Press for the the new Dave Douglas album Little Giant Still Life featuring The Westerlies and Anwar Marshall is starting to come in. Here’s a selection of what folks are saying about the record.

“Dave Douglas doesn’t pass the torch to The Westerlies. They both already possess the same flame … All the proof you need is Douglas’s songs, the Westerlies’s musicianship, and Anwar Marshall’s unwavering percussive anchor … ‘Colonial Cubism’ does the trick there, finding all six musicians in the driver’s seat.”
– John Garrett, Pop Matters

“Little Giant Still Life (Greenleaf Music), is the work of an inquisitive, ambitious artist who draws inspiration from numerous sources.”
– Downbeat News Feature

“The musicians tender a mesmeric sequence of musical events … the radiant themes with Douglas’ sinuous arrangements yield gratifying results … there are an abundance of crests and sinuously executed passages on this album as the ensemble operates in perpetual motion while reengineering primary motifs along the way.”
– Glenn Astarita, All About Jazz

“Dave Douglas … is the ideal person to collaborate with The Westerlies, a new-breed brass quartet. Their new album, Little Giant Still Life, … 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.”
– Nate Chinen, Take Five piece on WBGO.org

“Little Giant Still Life contains [Douglas’] impressions of 12 Stuart Davis artworks, refracted into intricate scores for The Westerlies, a pan-stylistic bass ensemble that plays with ‘intense precision’ and the erudite 22-year Philadelphia drummer Anwar Masrshall.”
– Ted Panken, JAZZIZ feature, October 2017