Two groups with activist genes—Dave Douglas’s new quartet and Bellbird—offer releases that take clear political and moral positions.
Dave Douglas
Four Freedoms (Greenleaf Music)
A review
On his latest release, Four Freedoms, trumpeter and composer (educator and entrepreneur) Dave Douglas takes the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear—as a starting point. With a new quartet that includes Marta Warelis (piano), Nick Dunston (bass), and Joey Baron (drums), he sets off on an exploration of “freedom within structure, structure within freedom,” as he explains in the liner notes. The result, delivered with a bracing clarity of conviction, is an expansive musical demonstration of a dynamic that mirrors the democratic ideal of cooperation among independent but connected points of view. The nine tracks—recorded last July at Getxo Kultura Jazz Festival, three live before an audience and six on the same stage, without an audience, a day later—include compositions built on a familiar jazz structure and others closer to contemporary art song. The album opens with the live “Grits,” whose Southern, African-American DNA offers a groove-based celebration, and it closes with the contemplative “Ruminants,” contemporary art music in which Warelis’s crystalline prepared piano opens the way for Douglas’s triumphant trumpet. Between these two, the material ranges across the aspirational (“Dreams We Hold”), the swaggering (“Sandhogs”), the live and intentional (“Four Freedoms”), the anxiously jaunty (“Militias”), the emergent (“Fire in the Firewood”), the lamenting (“Sing Sing”), and the live and playful (“My First Rodeo”). Emotionally rich and musically compelling, Four Freedoms offers a satisfying excursion into the nature of freedom.
Bellbird
The Call (Constellation Records)
A review
Montréal’s Bellbird quartet—Allison Burik (alto sax, bass clarinet), Claire Devlin (tenor sax), Eli Davidovici (bass), and Mili Hong (drums)—takes its name from the bird that possesses an exceptionally loud and distinct call, and the band’s sophomore release, The Call, offers equally loud and distinct music that channels the band’s feelings on the climate crisis and global solidarity. There’s an ache in every track on the album, in the hard-driving sonic assaults (“Firefly Pharology” and the title track) and in the softer, more reflective tracks (“Soft Animal” and “Phthalo Green”). Every track reflects a rigorous egalitarian approach in both the compositional process and performance. (“The eight songs on The Call emerged from workshopping musical cues and improv games, drawing on poems and conversations exchanged during residencies outside the city,” says Joseph Sannicandro in his excellent liner notes.) The drums and bass, right up front with the reeds in the mix, take a lead role in shaping each track, with the reeds often offering rhythmic and textural support. Burik and Devlin bring technical mastery to the proceedings, entwining liquid melodic lines in nuanced and emotionally charged performances. The music is not always pretty. The title track, for example, incorporates the harsh call of the band’s namesake, which the reeds mimic. But it is always well articulated and compellingly raw—particularly “Blowing on Embers,” dedicated to a free Palestine, in which pleading transforms into outrage and naked pain.
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© 2026 Mel Minter