In a moment when political language feels increasingly hollow and the very idea of freedom has become contested terrain, Dave Douglas returns to first principles — not through slogans, but through sound.
Four Freedoms, released on Douglas’ own Greenleaf Music label, takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s historic 1941 State of the Union address, in which the American president articulated four fundamental human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. More than eight decades later, these words continue to resonate — not as settled achievements, but as fragile ideals under renewed pressure.
Douglas does not treat these freedoms as historical artifacts. Instead, he reanimates them through music that questions authority, resists hierarchy, and insists on collective voice. In doing so, Four Freedoms functions simultaneously as a jazz album and a subtle political statement.
A Quartet Built on Trust Rather Than Control
Douglas assembled a quartet that embodies freedom through interaction rather than dominance. At the piano is Marta Warelis, the Polish, Amsterdam-based improviser whose work often blurs the boundaries between composition and sonic exploration. On double bass, Nick Dunston brings elasticity and restless momentum. On drums, Joey Baron — a longtime Douglas collaborator dating back to their work in John Zorn’s Masada in the early 1990s — provides rhythmic intelligence rather than rhythmic authority.
This is not a leader-and-sidemen configuration. The music breathes because each voice is allowed to stretch, contradict, and redirect the collective flow. Douglas’ trumpet, warm and commanding, does not dictate outcomes; it proposes possibilities.
The quartet was recorded live and without an audience at the Getxo Kultura Jazz Festival in the Basque Country of Spain in July 2025, a context that heightens both intimacy and risk. Without applause or external cues, the musicians respond solely to one another.
Freedom Within Structure — and Structure Within Freedom
Douglas composed nine pieces, each shaped by a different perspective on freedom — not as chaos, but as conscious choice. Nowhere is this clearer than in the title track, which employs a graphic score rather than traditional notation. This visual framework encourages the musicians to navigate the composition independently, tracing personal paths through shared musical space.
The result is a constantly shifting equilibrium: lines emerge, dissolve, and reassemble. Warelis’ piano playing is central to this dynamic. Her approach is economical yet poetic, capable of expanding the smallest motif into a fully formed narrative. When she turns to the prepared piano, the music opens into unfamiliar textures — metallic resonances, childlike melodies, almost vocal gestures — suggesting freedom as curiosity rather than assertion.
At times, her interplay with Douglas feels almost telepathic, as if the two are finishing each other’s musical thoughts without prior agreement.
Rhythm as an Open Architecture
Dunston and Baron form a rhythm section that refuses to settle into fixed patterns. Rhythmic ideas appear, stretch, fracture, and reconfigure, creating motion without confinement.
Baron’s drumming is particularly telling: dynamic without spectacle, assertive without rigidity. He shapes time as a flexible, living substance, allowing tension to develop organically rather than through volume or speed. Dunston mirrors this approach, using the bass not merely as foundation but as commentary — at times grounding the music, at times gently destabilizing it.
Together, they construct a rhythmic environment in which movement is invited, not enforced.
Improvisation as a Civic Skill
What Four Freedoms ultimately suggests — quietly but insistently — is that improvisation is not merely a musical technique, but a way of being. Like freedom itself, it demands attentiveness, responsibility, and continuous renewal.
This is music that trusts both its performers and its listeners. It does not explain itself or seek easy resolution. Instead, it invites deep listening, asking us to observe how individual expression can coexist with collective coherence.
Douglas’ trumpet guides without dominating, carrying a tone that feels shaped by history yet alert to the present moment. His phrasing resists nostalgia while acknowledging memory, balancing resolve with empathy.
A Record That Listens Back
There is passion here, but also restraint. Urgency, but not hysteria. Four Freedoms never collapses into protest music in the narrow sense; instead, it embodies what it proposes. The quartet listens deeply, disagrees productively, and constructs meaning through interaction.
In an era marked by fragmentation, noise, and polarization, that approach feels quietly radical.
As the final notes fade, what remains is not closure, but motion — a reminder that freedom, like improvisation, is never finished, never guaranteed, and never owned by a single voice.
It exists only as long as we continue to practice it together.