Sep 13, 2013
As part of a residency at Cornelia Street Cafe, I will perform with 2 of my well established groups and one experimental ensemble. This will take place on the last Saturday of September, October and November. See below…
September 28th- Kris Davis Trio with Tom Rainey and John Hebert. Performing the music I composed for the Jazz Gallery Residency in April.
October 26th- LARK! CD release party (on Skirl Records) with Ingrid Laubrock, Ralph Alessi and Tom Rainey. (We are also playing at Edgefest on the October 24th in Ann Arbor as part of the CD release).
November 30th- ‘Experimental Quartet’ with Sam Newsome-soprano saxophone, William Parker-bass, Ches Smith-drums
Jun 11, 2013
Really looking forward to playing with Eric Revis’s trio (Eric Revis, myself and Andrew Cyrille) again at the Vision Festival (Saturday June 15th at 8:45). Also looking forward to playing with LARK (Ralph Alessi, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey and myself) at the Red Hook Jazz Festival (June 16th at 1pm).
Heres the New York Times Review of Eric’s new record ‘City of Ayslum’:
The performance to write home about at this year’s Winter Jazzfest was a freely improvised set by the bassist Eric Revis, the pianist Kris Davis and the drummer Andrew Cyrille: musicians of intrepid poise, foraging together in deep communion. “City of Asylum” (Clean Feed) offers a comparable experience. Mr. Revis, who has earned a reputation for hard-swinging brio in the Branford Marsalis Quartet, works here with mystery and indirection. Mr. Cyrille, an avant-garde eminence in his 70s, and Ms. Davis, an ascendant talent in her 30s, explore a language largely defined by common touchstones, like the pianists Cecil Taylor and Andrew Hill.
The album has three proper compositions — a slinky Revis original (“Question”), a Thelonious Monk tune (“Gallop’s Gallop”) and a hymn by Keith Jarrett (“Prayer”) — but its lifeblood is the uncharted territory, spread across seven tracks that cohere as a whole. What that material reveals is the quality of the listening among the players, an abstract ideal made nearly tangible.
Apr 26, 2013
Through the Jerome Foundation, the Jazz Gallery commissioned me to compose a series of new works in the month of April. I composed a series of new pieces for my working trio with Tom Rainey and John Hebert. Looking forward to premiering the new music in Europe next week (see dates below) and in New York City at the Jazz Gallery May 10th and 11th. We go into the studio right after the performances to make a new CD on Cleanfeed Records, to be release some time in early 2014.
May 1- Stadtgarten, Cologne, Germany
May 2nd- Bimhuis, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
May 3rd- AJMi, Avignon, France
May 4th- Jamboree, Barcelona, Spain
May 5th- National Jazz Scene, Oslo, Norway
May 10th and 11th- Jazz Gallery, NY, NY
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Mar 5, 2013
Ingrid Laubrock, a saxophonist, and Kris Davis, a pianist, share an aesthetic of unsettled calm and unhurried revelation. With the drummer Tyshawn Sorey they make up Paradoxical Frog, a trio that can make free improvisation feel structurally inevitable, like the logical conclusion to a far-reaching argument.
With their own bands Ms. Laubrock and Ms. Davis favor a slightly more careful arrangement of ideas, and compositions with discrete parameters. They both like chamber-group dynamics but shot through with rough texture and a vigilant avoidance of sentimentality. That they appear on each others’ new albums is no surprise. It confirms that their interaction is adaptable as well as sturdy and suggests that they haven’t begun to exhaust its potential.
Both albums — Ms. Laubrock’s “Strong Place,” released in January, and Ms. Davis’s “Capricorn Climber,” due out on March 18 — feature quintets driven by the alert and sinewy drumming of Tom Rainey, who happens to be Ms. Laubrock’s husband. Each album also includes a resident mischief maker with a melodic instrument. On “Strong Place” it’s the guitarist Mary Halvorson, and on “Capricorn Climber” it’s the violist Mat Maneri. On both albums it’s the second track, more than the first, that pulls you in.
The second track on “Strong Place” is “Der Deichgraf,” its title a nod to Ms. Laubrock’s German origins. The piece opens with a stern rumble of pianism before the ensemble gives halting chase, and then tapers off into balladic terrain without relaxing its intensity. (At one point the rhythm drops away to leave only Ms. Laubrock, circular-breathing a single note, and Ms. Halvorson, playing a wobbled-pitch version of the same.)
Ms. Laubrock’s band, Anti-House — which appears on Tuesday night at Cornelia Street Café, before embarking on a European tour — has an insistent rhythmic footprint. One track here, “From Farm Girl to Fabulous Vol. 1,” pushes the idea almost to the point of irritation, with a strobelike repetition assigned to piano and guitar.
But the ensemble, anchored by the bassist John Hébert, also has a way with drift and flow. “Cup in a Teastorm (for Henry Threadgill)” features Ms. Laubrock’s focused meanderings over a garden of exotic chords outlined by bass and guitar. “Alley Zen” revolves around a swirl of arpeggios played, with lovely impassivity, by Ms. Davis.
The second track on “Capricorn Climber” is “Pass the Magic Hat,” which begins with a fluid piano solo over an amorphously syncopated groove. Gradually Ms. Laubrock enters the picture, and into sync with a melody that briefly surges before its ebb. What follows is a solo by Mr. Maneri, slipping through the cracks between tempered pitch. The entire track is an engrossing lesson in ensemble flux, carried out with finesse.
A similar energy spills into the next track, “Trevor’s Luffa Complex,” named after the band’s bassist, Trevor Dunn, and featuring an initial melody played on glockenspiel. Several other tracks begin in hazy but thoughtful quietude, only gradually picking up heat and speed. The quieter moments aren’t necessarily more placid, since Ms. Davis is wizardly with tension. And like Ms. Laubrock, who also does some serious work on this album, she’s comfortable leaving an open-ended impression. NATE CHINEN
Mar 5, 2013
Pianist Kris Davis has perfected a great trick, dressing her elaborate compositions in the guise of improvisation so successfully it’s barely possible to tell one from the other. By doing so she retains the freshness and unpredictability of unscripted interaction while at the same time keeping a taut conceptual grasp. In this she’s abetted by an allstar cast, including frequent collaborators like saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tom Rainey.
Davis sets the mood with her purposefully intelligent promptings, only cutting loose herself on “Pass The Magic Hat”, before setting up the sort of involved interplay characteristic of all the pieces here. For her contribution Laubrock alternates between flowing but asymmetric rounded tones and heated timbral distortion, but meshes well with her frontline partner, violist Mat Maneri, during some tricky unisons. Elsewhere Maneri is angular and abrasive, sliding between notes in a way that ups the surprise quotient. In fact, it’s impossible to anticipate the trajectory of any of the selections. Much credit for such flexibility falls to the rhythmic ingenuity of Rainey allied to the nimble yet assertive bassist Trevor Dunn
Each number is event-strewn but cohesive. The title cut provides as good an example as any: Maneri and the leader pontificate dreamily to start, before building to an energetic crescendo of intersecting layers. A saxophone/viola theme emerges from the swirling chaos, providing a cooling interlude, which morphs into a tappy coda of sustained drones, culminating in a chiming conclusion recalling an oldfashioned clock. While highlights are too many to enumerate, one that sticks in the mind is Laubrock’s forceful tenor solo on “Trevor’s Luffa Complex”, goosed by some explosive comping from the leader.
One of the treats of this tremendous album is to savor the appealing blend of the cerebral and affecting, with new quirks revealed on every listen.
Feb 21, 2013
There’s a kind of quiet at the heart of the Kris Davis Quintet. Even in the band’s wildest, most avant-garde moments — and there were a few at Bohemian Caverns on Sunday — it was easy to detect a peaceful center to the maelstrom. And as loud and seemingly chaotic as its members could get, especially tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubock and drummer Tom Rainey, they consistently found their way back to that centering influence — Davis herself.
The young pianist has a knack for finding short patterns of notes to riff and develop, and, although she can get quite aggressive in her explorations, she kept them rooted in pastel colors and similarly muted volumes on Sunday night. The band’s second piece came close to breaking that cycle, with the piano suddenly forthright and in an out-of-alignment swing; even so, Davis was more restrained than the declarative bass lines of Michael Formanek, and if her playing wasn’t exactly quiet, it was nonetheless thoughtful and unflashy.
It was violist Mat Maneri who followed Davis’s example most closely. He avoided flights of fancy. While maintaining an even, questioning tone that sometimes thickened with cacophonous harmonies and could also overpower the ensemble (Maneri was the most amplified), he passed up opportunity after opportunity to run away with the proceedings. Instead, he kept pace with Laubrock’s rock-hard tenor lines and ultimately deferred back to Davis’s understated statements.
Even through the sonic dominance of Laubrock, Rainey and (to a lesser extent) Formanek, however, it was remarkable the degree to which Davis maintained control. The imperative lines by Laubrock, in particular, were unswerving responses to softer, but no less firm lines on the piano. Though it was the piano that joined into the sax’s already-incendiary lines near the conclusion of the third piece, it was hard to tell who was leading whom.
The same was true for Rainey: His crisp, poking drum sound hung heavy in the air throughout, and it was only close listening that revealed how meticulously he hewed to accents and momentum that Davis was putting into place. Formanek, moreover, seemed almost telepathically linked to Davis even when it was he who seemingly overshadowed her ghostly phrasings. His major showcase of the set, a solo to start the fourth and final piece, simmered with potential energy but remained preternaturally subdued even as it turned into accompaniment for Laubrock’s strident, muscular lines and Davis’ harmonic rainbows.
Just 33 years old, Davis is an artist to watch. To exert such decisive control over an ensemble, while exerting significantly less force than they, is a sign of fearsome artistic powers.
