Movers and Shakers: The 40 Most Exciting Soulful Artists of 2003

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Dave Douglas jazz renaissance man
Calling Dave Douglas a trumpeter is like calling Duke Ellington a piano player. Douglas is a brilliant horn player, but his roles as composer, bandleader, thinker, multimedia collaborator, and all-around creative force are what make him a bright light in today?s jazz world.
He can?t be pinned down, which is just the way he likes it. He plays arty Jewish avant-jazz with John Zorn?s group Masada, Indian-influenced music with his new group Satya, something akin to chamber music with his Charms of the Night Sky band, and he composes for and leads at least half a dozen other ensembles. Since 1993, Douglas has released 19 CDs with eight different groups, and his head continues to spill over with good ideas.
An edgier, more versatile alternative to the Wynton Marsalis?Ken Burns school of classic American jazz, Douglas has plenty of grants and awards (if not widespread public acclaim) to show for his efforts. As long as he keeps blowing his horn, though, he?s certain to attract audiences for his stunningly ambitious work. The Infinite (Bluebird/RCA)
?KEITH GOETZMAN

Julie Taymor
Stage sage
A student of anthropology as well as theater, director-designer Julie Taymor has long explored the religious and shamanic roots of drama. In her 20s, she spent four years in Asia studying stagecraft and the accompanying spiritual traditions in places like Bali and Java. Since then, in a career that has included ?downtown? experimental theater, Broadway, opera, and film (her biopic of artist Frida Kahlo, Frida, premiered this fall), her goal has always been to give audiences a taste of the mysterious, sacred depths beyond the immediate experience of the performing arts.
This point of view prepared Taymor well to take on her best-known project, the reconceiving of Disney?s The Lion King for the stage. The show, currently touring the country, transformed the kitschy animated film into a profound experience of theater poetry, with its puppet animals, its simple, powerful stage effects, and its deep-dyed African sensibility.
(www.miramax.com/frida)
?JON SPAYDE

Whitfield Lovell
on-the-Wall artist
In 1993 Whitfield Lovell sought respite from New York City at an artist?s retreat in an old Italian villa. But when he arrived, Lovell, an African American, was horrified to discover grotesque caricatures of black men and women decorating the building?s interior. Turns out the villa had been built by a prominent Italian slave trader with unusual tastes. Taking a personal and artistic risk, he began expressing his reaction in charcoal directly on the villa?s walls.
Since then, in half a dozen installation projects and many ?tableaux? he constructs from wood and found objects, Lovell has continued to explore the themes of history and ancestral power. Using charcoal on the bare surfaces of pine boards, Lovell makes realistic drawings of old photographs?portraits from the 1920s and 1930s of black men and women stiffly posed and formally dressed. Then he adds artifacts his subjects might have used. In ?Whispers from the Walls,? a full-gallery installation commissioned by the University of North Texas in Denton, Lovell built an entire shack, peopled with his ghostly ancestor drawings.
The effect of these constructions is strangely raw and disorienting, in part because Lovell?s art combines seemingly contradictory impulses: Drawing on a wall suggests graffiti?but his portraits are tender and ghostly. His subject is the enduring legacy of slavery, but his charcoal medium is ephemeral. Equally influenced by folk art traditions and his formal art-school training, Lovell?s work is on the cool cutting edge of the art world, where installation work and the use of ephemeral media are marks of sophistication, but it is also nakedly emotional in its exploration of the black American experience. ?Whispers from the Walls? will travel to Virginia, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Los Angeles, and Oregon in 2003. The Art of Whitfield Lovell, ed. by Diana Block (University of North Texas Press)
?JOSEPH HART

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