In 2024, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas presents a new project: Gifts Quintet, featuring James Brandon Lewis (tenor sax), Tomeka Reid (cello), Rafiq Bhatia (guitar) and Ian Chang (drums and electronics).

Featuring new, original, energy music-influenced compositions from Douglas, as well as inspirations from the life and music of Charles Lloyd. Gifts Quintet reflects on the wisdom, vision, and positivity of the composer and saxophonist in an innovative way, notably exploring Lloyd's fascination with the music of Billy Strayhorn. The quintet’s sound focuses on song form, emphasizing textural and timbral enhancement in service of each song.

James Brandon Lewis is a critically-acclaimed composer, saxophonist, and writer. He has received accolades from NPR, ASCAP Foundation, Macdowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He has released several critically-acclaimed albums, most recently highly touted 2021's Jesup Wagon. James was voted Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist by Downbeat magazine's 2020s International Critics poll, and most recently named top Tenor Saxophonist for 2021 by Jazz Times Magazine.

Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community. A 2022 Herb Alpert awardee and MacArthur Fellow, 2021 USA Fellow, 2019 Foundation of the Arts and a 2016 3Arts recipient, Reid received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. From 2019-2021 Tomeka Reid held an appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud chair in composition. Most recently, she was the artist in residence with the Moers Jazz Festival 2022.

A guitarist, composer, producer, and sound artist, Rafiq Bhatia “treats his guitar, synthesizers, drum machines and electronic effects as architectural elements" (The New York Times). Bhatia is a member of the band Son Lux, with whom he has released three albums and scored the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. Bhatia is a Jerome Foundation Composer/Sound Artist Fellow and adjunct faculty of the New School’s Performer-Composer Master of Music program. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Drummer Ian Chang makes electronic music that is humanistic. Using drums to control and manipulate samples, he is able to realize complete musical ideas with unaccompanied and unedited performance. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Chang moved to New York in 2007 and quickly gained a reputation as a “gigantically talented drummer" (NPR). Now relocated to Dallas, Texas, Chang’s debut full-length record 属 Belonging was released in April 2020 via City Slang.

Douglas has previously collaborated with Bhatia and Chang on the acclaimed Greenleaf Music albums MARCHING MUSIC (2020) and UPLIFT (2018), respectively. Both these albums center themes of activism, justice, and advocacy.

Douglas has long considered his work to be a projection of societal possibility, where a musical ensemble is an allegory for how social justice can be enacted and promoted. In ways both explicit and implicit, Douglas' music speaks to the many struggles to be overcome in currently prevailing systems.

Gifts Quintet envisions a new sense of interaction through expression of song form, using sound and atmosphere as a field of action. The quintet will begin production of a new recording. Entering the studio together in New York to develop and capture an improvisational process, the five musicians will realize their vision for the first time.

Gifts Quintet will tour Europe in spring 2024, presenting a fresh take on the quintet format that Douglas has featured extensively over the past 30 years.