Grieving, poetry fuel Davis’ surprising new album
N.Y. saxophonist heads to Bay Area for series of shows
In the weeks after her father’s death in the winter of 2019, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis found comfort amid the well-stocked library at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.
During her stay as composer-in-residence at the bucolic artists retreat she wrapped her grief within the seeds of a series of adventurous new tunes, while often taking breaks to peruse “the many beautiful books by poets who’ve been in residence there,” she said in a recent conversation from her home in Brooklyn.
Some of the poetry she encountered joined her creative stream and ended up inspiring the music on her recent album “Portals Volume 1: Mourning” (Sunnyside). An innovative chamber jazz project weaving together a string quartet with her jazz quintet, the album includes several spoken-word passages, centering on a verse by Omar Khayyam that had been one of her father’s favorites.
“I was reading poetry my father had read in his younger life, and writing my own minimal phrases and quatrains for this album and the next volume,” said Davis, who brings her stellar New York quartet to Palo Alto today through Saturday for three concerts at the Mitchell Park Community Center produced by Mark Weiss’ Earthwise. The band also performs Sunday afternoon at San Francisco’s well-curated Chez Hanny house concert series.
The music she’s created for the group is elliptical and often unsettling, with quick rhythmic shifts, sinuous melodies and opaque harmonies that suggest unseen forces. “Portals,” she said, “is all about connecting to various other worlds.”
“I’m restructuring a few of the pieces from the record for these shows, but I’ve been writing new music and pulling from previous records to incorporate these ideas.”
A rising force on the New York jazz scene in recent years, Davis has collaborated with some of jazz’s most celebrated artists, including the late altoist and NEA Jazz Master Lee Konitz, pianist Angelica Sanchez, guitarist Miles Okazaki, drummer Matt Wilson and vocalist Thana Alexa. She’s released several acclaimed albums under her own name, and the “Portals” project features a powerful cadre of improvisers.
The quartet she brings to the Bay Area includes drummer Allan Mednard, bassist Chris Tordini and pianist Julian Shore, who first met Davis as a teenager when she was on faculty at the Litchfield Jazz Camp. A bandleader and accomplished composer himself who’s performed around the Bay Area with vocalist Kavita Shah, Shore has found that Davis’ blend of detailed, through-composed passages and formbased improvisation presents an inspiring challenge.
“Caroline writes some of the most difficult music that I’ve played, in that her sense of rhythm and form and harmony is so sophisticated and has so many influences,” Shore said. “It’s really hard to navigate, but also very organic and logical. What makes it different is that she leaves a lot of room for soloing over forms.”
Born to a British father and Swedish mother who met in college in upstate New York, Davis spent her early childhood in Singapore. When her parents split up she settled with her mother in Atlanta and found early inspiration amid the city’s flourishing and interwoven R&B and gospel music scenes.
By high school she and her mother had relocated to North Dallas, and an inspirational summer stint at Litchfield Jazz Camp sparked her love of improvisation. Music wasn’t her only passion, and when she enrolled in a cognitive science and music Ph.D. program at Northwestern she was determined to keep playing.
With a demanding course load she didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse, “so I gravitated to more avantgarde situations, which was a really wonderful way to develop an intuitive way of improvising,” she said. “I met a lot of fantastic musicians, like Von Freeman, Fred Anderson and Phil Cohran,” a trumpeter who played and recorded with Sun Ra from 1959-61 and helped found Chicago’s seminal Black avant-garde collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
After earning her doctorate Davis started focusing on composition, work she documented on her Chicago-centric 2012 debut album “Live Work & Play.” For several years she divided her time between teaching and performing but since her 2013 move to Brooklyn she’s established herself as a creative catalyst as a collaborator and bandleader.
After the 2018 release of her third album, “Heart Tonic” (Sunnyside), which also features Julian Shore, Davis was voted alto saxophone “rising star” in Down Beat magazine’s critics poll. Combining her love of data and intricate rhythms, the music was partly by her immersion in recordings of arrhythmic heartbeats, a condition that was plaguing her father. “Portals” is another heartfelt tribute to him, adding poetry into the irregular beats.