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.
Feb 1, 2013
Kris Davis’s style is dry and blunt and authoritative, and still changing. At 31 she’s worked in a circle of musicians including the saxophonists Tony Malaby and Ingrid Laubrock, the bassists John Hébert and Eivind Opsvik, and the drummer Jeff Davis, her former husband. Her playing uses space and tension and contrast; it always has an interior plan and doesn’t leap at you to show you how hip it is. It’s very open, but it comes with rules.
“A lot of times I’ll try to write as little as possible,” she told me. “I want to write things that guide musicians through a certain idea but not control what they’re actually doing. A lot of times I don’t have a specific way in mind that something should sound.”
Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, she’d studied classical music at the Royal Conservatory, but found out about jazz in high school. She got into it slowly, transcribing Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett and eventually studying it at the University of Toronto. And in general she has taken strong but measured steps since. You can hear her small-group conception really come together on “Good Citizen,” from 2010, and then become more abstract in her work with the remarkable trio Paradoxical Frog, with Ms. Laubrock and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey.
She heard free jazz pretty much for the first time around the age of 20 at the Banff International Jazz Workshop, where she met Mr. Malaby and his wife, the pianist Angelica Sanchez, who would later become important friends and collaborators. Moving to New York in 2001 she got up to speed very gradually; after her first album, “Lifespan,” she changed her style completely.
“I decided not to play chords anymore, just to play lines,” she said. “I started improvising that way. Those left-hand chords are such a jazz-piano sound; I didn’t want it to sound that way. So I rarely play chords, and I rarely double the bass line.”
More recently she completed a degree in classical composition from City College in New York.
Two years ago she toured Portugal playing solo concerts, then made a solo recording, “Aeriol Piano,” which has just come out on the Clean Feed label. It’s seriously good, a kind of logical crossing of Morton Feldman and Mr. Jarrett, with her own touch and strong sense of compositional organization framing the soloing. It includes a version of the standard “All the Things You Are”; she comes at it in her all-lines fashion, implying melody and harmony and finally making the tune clear at the end.
by Ben Ratliff – NY Times
