Kris Davis & Craig Taborn: Octopus — ‘single intelligence’
Core differences are at their clearest as percussive bell-like tones and rococo lines complement lyrical ripples
Kris Davis & Craig Taborn
Octopus
(Pyroclastic Records)
There are times when the criss-crossing lines and rumbling full-piano chords captured on this dazzling live piano duet do indeed conjure a single creature with many arms. Even when playing at full stretch, pianists Kris Davis and Craig Taborn deliver the control and sense of purpose of a single intelligence.
The album opens gently enough with Taborn delivering the scattered notes and harmonised cadences of his compositional fragment “Interruptions One”. A short silence signals the theme is complete, and acts as a cue for Kris Davis to join the fray. As the piece progresses, notes scamper to the upper range over low register rumbles while lightly voiced chords and forceful tremolos add texture and bite. As the improvisation fades with a gracious lilt of interlocking rhythm, it is hard to tell the pianists apart.
The sparse interplay of Davis’s “Ossining” comes next, and here the composer’s stark prepared piano gives us a clue: her deadened notes and tick-tock rhythms clearly contrast with Taborn’s loops and fancies. But when the pianists go at it hammer and tongs and riotously swap clusters, thumps and rumbles on Davis’s well-named “Chatterbox”, distinctions fade.
The duo present two covers. The first, Carla Bley’s delicate “Sing Me Softly of the Blues”, builds to a peak before segueing seamlessly into the steady tempo and sturdy single-note lines of Taborn’s “Interruptions Two”.
The second, an elegiac reading of Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space”, closes the album. Here, core differences are at their clearest as Taborn’s percussive bell-like tones and rococo lines complement Davis’s nuanced voicings and lyrical ripples with an impressive sense of common cause.
Such mutual understanding does not come overnight. The tracks on this album were culled from a 12-date US tour, while Davis and Taborn delivered the highlight duet on Davis’s well-received 2016 Duopoly album. Quite a feat given the likes of guitarist Bill Frisell and saxophonist Tim Berne were also featured.
wo of the most formidable pianists and master improvisers of today’s jazz, Kris Davis and Craig Taborn, let their endless creativity fly high with a live recording session that comprises magnetic originals and ingenious reimaginations of pieces from Carla Bley and Sun Ra.
The idea came up after the studio collaboration between the two musicians for Davis’ last album Duopoly (Pyroclastic Records, 2016). Their unmistakable rapport triggered a series of live performances across the country, including the University of Michigan, the Wexner Center, and the UC San Diego, where the pieces of Octopus were recorded.
Opening with whispering invocations, Taborn’s “Interruption One” escalates into thoughtful reflections, ultimately inflating through gusts of melodic whirlwinds supported by regular sparse chords and tense strokes anchored in the lower register. Inexorable, these are consequentially transferred to high-pitched zones to work in counterpoint with other premeditated phrases or extemporaneous ideas. The finale includes an erudite cyclic movement with 14 beats per measure that easily catches the ear.
The following two pieces, “Ossining” and “Chatterbox”, were penned by Davis and are very dissimilar in nature. While the former, inspired by her recent move to the Hudson Valley, combines metallic timbres of prepared piano, smothered ticking sounds, and contrapuntal ostinatos in order to enrich the pulse and texture that lead to a serene finale, the latter sounds like a verbose abstraction of a bluesy swing song built through dense and expressionistic maneuvers delivered at a busy pace. Despite the free posture at the surface, tempo and coordination are addressed with unmistakable intuition, a fact that is noticeable again on “Interruption Three”, where the duo’s go-getting demeanor creates an untamed groove armored with agitated phrases and swift harmonic sequences. You’ll also find shrill trills and lively spirals dancing atop.
The 14-minute rendition of Carla Bley’s “Sing Me Softly of the Blues” is drowned in pure experimentalism and comes attached to “Interruption Two”, traversing the realms of classical and avant-jazz.
The album closes with a devoted version of Sun Ra’s “Love in the Outer Space”, whose slow awakening in tones of classical throws us into a state of dreamy idleness before falling into the irresistible African groove in six presented in the original.
Davis and Taborn’s fingers, like the tentacles of an octopus, have the ability to pull simultaneously this music in many directions or, in certain circumstances, make it flow within the same current. As spunky experimenters, their interplay is both surefooted and focused, aiming at a voluminous overall whose parts are congruously attached. There’s a lot to digest here, but this is definitely worthy of your time and attention.
Half of the sixteen tracks on jazz pianist Kris Davis’s new Duopoly are free improvisation, and the other half are loosely based on an original tune or jazz standard. But if you were to listen to Duopoly without a track listing, it would be difficult — maybe impossible — to make out which pieces jump off from an established work and which were made up on the spot. Her freely improvised track with the clarinetist Don Byron unfolds peacefully, with harmony and control. Davis and Byron’s take on Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” on the other hand, is all over the place.
“As listeners, our natural sense is to want to figure out how [the music] works,” Davis says. When the line between composition and free improvisation is blurred, she says, it engages the listener. “It’s like, ‘How did they do that?’ ”
Davis, 36, recorded with eight different musicians of varying sensibility and style — including Byron, guitarist Bill Frisell, saxophonist Tim Berne, and drummer Marcus Gilmore — live to two-track tape with no rehearsals and little in-studio preparation. “The fun part of this is the X factor,” she says, “where you don’t know what’s going to happen and then you suddenly hit the same note and you come together.”
That X factor is at play in “Fox Fire,” a frenetic collaboration with fellow pianist Craig Taborn. At first the tune was almost completely written out, Davis explains, with very little improvisation planned. “We completely annihilated that,” she says with a hint of mischief. “We were just playing into it, sort of touching on it at the end. The idea of the tune is there, but you never really hear the tune. To me, it sounds like it’s completely free.”
Raised in Calgary, Davis originally studied classical music, piecing together an early jazz education with whatever records she could find. Mostly she listened to Keith Jarrett, for his sense of melody and pacing, and Herbie Hancock, for his rhythm. She discovered free improvisation when, in 1997, she attended the Banff International Jazz Workshop. In 2001 she moved to New York — and began moving away from a traditional harmonic approach, listening to pianists like Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, who opened her up to irresolution. She recently made DownBeat‘s list of 25 jazz musicians to watch.
At the piano, Davis sits erect, a polite, welcoming presence. She’ll play a tortuous, note-filled phrase with the seeming ease of a court stenographer, though she hits the keys with an urgent force. John Zorn, with whom Davis has collaborated, praises her “powerful rhythmic drive” and her “ear for adventure.”
Duopoly — out September 30 on Davis’s label, Pyroclastic Records — is the pianist’s most conceptual album yet, and also, perhaps, her most open-ended, because she’d never before played with some of the musicians. Davis’s collaboration with Taborn, her first, worked so well that they’re taking it on the road, she says, with the intention of recording a full album together in the future. The two pianists will perform together at Roulette, in Brooklyn, on October 2. Since their songs will be improvised, there’s only so much you can expect — which is how Davis prefers it.
“The possibility of reaching another level is higher, for me, if I let things be mysterious,” Davis says. “I like the unknown.”
THE WORD “OPENNESS” CROPS UP OFTEN IN A CONVERSATION WITH PIANIST KRIS DAVIS, WHO USES THE TERM WHILE REFERRING TO MUSIC, AND TO LIFE IN GENERAL. REFLECTING ON HER 2016 CD/DVD SET DUOPOLY (PYROCLASTIC) WHICH FEATURES HER IN DUETS WITH EIGHT DIFFERENT PARTNERSSHE SAID: “THE APPEAL OF DUO PLAYING IS THE
OPENNESS OF IT, WHERE THE MUSIC FEELS LIKE IT CAN GO ANYWHERE. THEN THERE IS THE CONVERSATIONAL INTIMACY OF IT, LIKE TWO PEOPLE TALKING, WHERE THERES THIS SPACE FOR GIVE-AND-TAKE.”
For her interview with DownBeat, the Calgary native decided to meet us at a café in the Park Slope neighborhood of her former home borough of Brooklyn, just before giving a private lesson to a teenage student. Davis, 37, moved not long ago to the Hudson Valley community of Ossining, north of New York City, with her husband, guitarist Nate Radley, and their 4-year-old son, Benji.
“It was becoming impossible to sustain a life as a parent and a musician in New York,” she explained. “Our lives are so much easier in Ossining day-to-day, and there’s room for Benji to play outside. I feel lighter overall, with more mental and physical space and time to compose and experiment.”
Although her soft-spoken demeanor and appreciation for suburban gardening might belie the fact, Davis is every bit the driven, focused, prolific artist, very much a modernist. Prior to Duopoly, she released arresting albums as a leader in solo, trio, quartet, quintet and octet formats over a dozen years or so, not to mention adventurous discs with trio Paradoxical Frog (with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tyshawn Sorey) and her contributions to albums by the likes of saxophonist Tony Malaby and bassist Eric Revis.
Duopoly captured Davis performing alongside a dizzying variety of partners: saxophonist Tim Berne, clarinetist Don Byron, guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage, pianists Angelica Sanchez and Craig Taborn, and drummers Marcus Gilmore and Billy Drummond.
“Everybody on the record is involved with different aspects of jazz—but with the common thread of each being a creative musician and a great listener,” Davis said about the Duopoly lineup. Although some interactions were trickier than she expected—it took 12 takes to find happy common ground with Bryon on “Prelude To A Kiss”—others clicked right away. “It was amazing how easy it was to play duo with Bill Frisell,” she said. “We did two takes of a tune, then three improvs—all in a half-hour.”
The session with Taborn went so well that the two embarked on a rare duo-piano tour. “With duo piano, there’s the basic challenge of staying out of each other’s way,” she said, laughing. “But we never discussed the music that much, just working it out on the gig. We talked instead about everything from microtonal death-metal to Geri Allen.” Davis is prepping a live album from the dozen shows with Taborn, for release on her Pyroclastic Records imprint.
Reflecting on Davis’ qualities, Taborn echoed what many DownBeat critics were surely thinking when they voted her the winner of the category Rising Star–Piano. “Kris has the mind of a composer but an improviser’s soul,” Taborn said. “Her music has so much order and design, even as her temperament is open to surprise and challenge. Also, her playing is much more responsive to context than it is to stylistic tendencies. Kris is really a fearless improviser—and the truth is that there aren’t as many of those these days as one might think.”
Davis recently composed a book of classical- style pieces for solo piano. Pianist Rory Cowal has recorded these for an album to be released by New World Records next year, and Davis will be publishing the pieces as sheet music via Pyroclastic. Like the ambitious ventures that resulted in her octet album Save Your Breath (Clean Feed) and the audiovisual release of Duopoly, this new project for piano was supported by the Shifting Foundation, whose David Breskin has become an “indispensable” catalyst for Davis as a producer.
Of late, Davis has been playing music from John Zorn’s book of bagatelles, with a quartet that also includes Sorey, guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Drew Gress. And, inspired by the example of Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf Music, Davis aims to offer a subscription series via Pyroclastic, releasing something monthly—whether it’s a studio album, live recording, video, scores or an interview. “I’m looking forward to opening up the format for releasing creative work. Openness creates room for more possibilities.”
