In 2023, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas presents a new project: Gifts Trio, featuring Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang.

Inspired by the life and music of Charles Lloyd, Gifts Trio 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 trio’s sound focuses on song form, emphasizing textural and timbral enhancement in service of each song.

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 Trio envisions a new sense of interaction through expression of song form, using sound and atmosphere as a field of action. In April 2023, the trio will begin production of a new recording. Entering the studio together in New York to develop and capture an improvisational process, the three musicians will realize their vision for the first time.

Gifts Trio will tour Europe in fall 2023, presenting a fresh take on the trumpet-guitar-drums ensemble that Douglas featured with the Tiny Bell Trio, almost exactly 30 years prior.