| Jazz |
Doug MacDonald’s Sunlit Jazz: A Soundtrack for Summer’s Last Days.
Doug MacDonald’s new release arrives like a glass of something cold and carefully mixed on a late August afternoon, smooth, bright, and tinged with the melancholy of a season about to fade. It is an album suffused with sunlight, made for evenings when conversations drift toward summer memories, the kind that linger long after the first leaves have begun to scatter across rain-darkened sidewalks, as Yves Montand once sang.
“I have never lost my love for warm notes, for a high standard, and for the pursuit of the best performance,” MacDonald says. That credo runs through the entire recording. His guitar work radiates warmth, elegance, and a level of craftsmanship that recalls artists such as Chet Baker and Sinatra, musicians who made a career of refining a signature sound without ever letting it grow stale.
The notes here fall easily, generously, and the music is deliberately welcoming. Positioned between jazz fusion and smooth jazz, the album resists exclusivity: it is as approachable for the casual listener as it is rewarding for the committed jazz devotee. That balance reflects MacDonald’s wide-ranging journey through the jazz world. Born in Philadelphia, he cut his teeth in Hawaii with Trummy Young and Gabe Balthazar before moving through Las Vegas’s bustling lounges and Los Angeles’s storied studios. Along the way, he shared stages or sessions with Joe Williams, Carl Fontana, Jack Montrose, Carson Smith, Bill Holman, Ray Anthony, John Clayton, Jake Hanna, Rosemary Clooney, Jack Sheldon, Bob Cooper, Ross Tompkins, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich, and even Ray Charles. Parallel to these collaborations, he forged his own path with a trio, a quartet, and a 13-piece ensemble, the aptly named Jazz Coalition.
This new album is not about invention for invention’s sake. Instead, it is about mastery, about knowing the instrument and the idiom so thoroughly that the listener can relax into it. The arrangements are polished and cohesive; the record plays with an unbroken consistency that rewards beginning to end. MacDonald’s guitar work impresses not through flash or overt drama but through balance, the graceful way he weaves between leading and blending, between standing out and serving the ensemble. It is, in many respects, a style more technically demanding than it might sound, and one that explains the quiet admiration he has earned from critics for decades.
For guitarists and jazz students, the album offers an education: a chance to study phrasing, tone, and the way arrangements can shape the character of a piece. For listeners, it offers something more immediate, pleasure, atmosphere, and the sense of time well spent. This is music for friends, for cocktails, for conversation. It is music that, as summer slips away, holds on to the glow just a little longer.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 1st 2025
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Musicians :
Doug MacDonald – Guitar
Bill Cantos – Piano, Organ, Fender Rhodes
Hussain Jiffry – Bass
Kevin Winard – Drums, Percussion
Track Listing :
Lady Bird
Minor Make Up
Prisoner Of Love Master
Tele Time
Walkin’
Pent Up House
Dmac
Perdido