An ever-expanding creative vision
U of T alumna and pianist named in Downbeat’s 2020 Critics Poll
Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans … the list of winners in the piano category of Downbeat magazine’s annual Critics Poll is like a roll call of jazz titans. And the latest name to be added, just this month, is Vancouver native and University of Toronto alumna Kris Davis.
“I never, ever thought that would happen,” says Davis.
She’s on the phone from her home just up the Hudson River from New York City, where she moved in 2001as a freshly minted graduate, with no profile, a few contacts and a desire to make adventurous, non-commercial music in the epicentre of jazz. Now, after 19 years of playing, studying, writing, teaching, organizing bands and steering her course resolutely beyond the mainstream, she is unexpectedly becoming one of her genre’s most celebrated names.
There are150 or so professional gatekeepers who vote in the Downbeat poll; it often indicates just how long it takes for the jazz establishment to welcome change. This year’s winner for Best Jazz Artist, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, is the first female instrumentalist to top the poll in all of its 68 years.
Two years ago, Davis was named “Rising Star” in the piano category; by that time, she had already released eight albums under her own name and five as part of different groups. Even now, she shares the spotlight, in a tie with septuagenarian piano legend Kenny Barron, who first topped the piano poll back in 1993.
“That’s quite a juxtaposition of two very different pianists,” she says, “and I love it. That’s what I’m all about: being able to occupy all these different spaces.”
What makes Davis’s career so compelling is her drive to explore new sounds and expand her creative vision. After joining her high school jazz band in Calgary, she moved to Toronto at 17, to learn more about the genre’s tradition.
Brian Dickinson, one of her teachers at U of T, recalls, “She was working on more conventional things back then. Schools can sometimes pigeonhole people and teach in a generic manner, and I know she did not that like that very much. She was nice about it, and I always tried to be more open-minded. All the big innovators we encourage (students) to study were trying to do something different, to express themselves, and that’s one thing I can see in her career path. You can tell it’s her when she’s playing.”
She put herself through school performing jazz standards at the Courtyard by Marriott on Yonge Street. Davis remembers her residency with fondness.
“I could play the tunes I was working on at school and I could really stretch! Sometimes I’d get sick of playing a tune and would just play a vamp for 20 minutes.”
Other gigs with her peers, especially at the Rex Hotel, let her play even more freely, leaving chord changes behind — a form of improvisation she continues to pursue. She also started a funk band called The Source, playing classics by Stevie Wonder. She would draw both these strands of her art together much later, on her relentlessly inventive 2019 album “Diatom Ribbons.” With Carrington on drums and Haitian artist Val Jeanty on turntables, as well as guest spots by Esperanza Spalding and guitarists Nels Cline (Wilco) and Marc Ribot (Tom Waits), Davis melds her more “outside” playing with both snaky breakbeat grooves and searing, shredding rock. Both the New York Times and National Public Radio declared “Diatom Ribbons” their No. 1 jazz album of 2019; it also received raves from outside the jazz press, including Popmatters and Pitchfork. Davis released it on her own label, Pyroclastic, named after the explosion of gas and rock from a volcano — and descriptive of her playing at its most intense. She launched it in 2016, as a nonprofit, in order to keep her master recordings and help others do the same — giving back to a group of musicians that has constantly supported her.
New York may be the best place from which to launch a jazz career, but it isn’t the easiest. As Dickinson puts it, “You see people just get worn down by the rat race and, with the sheer number of people too, it can be hard to stick out.” Davis recalls that for a time in her late 20s and early 30s, “I was seeing some of my peers go on to have good opportunities and I wasn’t. I was questioning, ‘Should I be here? What’s really going on?’ I made a lot of life changes.”
Among them were starting a degree in composition at the City College of New York and trying “to follow the bread crumbs” of encouragement she was receiving, from the press and from her peers. By avoiding the well-trodden route to New York jazz success involving competitive late-night “cutting session” jams in small bars, she had met a supportive community of artists more devoted to free playing. And although it’s even harder to make it in jazz if your music is avant-garde, Davis notes, “so many women musicians who stayed on the traditional straight-ahead jazz path experienced a lot more misogyny than I ever did.”
As Davis’s career has taken flight, so too have those of collaborators such as German saxist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson. Carrington, meanwhile, last year hired Davis to be associate program director of creative development at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, which the drummer herself directs.
“It’s not just focused on women,” says Davis. “It’s about trying to find gender balance within the ensemble. The male students in the institute are so devoted to gender equity, it’s incredible. It’s a safe space for students who are trying to figure out if they’re gender nonconforming or nonbinary, to be who they are.”
Davis was supposed to have played the Toronto Jazz Festival this summer with Carrington and Jeanty, but that performance, like so many others, has been indefinitely postponed. Winning the Downbeat poll has been a bittersweet experience as she can’t make the most of the opportunity. Online performances can go some way toward making up the financial shortfall, but Davis says, “It feels like a big hole in my life and for everyone I talk to. We miss playing and connecting, and that close personal contact and interaction that can’t really be replaced.”
Her last pre-pandemic concert was in Toronto, at the Women from Space Festival on International Women’s Day. She looks forward to the time they can perform together again.
“There’s something really special about being able to continue a musical conversation with somebody you really care about. There’s just no limit on, ‘Is this popular? Are people going to be able to grasp this?’ If we’re serious about the music and it resonates with us, people will be drawn in.”
“We miss playing and connecting, and that close personal contact and interaction that can’t really be replaced.”
KRIS DAVIS PIANIST