Doug Beavers - Luna (2023)

GRAMMY® award-winning producer, composer, trombonist and arranger Doug Beavers sixth leader recording is Luna. Esteemed “master of transformative artistry” (Raul da Gama, Latin Jazz Net), Beavers is known widely as a leading trombonist of his time, as well as a member of the multi-GRAMMY® award-winning ensemble Spanish Harlem Orchestra. His critically- received 2020 predecessor Sol explored a dozen original compositions which blended salsa with styles of Afro-Latin, R&B and Soul. Luna continues an expedition across a terrain of similar rhythmic styles, this time infused predominantly with Latin Jazz.

In that regard, Luna is both a sonic counterbalance to Sol as well as a conceptual one—Luna, the moon, is the celestial opposite to the sun. In 2021, Chamber Music America commissioned the Luna Suite, the first half of the record, through a New Jazz Works grant funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Beavers composed the suite while taking a residency in Sitges, Spain along the Mediterranean Sea. At once sensitive, adventurous, soulful and meditative, Luna culminates the vast inner workings of a master composer of boundless sensibility and epic ambition.