Nineteenth-century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson called art an “expression of nature.” Guitarist Scott DuBois‘ Winter Light transports the listener on a day’s journey from earliest dawn into deepest night, illustrating the day’s changing light through varied landscapes and weather conditions. He has loved representations of this evolution in visual art, especially in the paintings of Claude Monet, who often worked on several canvases at once in order to track the day’s shifting light. Winter Light captures such visions in sound.
The New York City Jazz Record has described DuBois’ writing as “captivating music for the meditative thinker.” This telling expression goes quite some way towards unlocking its essence, since the guitarist composes in an associative way, through pictures. Indeed, Winter Light, which marks his debut as an artist on the ACT label, has a strongly programmatic concept running right through it. The listener is taken on a journey through a winter’s day. As we witness the progression from before daybreak right through to the depths of night, DuBois draws the listener in with sounds vividly portraying myriad shifts in the balance of light, leading us through different landscapes, and even making us feel the ever-changing patterns of the weather.
The guitarist’s first five albums have received major critical acclaim. Black Hawk Dance earned the maximum 5-star rating from DownBeat Magazine. His next album, Landscape Scripture, was one of the “Top Ten Jazz Albums of 2012″ as selected by the highly influential coast-to-coast American network, National Public Radio.
