By Ted Panken With nods to Messaien and Dolphy, Kris Davis and like-minded colleagues unfurl a tantalizing aural tapestry at a storied jazz proving ground. It’s the first day of summer and Kris Davis is speaking with JAZZIZ by Zoom from her home office-studio in Boston to discuss the September 1 release of Live at
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Photo: @Vanguard ©Mardok[/caption]
Davis was just back from Gliwice, Poland, where she’d played with Spalding and Carrington in a celebration of Wayne Shorter’s symphonic music that included an 80-piece orchestra and dancers. “With so much going on, I was feeling totally out of my element, but as soon as Terri started playing, I was home,” Davis says. Always comfortable playing with dynamic drummers, she connected with Carrington in 2016. Carrington had emailed Davis after she read a Downbeat article citing 20 young musicians to look out for.
“I listened to the people on that list who I didn’t know, and Kris blew me away,” Carrington told me last November in a conversation about her New Standards book, which presents 100 compositions by women, and the accompanying CD on which Davis plays. “I emailed Kris cold on her website and said, ‘I’m coming to New York; any chance you want to get together and talk? I’d love to play with you sometime.’”
“I knew Terri Lyne from her early records with John Scofield and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter,” Davis says. “I wrote back, ‘I’m a fan.’ From there, we started emailing back and forth, and she asked if I’d play a concert with her in Taipei. Geri Allen was sick at that time and she passed away a few months later. She and Terri, of course, were very close. Terri wanted to do tribute concerts for her, and she asked me to participate. That’s how I met Val and Esperanza.”
Davis asked Carrington and Jeanty to join her in an improvised trio set at The Stone, John Zorn’s experimental music bastion. “It was super fun,” Davis recalls. “Terri was all dressed up for a Grammy party later, and she comes to the black box of The Stone — it’s a little dingy, and she was worried about getting all sweaty before this big premiere. I said, ‘Don’t worry.’ It was a memorable concert. There’s an element of groove, and Val is such a great improviser. She knows where to put things and how to twist a part in the background.”
The Davis-Carrington-Jeanty trio played several shows, including three in Europe in January 2020, as a trial run for an April week at the Vanguard by the quintet. The pandemic wiped out that gig, which rebooked for the May 2022 run that generated the new album. Meanwhile, the Vanguard invited Davis to do two no-audience livestreams in January 2021, which she fulfilled with improvised sets by the Borderlands Trio (bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Eric McPherson) that established her aural template for the room.
“The dryness of the space, how the piano sounds in it, resonated and stayed with me,” Davis says. But it was complicated to capture that quality with the quintet, in which her piano’s lid was wide open, adjacent to a small keyboard synth, creating a sonic jumble along with drum bleed, buzzing amplifiers and speakers. “We had to do some doctoring to hear everything,” she says, referring to her extensive interface with Ron Saint Germain, who’d engineered her previous Pyroclastic leader albums. “He’s committed, thorough and detail-oriented and is not afraid to manipulate or change the sound to enhance it, as he did on the song ‘Kingfisher.’ I want Ron to be creative and proactive.”
Saint Germain used filters to broaden the sound of Davis’ prepared piano passages on “Kingfisher,” the first entry in her three-part “Bird Suite,” which references both her propensity for transcribing bird calls à la Olivier Messaien and her fluency with, as Holland put it, “harmonic settings and chord sequences as well as more atonal, freer approaches to the music.”
“I learn music best, and gain influences and get excited about music, through playing and doing,” Davis says. “Of course, that wasn’t possible in the pandemic. So I started to rely on some systematic compositional methods from the past. One used Messiaen’s modes of limited composition, which I applied to six different pieces. Messiaen was a big influence. On Diatom Ribbons, he speaks about his bird calls on ‘Corn Crake.’ But I’d never tried to write with those modes, which gave me the notes so that I could then develop the melodies and rhythms and see what comes out.”
Davis based “Kingfisher” on Messaien’s Mode #3. She phrases it with a three-bar groove and established three sections, one “grooving with the guitar solo, then another half-time grooving section, and then a third, totally improvised section. Each section is like a jump cut. After the third section, we return to a cycle of threes, done three times. Each improvisation is very different, and the half-time section also goes into a different key each time. It’s meant to feel like it’s evolving.”
“Bird Call Blues,” written for a COVID-canceled 2020 Charlie Parker centennial tour with Carrington and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, references Messaien’s Petites esquisses d’oiseaux. It opens with Messaien’s voice, followed by pianist Paul Bley — a Davis influence by his phrasing, use of space and propensity to follow the shape of his ideas, irrespective of chordal direction — discussing his bandstand experience with Parker, before Davis uncorks a swinging bop solo on the chords of Parker’s “Blues for Alice.” “I tried to pick something very abstract,” Davis says. “It’s all written out freely, but I wrote it with a bit of a Steve Coleman rhythmical element.”
She wrote “Parasitic Hunter,” “maybe the freest piece of the album,” before moving to Boston, “using bird calls I’d transcribed outside my house that fit with Messiaen’s mode #7,” then funneling to Jeanty clips of Karlheinz Stockhausen speaking about his intuitive music “that Val used to punctuate what we were doing, and we choose to respond to those directives or not.”
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Photo: @Vanguard ©Mardok[/caption]
Davis hadn’t worked with a turntablist before Jeanty, whose presence also inspired the track “Brainfeel,” a term Davis discovered in a New York Times article about TikTok memes. “Val is bringing the idea of memes into the music, including short repeated phrases that feel good to the listener, like James Brown’s ‘funky,’which she always draws on. I’ve felt there’s an element of humor and playfulness in my music and personality, and on this record I found a way to bring in those elements. I don’t write lyrics and wouldn’t even know where to start. But sometimes I like to incorporate words, and using clips was a way to do that.”
For “Nine Hats,” Davis had a pianist play and overdub multiple lines by player-piano composer Conlon Nancarrow for Jeanty to sample, then programmed material from Eric Dolphy’s “Hat and Beard” into an inexpensive Arturia Micro Freak synthesizer purchased during the pandemic and manipulated it to move different keys and octaves and sustain.She juxtaposes prepared piano and synth colors on the rubato opening section of “Endless Columns,” which gives way to a long declamation by Lage that proceeds over Dunn’s and Carrington’s restrained yet ever building groove-lock.
Carrington guides the flow on two propulsive versions of her dear friend Wayne Shorter’s “Dolores.” “Every time this tune came up during the week, I could hear Terri breathe, like, ‘“Ahhh ... OK,’” Davis says. “On the original recording [Miles Smiles], there’s an element of searching. I don’t think they’re playing on changes. There are some Real Book changes, but I don’t think those are correct. I wanted to bring the flavor of that mentality and play it in a more open-ended way.”
A few weeks before their Molde duo, Taborn remarks that (Kris) Davis’ approach to curating groups resembles (Miles) Davis’ “in the sense of taking inspiration from different musicians and inviting them in.” He continues: “As opposed to, ‘Oh, I need this thing in the music,’ she’s curating interesting assemblages of people and keeps extending her context in terms of writing and what’s possible aesthetically. Another tack might be to stay within your safe zone in terms of ‘I know how to write for these instruments or these instrumentalists.’ But she’s continually saying, ‘I’ll find some things to do and we’ll make it happen.’ A very proactive, positive engagement with the creative process. She teaches that way, too. She tells her students that continually challenging your context brings its own rewards and it can actually be fun.”
“I teach a wide-ranging curriculum for my ensembles at Berklee,” Davis says, noting that none of BIJGJ’s 11 ensembles comprises more than 50 percent of any gender or binary designation. “It’s a mix of learning pieces and composing. For example, I’ll give everybody one tone row and they write a piece based on this collection of pitches. Last semester, when [Carrington’s] New Standards book came out, we focused on learning pieces by women composers. I also created a digital collection, where we gave grants to 10 women to create digital collections of their scores for the Berklee Library, and then made it available on Bandcamp, so any institution could buy those collections. I’ve been using those pieces to supplement the book, so we can go deeper into other pieces by composers who are in it. One semester we looked at John Zorn’s Cobra; we looked at some game pieces, and we did some graphic score things. On top of that, more than half the classes are guest artists, so the students are often learning the guest artist’s music. For example, Nicholas Payton and Ledisi both come for four weeks out of the semester. That mix is Terri’s vision.
“The New Standards book has such a wide range, and people at many institutions are reaching out and making courses based on it. There was an event in Boston that hired 30 bands to play along the Charles River, each playing their arrangements of the same 10 pieces, all from the book, including one of mine. I thought that was cool, that I’m going to hear my piece played by 10 different groups as I walk down the Charles River.”
She’s more ambivalent about classical pianist Rory Cowal’s 2018 recording of Davis’ fully notated “Eight Pieces for the Vernal Equinox” on Clusters: American Piano Explorations (New World). “I was curious to try, first of all, to write for another pianist and see if some of my language and ideas around composition translated,” she says. “I felt that they did, so that was good. But it’s weird to listen to someone else play something you started to find or improvise on the piano and fleshed out into this longer piece. I’m writing a lot of things that incorporate improvisation and blur the lines between written music and improvisation. I decided to write these through-composed pieces mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to write something without doing it in the moment, where the sense of pacing happens naturally. These pieces tried to solve that question. I don’t think I totally figured it out.”
Both Holland and Taborn remark on Davis’ rhythmic legerdemain and time feel that, in conjunction with what Taborn describes as a “comprehensive technique, studied approach, knowledge about the piano, inquisitive nature and creative drive to push things forward,” make her a “next-level player.”
“Drummers are super-important to me, and I play so differently based on who’s playing,” Davis says. “Sometimes I feel there’s a flow and I’ll be riding the wave ahead of what the drums are doing. Or it’s happening at the same time, or I’m responding to something they’re doing. It depends on how the drummer rides the wave. If a drummer is playing time or a groove, I might choose to play something more floaty over that, or I try to play something more in time with the drummer, or change the idea that’s still in the same rhythm to a different tonality, or how much repetition versus how much change.”
She hearkens to undergraduate years at the University of Toronto, when she played a quotidian early set at The Rex, a popular club. “That was my first experience letting go of the form and just playing in the moment,” she says. “I found I could be more abstract harmonically or melodically, but as long as I played rhythmically, it was cool. I think that mentality has stayed with me. This morning I was watching some clips of Cecil Taylor. He’s playing abstractly, but it’s so rhythmic. The rhythm ultimately is what draws people in.”
It was time for Davis to return to practicing for her imminent tour with Holland, with whom she first shared a bandstand in 2021 on the Walter Smith III-Matt Stevens date In Common III. “We felt a connection and decided to try to play some duo,” Davis says, explaining the back story of a memorably telepathic recital at Brooklyn’s 2022 Bang on a Can Festival that this writer attended. “Dave said, ‘I think I want to do something more with you.’ He’s on so many of my favorite records, from Kenny Wheeler’s Gnu High to his own albums like Extensions and Seeds of Time, and, of course, playing with Anthony Braxton and Sam Rivers and Geri Allen. We just rehearsed last week. I know where he is at all times. He’s so clear and creative and generous. He writes great tunes. I’m really looking forward to the tour.”
Two weeks later, Holland, speaking by Zoom a few hours before the quartet hits at the Northsea Jazz Festival, revealed that the duo will resume at SFJAZZ next May. “Kris has a fantastic touch, and she’s carving out her own approach to the music, synthesizing so many influences into a very strong vocabulary,” he says. “But she’s also such a sensitive player to the group. I always feel this communicative factor of the conversation on stage. She clearly values the quality of a group playing together. Her group doesn’t just feature and showcase her. Kris concentrates on the total sound, and at times she’s happy to take a background role and let other people have plenty of space. I respect that. I think that’s what the music is about.”
https://open.spotify.com/album/3p9UoK5d40gZD0Ibr0rkXO?si=JrCBX8idQpmEdaiCqy005w
Featured photos: @Vanguard ©Mardok.