Doug Martin

[Translation from Spanish]
Even though it’s not indoors, and though it’s not even remotely close to the Havana clubs or those of New Orleans which are considered jazz havens, the Gardens of the Mella Theatre provide a venue for such virtuosos as trumpeter Wynton Marsalis every year at the International Jazz Festival Jazz Plaza.
With a major line-up such as this, foreign and Cuban artists share their musical ideas and styles. And they do it in a place where the night sky provides a canopy of stars for their creativity. In this uncommon environment where nature provides the artwork, musicians and audiences will gather from this Wednesday to Sunday, to enjoy this intense art form which many consider to be a way of life.
Yesterday in fact, Jazz Plaza perpetuated this tradition with a luxurious line-up at its Mella Gardens when saxophonist Doug Martin seduced the audience with his unique way of presenting his witty creativity. The Canadian was accompanied by the classical rhythm section of the genre: drums, bass, and piano. With this he took us down the road of blues and swing, with many well-applauded solos along the way.
Martin gave way to a group from Camagüey, Maracujazz, who, in November, won the International Competition of Young Jazz Artists (JoJazz). The group, made up of new musicians, some of them students and some of them graduates of the Jose White Conservatory, moved the late evening crowd with their distinctive brand of music-making. - JAZZ PLAZA: Diario del Festival Internacional Jazz Plaza #02 Dec.18, 2014

[Translation from Spanish]
Doug Martin is passionate about the saxophone even though he burst into the musical world with the trumpet. Years later, after discovering his instrument of choice, he graduated from The Jazz Program of Humber College in Toronto, Canada, studying saxophone, theory and composition. As to his early influences , the musician cites rock-and-roll bands such as Bill Haley and The Comets , Duane Eddy , and Johnny and Hurricanes. Subsequently, he was captivated by the tune “Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph, who became one of his primary jazz heros. On one occasion, while listening to a Detroit radio station, it was DJ Le Baron who introduced him to the music of Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Rollins, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Miles Davis. Prepared to absorb everything he could to perfect his career, he soon discovered influences such as John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, and Chet Baker. Two major influences that captivated him were Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz [the album Jazz Samba]. He loved the Getz's warm lyrical style. Present day, Martin has been musical director of various jazz groups with whom he has toured Canada and The United States. He is a regular participant in the Ottawa International Jazz Festival, where he gives classes and composes, and participates in other festivals in Ontario and Quebec. In his latest album release entitled Odyssey, he demonstrates a high degree of maturity as a jazz composer. Several European radio stations, including Cuban radio, have added him to their play lists. The song “Amsterdam”, from the same album, received honourable mention in the San Francisco West Coast International Composers Competition - in 2012. One year later, his song “Kafka Was Here” became semi-finalist in the category of Jazz/Blues in the prestigious United Kingdom Songwriting Competition. Presently, Doug Martin is working on a jazz-ballet and is composing for both television and cinema. The saxophonist has confessed in previous interviews that he has embraced a certain philosophy of music which guides his playing, his composition, and his teaching. The secret, according to Doug, is in creating an ambience, mood, or emotion that “moves” the listener. Because of this, his work incorporates people or situations as his subject matter of compositions. - JAZZ PLAZA: Diario del Festival Internacional Jazz Plaza #01 Dec.17, 2014

Tuesday, 16 December 2014

This week, Ottawa saxophonist Doug Martin is having an adventure at the Havana Jazz Festival – one that may provide inspiration for a new album.
He has been invited to perform three shows in theatres in the Cuban capital, as part of the festival. But he’ll be playing with musicians he’s never even met before. Doug Martin 2014
“The only one whose name I know is Miguel de Armas, jr ,” Martin told OttawaJazzScene.ca shortly before he departed for Havana last week.
Yes, the son of Ottawa-based Cuban pianist Miguel de Armas, who began playing here in the spring of 2012, and has quickly made a splash in the Ottawa and Montreal jazz scenes.
“When I finally realized I wasn’t going to be taking any musicians from here, and that I wanted to use Cuban musicians, I approached Miguel and asked if his son would be willing to play for me. And so the son, Miguel junior, is picking the other two musicians and I’m not sure who they are.”
The band will be de Armas jr. on piano, plus bass and drums, and possibly one or more conga players. They’ll be playing primarily Martin’s compositions, plus a few standards. He’s looking forward to hearing an Afro-Cuban take on his music, which is mainstream modern jazz.
“I’m sure they’ll have their own ideas, their own style, their own way of doing things. A lot of my tunes have never had a conga player in them, so it will be interesting to hear what that turns out to be.”
He’s already sent his charts to Cuba and was hoping to rehearse for a few days before the group’s first show at on Wednesday, December 17, at the Jardines del Teatro Mella theatre. They will also perform on Friday at Café Miramar, and on Saturday at Pabellón Cuba.
But he expected a fair amount of improvisation – not only in the music, but also in the arrangements. “Definitely it’s going to be one minute to the next. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It will be an adventure for sure.”
The adventure first started in October, 2012, when Martin visited Cuba, and brought a few copies of his most recent CD, Odyssey, with him. “I never thought anything would happen, but just by chance I happened to meet a guy who had a jazz show on Radio Taino in Havana. And I gave him a couple CDs and he checked them out and he really liked them, so they started playing them on the radio down there.”
“And then I conceived the idea a little later on maybe if they liked my music there I could parlay this into playing at their jazz festival. So I managed to get a copy of it to the jazz festival people there at the Ministry of Culture and then they invited me to come down and play.”
Martin said he was excited to get the invitation. “After a couple moments of disbelief [laughs], I was elated to say the least. I’d been working on it for a while, like maybe six months trying to get it. Things are hard to do in Cuba, especially if you’re emailing and whatnot, because their computers keep breaking down. So it took forever for this to happen and so when it finally did, I thought ‘Ahhhh… finally, at last!’ ”
This is the 30th year of the Havana Jazz Festival, which was founded when Bobby Carcasses, and other Cuban jazz musicians presented the first jazz concert at the Casa de la Cultura de Plaza in downtown Havana. For many years it has featured major Cuban jazz musicians like Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, as well as renowned Americans like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Haden. But what it doesn’t have is a website or an on-line listing of who’s actually playing there each year.
Martin said he was going to be in Cuba for 10 days and wanted to hear as many festival concerts as possible, but “I have no idea who else is playing there”.
The festival also can’t afford to cover Martin’s expenses or the wages of his musicians, so he started a crowd-funding campaign on GoFundMe.com in September. He was happy with the response ($2640 of his $5000 goal). It will cover most of his expenses and “my paying the Cuban musicians which I certainly plan to do – and pay them handsomely by their standards. And a lot of people were very generous in helping me out, so I was pleased all around.”
In his funding pitch, Martin said “It is an honour to be invited to this prestigious festival since not many non-Cuban musicians get to perform there. And it will be an honour to represent Canada as well, to show people who know little about us that Canada has much more to offer the world than hockey & bad weather.”
Martin’s last CD, Odyssey, was inspired by a trip across Europe he took in 2007. Any chance that this trip will inspire his next CD?
“I think there’s a good possibility of that, yes. I’ve already been working on a couple of tunes, but the experience itself is going to be the inspiration. It’s when I come back that’s when the creative sparks will fly, I hope.”
And what else will he bring back besides the memories and musical inspiration? Probably some rum and cigars.
– Alayne McGregor - OttawaJazzScene

At 7 p.m., saxophonist Doug Martin teamed up with pianist Yves Laroche to play both standards and Martin’s originals in the Gad’s Hill Pub. The pub’s stage is in the middle of the room which gave everyone in the almost-full room a good view of the musicians. Almost all the audience appeared to be there to listen, applauding appreciatively after each piece.
Most of the originals were based on his experiences while travelling through Europe in 2007, which he chronicled in his 2012 CD, Odyssey. They opened with one of Martin’s strongest and most memorable pieces, “Kafka Was Here”, with sinuous saxophone melodies over strong piano chords, and continued with several other pieces from the CD.
Martin premiered a piece for this show: “Southern Exposure”, a bright Latin number which he said he had written years ago but never played in public. Featuring him on alto, it had a happy dancing vibe. He also played several pieces from an earlier CD, including the bebop-influenced “First Steps” chronicling a baby’s efforts to walk, which ended in a vibrating sax note indicating success.
But despite the quality of Martin’s own pieces, the most notable numbers in the show for me were the standards, in particular Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk”, where Martin and Laroche dialed up the intensity and explored the full possibilities of the rhythms in that piece, and “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, which they gave a rougher, more out-there – but also exultant – treatment. They were very much in-the-moment, not smooth, throw-away pieces, and received strong applause. - OttawaJazzScene

Doug Martin has been attached to his sax for as long as he can remember. So much so, it’s embedded in his soul. You can hear that as he blows that horn. Growing up, music seemed odd as a career choice and he really never thought about it. He did the normal life and then went back to the horn to create sax jams like “Kafka Was Here.” It’s off the album “Odyssey” and will make you think of a spy thriller set in the alleyways of the cool streets of New Orleans. If you’re also a sax enthusiast, make sure to check out Doug Martin today. (http://dougmartin.ca/)

Kendra Beltran, Indie Music Reviews - Indie Music Reviews

EDA Music Radio in Dunfermline, Scotland is now playing my tune Kafka Was Here. Here is what Erik, the station manager, had to say about it:
“Love it. Now this is what I like about music, thank you for sending this for consideration. Just love jazz music and I play jazz on my station as often as I can. So emotional this music. Great work. Many thanks. Erik EDA Music Radio.”

EDA Music Radio is at http://eda-music-radio.playtheradio.com
- EDA Music Radio

Artist Name: Doug Martin
Reviewed source: Sonicbids

Music (Scale of 1-10)

Music - 8
Songwriting - 8
Production - 10
Marketability - 8

Total Music Score = 75%

Image/Marketability (Scale of 1-10)
Artist / Band Name - 9
Artwork - 8

Image Marketability - 8
Total Marketability Score = 90%
Current Overall Package Score = 94%

Reviewed by A&R dept

Music Comments: Doug Martin throws his name into the musical hat as a jazz honk to be reckoned with. Ottawa's best includes the track "Unicum", played with gusto and joy by his on-point quartet. Other memorable tracks are the emo "Amsterdam" with its soft and tender notes, and the equally memorable "Roma". All in all, a terrific list of colorful, contemporary jazz gems that leave us wanting more.

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- Member Services, A&R Select

June 16, 2012 - Ottawa Citizen

Odyssey
Doug Martin Quartet
(Backburner Records)
On his website, saxophonist Doug Martin says creating a mood is essential to his music. On "Odyssey", a 12-tune musical diary of a 2007 trip to Europe, Martin manages to do just that - taking listeners from Amsterdam to Paris, from Barcelona to Rome, and sharing a sense of what he found in each place.
From Budapest, he provides a tune ("Unicum") with the slightly tipsy feeling he got from imbibing Hungary's national drink. On "Secret World", he conjures the romance he discovered among the cottages in Vienna's pretty Alte Donau district, and on "Mediterranean Blue", there is the buoyancy he experienced from watching the glittering sea. Also included on the tour is a darker side trip to the death camps at Auschwitz and an eccentric visit to Franz Kafka's Prague.
Martin, who's been around Ottawa since the 1970s playing rock, R&B and mostly jazz, has a relaxed bop style and pleasant tone that is nicely complemented by his sidemen, especially pianist Yves Laroche.
The Doug Martin Quartet performs a free Ottawa jazz festival show on Thursday, June 21 at noon at the Rideau Centre.
- Doug Fischer - Ottawa Citizen (Doug Fischer)

June 15, 2011 – OttawaJazzScene.ca

Most people, when they come back from a trip to Europe, will tell their friends about it or post their pictures. Ottawa saxophonist Doug Martin was inspired by his 2007 trip to create a jazz album, which will receive its official release this Friday.

Doug Martin is one of the steadiest, long-term players in the Ottawa jazz scene. After graduating from Humber College’s music program in the early 1970s, he went on the road with rock and R&B bands. These days, he plays mostly jazz around Ottawa: in his own groups, in the Jasmine Trio, and accompanying other musicians.

But he’s not settling into a standards-only groove. He’s spent the last several years writing the material for this CD, called Odyssey. It’s his first quartet album, his first concept album, and his first album containing only his own compositions.

He’ll be premiering it Friday evening at Café Paradiso, with the same musicians who played on the album: pianists Yves Laroche and Ian Card, bassist Tom Denison, and drummer Jeff Asselin.

He talked about it with OttawaJazzScene.ca editor Alayne McGregor on Tuesday. Following is an edited version of the conversation:

OttawaJazzScene.ca: How is this album different from what you’ve done before?

Doug Martin: It’s different in several respects. The main one is that I wrote all the music myself. Nothing I’ve done in the past has had that much original music on it. Plus this particular CD is kind of thematic in nature: it’s based on impressions of places I’ve been on my travels in Europe a few years back. I wrote 12 different pieces, each one about a different place or experience or event that I had in Europe.

OJS: I noticed you’d previously done an album called In the Zone.

Martin: That was done about 10 years ago, and it was a duo album, a piano-sax duo. Two or three originals on it, but it was largely standards,

OJS: You played what seems to have been some of this music at the Ottawa jazz festival in 2009. So has this been a long process?

Martin: Yes, one or two of the songs we did in 2009, and last year, in 2010, we did several more. Again, that was the first time we did them as a quartet. So, it’s been about a two-year project. The album is called Odyssey, and it’s kind of an odyssey, not just because I travelled around Europe but in the way it all came together. It feels like it was a long journey.

OJS: When you went to Europe, were you writing down musical ideas as you went?

Martin: No. I wasn’t really thinking that way at the time. I was just there to travel around and see all these places and have fun – which I did. It was probably on the plane ride back, flying back to Canada that I started thinking about these things in a musical sort of way. So when I did get back, I started writing tunes, putting down some musical ideas and impressions of these different places. Deciding what experiences I wanted to write about, I guess.

OJS: Did you look at a photo and the photo inspired memories? How do you translate from an experience to music?

Martin: I’m not sure that’s an easy question to answer, but I think some of my ideas came from looking at the photos that I had taken. Others came from just feelings that I had about a place or an event. For example, a tune called Death Train on the album is about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have photos of that, but it was more the feeling that I had. For several days after being there – you’ve probably experienced this – you wake up in the morning and you suddenly remember that and you get this sick feeling in your stomach. I had that for several days after being there. That sort of thing makes quite an impression on you; I think the inspiration for that tune came from my remembering of that gut feeling, rather than the photos.

OJS: In La Rambla, I thought it was interesting how a Barcelona street scene translated into a bass line.

Martin: At nighttime on this street, La Rambla, there’s just tons - Ottawa Jazz Scene (Alayne McGregor)

June 14, 2011

The latest Ottawa jazz player to document his compositions is saxophonist Doug Martin. His CD, Odyssey, is to be launched this Friday at Cafe Paradiso.

Martin, who studied Jazz at Humber College in Toronto, has spent years abroad with bands around Canada and the U.S., playing blues, rock ‘n’ roll, pop, funk and jazz. In recent years, he has been teaching at several Ottawa-area music schools. Below, he tells the blog what led to the making of Odyssey.



1. What prompted you to make your recording?
The most important thing which inspired me to record this CD was my recent travels in Europe. I was in Europe in the summer of 2007. I went to France, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and England. That turned out to be one of those life-defining experiences for me, so, as a composer, it really wasn’t a big leap for me to conceive the idea of doing an album that expressed my impressions of the places, people and things I encountered on this journey.

2) Is this your debut as a recording artist?
I recorded a CD about 10 years ago. It was a sax-piano duo on which I was leader. I have also recorded with other bands over the years — R ‘n’ B and rock. This is the first time I have led a quartet and the first time I have composed all the music.

3) What’s the title of the disc? Tell me about the material — are you playing standards, originals or both? Is your recording self-financed or did you receive financial support of any kind, from, for example, the City of Ottawa?
The CD is called Odyssey, which works for me on two levels. It is an odyssey in the obvious sense as I outlined above, but also in the sense that this project has been a two-year adventure from inception to completion. All the tunes were composed by me and were written to reflect my feelings about the places I visited. Consequently, there is, I think, considerable variation in style amongst the pieces — although they all fit loosely under the jazz rubric. Some tunes have a very familiar structure; others have identifiable structures that I invented; and still others are virtually formless. In no cases, did I have any interest in emulating the musical styles of the countries I visited.

I applied for a number of grants and got nothing. So I financed it myself.

4) Where and when did you record? How was your experience of working in the studio?
The recording took place Jan. 29 and 30, 2011 at Norm Glaude’s studio (Morning Anthem Studio) in Cumberland.

Although I have recorded many times in the past, this session was particularly gratifying for a number of reasons. It was the most intense and the most fun. First, because, having conceived the idea and having composed all the music this time, this project was my baby from start to finish. Second, my musicians were all very much involved in the project. They made many contributions along the way, not the least of which was their excellent performances in the studio. No egos either. The musicians, by the way, were Yves Laroche, Tom Denison, Ian Card and Jeff Asselin. And third, Norm Glaude’s studio is a very pleasant place to work and Norm himself was great to work with. He is a very competent engineer and also made some very helpful suggestions and virtually became another member of the band. Yeah, it was fun.

5.What plans or hopes do you have to promote the CD?
Ideally, I would like to use this CD to move my career up a notch, with higher profile gigs — more festivals, both in Canada and abroad, some air play, more money (geez, what a concept!).

The CD will be available at my gigs, of course. Also online, in record stores, at academies where I teach and anywhere else I haven’t thought of yet.

And it would be nice if I could sell enough of them to finance the next project.
- Ottawa Citizen (Peter Hum)