided atmosphere while the saxophone slid into the piece’s ballad-like melody. Douglas, whose brow had been knitted in intense concentration for the first two pieces, visibly relaxed, and began to smile. The feeling was communicated to the audience, many of whom were transfixed by the sounds. Burton and Spann traded ideas, their notes floating around one another. Douglas took a muscular solo, full of thick tone, as Spann returned to the piece’s theme. A flourish from the band to lead to the next piece was downright romantic. Then Douglas stated a bass line so syncopated it at first sounded like it might be in an odd meter, though Ebo’s swinging drums clarified that it wasn’t. Burton and Douglas shared a quick laugh over the texture they created together, a musical space for Spann’s saxophone to dart in and out of. Douglas’s next solo was tender, and Ebo’s solo that followed was an exploration of the drums’ tonal possibilities. The song dissolved in a cloud of notes and, this time, didn’t return.
“I’m still sweating!” Douglas said, to laughter, as he mopped his brow with a towel. “That hasn’t changed.”
Lauren Desberg Photo
Burton.
Next up was a Burton-composed piece called “Second Opinion,” built on an angular phrase from the piano that made deft use of a half-step to signal a kind of searching indecision, in contrast to the resolute tones in the piano’s lower register. Douglas’s playing was now at its most relaxed yet; his eyes were open and he was smiling. By now some of the audience were in a kind of rapture, eyes closed, swaying, even clapping lightly along. A few choice lines from Douglas’s bass drew a “woo!” from the crowd. As Ebo sharpened the rhythm with a rim shot backbeat, Douglas and Burton built power out of repetition, climbing slowly through the registers of their instruments to create darkly rising harmonies. Once again, for a moment, all seemed lost. Once again, the bass brought the music home.
Douglas swapped basses again, joking to an audience member near the upright, now on the floor, was “just a $10,000 instrument.” He paused. “You ever meet someone who, every time they pulled up, they had to let you know how much their car was worth?” The audience laughed. “I hate that!” he said. “Though I used to be like that, except I had a Ford Taurus.” The audience laughed even harder.
A solo bass piece inspired by the documentary My Octopus Teacher (“No one asked me to” write it, he explained; “I just did it.”) used effects to give the instrument a, yes, underwater sound. Douglas used the lower open strings as drones to deploy a melody on the upper strings that was both playful and melancholy. Before the band’s final piece — a funky take on Pharoah Sanders’s “You’ve Got to Have Freedom” — he had one more thing to say.
“I really appreciate all of you coming out and continuing to support live music.” He nodded to the fact that everyone in the crowd — masked and vaccinated — was concerned for the safety of others, making concerts like this possible. “It’s a beautiful thing that this can happen now, anywhere.”
Or, as an audience member had put it just before the show started: “It’s great to be back here.”
Visit Firehouse 12’s website for information on future concerts. Tickets must be purchased in advance, mask wearing is mandatory, and proof of vaccination is required, with exceptions made only for the immuno-compromised, who must show proof of a negative test within 72 hours.