The new album from Dave Douglas, The Westerlies and Anwar Marshall is featured in this week’s Take Five piece on WBGO.org.

Here’s Nate Chinen’s commentary:

Let’s get down to brass tracks. (Sorry.) Dave Douglas, who founded the Festival of New Trumpet Music, is the ideal person to collaborate with The Westerlies, a new-breed brass quartet. Their new album, Little Giant Still Life, due out on Greenleaf Music on Friday, also features drummer Anwar Marshall, who knows how to bring muscle to a groove without a heavy trudge.

This being a Dave Douglas project, there’s also a source of outside inspiration: the work of Stuart Davis, a defining American modernist whose paintings have more than a passing relationship to jazz. The album is named after a 1950 painting whose defining feature is the word “CHAMPION,” bisected with diagonal lines but as legible and graphic as a logo. Douglas seems to be thinking in that mode too: the pace here is triumphant, and the harmonies (the low rumble of those perfect parallels!) convey a determined gravitas.

You can read the entire piece here.

The album will be released worldwide this Friday.

Pre-order Little Giant Still Life now on Bandcamp, iTunes and Amazon.

The group plays release shows in Brooklyn, New York on October 20 and Portland, Oregon on October 28.