2: The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas and their Sound Prints quintet promise sets full of accessible experimentation.
"Sound Prints," which opened the set, took on an episodic shape, beginning in freeform commotion and shifting in and out of swinging certainty.
At the Village Vanguard, they head up Sound Prints, a promising quintet that includes the pianist Lawrence Fields, the bassist Linda Oh, and the drummer Joey Baron.
Its WebSync software matches the "sound prints" of voices and noises heard on a television broadcast or video tape with related information stored on the Internet.
The trumpeter Dave Douglas and the saxophonist Joe Lovano led their quintet Sound Prints, named after Mr. Shorter's tune "Footprints" and also including Lawrence Fields on piano, Joey Baron on drums and Linda Oh on bass.
(Chinen) ★ Joe Lovano and Dave Douglas: Sound Prints (Tuesday through Dec. 2) The saxophonist Joe Lovano and the trumpeter Dave Douglas share a bustling and approachable vision of jazz, geared toward expedition while grounded in postbop custom.
The defining trait of Sound Prints, a newish quintet making its New York debut this week at the Village Vanguard, is the tangled crosstalk of its front line: an urbane, on-the-fly counterpoint brimming with crooked urgency, like a choice bit of dialogue in a David Mamet play.
Over the course of a carefully paced six-song set, identical in order to the one broadcast on Wednesday night on WBGO, Sound Prints held fast to a swirling extroversion, nearly outlandish in its play between slangy ease (Mr. Lovano's fallback mode) and contested control (Mr. Douglas's).
They organized Sound Prints — the name is a play on Mr. Shorter's "Footprints," which Mr. Douglas quoted during the final lap of one solo on Thursday — around old and new collaborators, starting with the unsinkable drummer Joey Baron, the sturdiest bridge between them.
