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Last December trumpeter Dave Douglas had a rather audacious idea, one that with time might catch on with more and more musicians. Booked for a five-night run with his quintet at New York’s Jazz Standard, Douglas decided that he and Mike Friedman, his partner in the Chicago-based Greenleaf Music, should record the entire stand and make all ten sets of music (two each evening) available as downloads. Douglas had a bunch of new tunes he was itching to get down on tape (or any format, really), but his group had just released an excellent studio album, Meaning and Mystery, earlier in the year. So he took advantage of the club’s vintage mike collection to record each set onto a hard disk, and after a quick mastering job, posted each of them to the Greenleaf site less than a day later. They sell for seven bucks apiece, or $70 for the full package. (Individual tracks are ninety-nine cents.)
