Caroline Davis' Alula: Captivity
Ropeadope

With Captivity, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis and her Alula partners deliver their first social justice album, its compositional focus eight figures subjected to incarceration. Helping Davis realize the project are drummer Tyshawn Sorey, bassist Chris Tordini, and, credited with turntables and samples, Val Jeanty. Guest contributions also come from Qasim Naqvi and Ben Hoffmann, who add modular synthesizer and prophet 6 to selected tracks. It's a new, quartet-styled iteration of Alula, with Davis and Tordini joined by new faces in place of keyboardist Matt Mitchell and drummer Greg Saunier.

Captivity isn't, of course, the first time a jazz artist has tackled social justice issues—Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite and John Coltrane's “Alabama” spring immediately to mind—but it is the first time Davis has tackled one head on. There's an intensely personal reason she decided to confront incarceration-related injustices: as a ten-year-old, she visited her uncle during his stay in a Swedish jail. Seeing firsthand the impact the prison system had on him made an indelible impression on the young girl, and when the pandemic brought things to a standstill she used the downtime to learn more about the topic and bring some degree of catharsis to her own experience with it. In focusing on incarcerated figures such as Keith LaMar, Jalil Muntaqim, Susan Burton, and Joyce Ann Brown and inmates with whom she has corresponded, Davis has produced a provocative and illuminating listen.

Her statement is all about seeking justice for those who for any number of reasons—the colour of their skin, their sexual preferences, etc.—have seen their rights and freedoms denied. Those include Muntaqim, a political activist and onetime Black Panther Party member who languished in prison for fifty years before his 2020 release, and Keith LaMar, who's currently on death row in an Ohio prison for a crime many believe he didn't commit. Black women such as Sandra Bland, whose death in her prison cell was suspiciously deemed a suicide, are also part of the conversation, but Davis looks back too, to Agnes Franco and Huguette de la Cote, accused heretics burned alive in the fourteenth century, and Galileo, condemned by the Catholic Church for his heliocentric view.

Bolstering the impact of the subject matter is music that's by turns tumultuous and boundary-pushing. As Davis and Jeanty flood the material with layers of sax and samples, Sorey and Tordini bring stability to the leader's oft-intricate compositional structures. The album's heady mix of electronics, voices, improv, and general wildness could veer out of control were it not for the order imposed by the rhythm twins. “[the day has come]” sets the mood with dissonant flurries of drums and echo-drenched voices, the sample a reading of Sojourner Truth's speech from 1867. Animated by a sing-song sax line and pulsating synth pattern, “burned believers” achieves immediate liftoff, the production sounding like some hypothetical meeting between Davis and The Bomb Squad. In this first of many brain-addling tracks, frenzied scratching from Jeanty and high-velocity soloing from the leader combine with Sorey's hard-hitting beat and Lorraine Hansberry and Astrid Delais speech samples. Gusts of winds swirl through the Galileo piece, “and yet it moves,” which aptly ventures into spacey territory whilst also coupling boisterous interactions between Davis, Tordini, and the ever-eruptive Sorey.

The album's not an unrelenting sonic storm, however, as Davis works a few interludes of less aggressive design (e.g., “[terrestrial rebels]”) into the set-list. Written for Muntaqim, “synchronize my body where my mind had always been” registers as a more contemplative meditation on the prisoner's plight and his longing for a home to call his own, even if it does ultimately mutate into a fierce throwdown. Gentler still are the Lamar-conceived “a way back to myself,” which flirts with lullaby-like balladry and features some of the leader's prettiest playing, and the hymnal outro “put it on a poster.” Even with Jeanty's turntable swizzle and Naqvi's synthesizer punctuating the music, “the promise i made,” written to honour the indomitable spirit of the wrongfully convicted and eventually exonerated Joyce Ann Brown, swings, thanks to the grooving pulse of the rhythm partners and bright saxophone voicings.

November 2023