photo: Jacob Hand

TEN QUESTIONS WITH CAROLINE DAVIS

Along with leading and co-leading a number of groups, Brooklyn-based alto saxophonist Caroline Davis fronts Alula, a bold trio whose eponymous debut pairs her with drummer Greg Saunier and keyboardist Matt Mitchell. Though she's now a solidly established figure in New York, that wasn't always the case: Davis moved to the city in 2013 after many years in Chicago, not only as a member of its own vital jazz scene but as a student at Northwestern University where she earned a Ph.D. in Music Cognition (before Chicago, the Singapore-born Davis called Atlanta and Texas home). The Chicago tenure proved invaluable in other respects, too, including exposing her to figures such as saxophonists Von Freeman and Steve Coleman, guitarist Bobby Broom, and pianist Ron Perrillo. The primary focus of this recent interview, however, concerns Alula, issued recently on New Amsterdam. textura thanks Davis for generously making time to speak with us about band-leading, improvising, influences, and, of course, Alula, the band and album.

1. Alula is the title of your most recent album but also the name of the trio featuring you, Matt Mitchell, and Greg Saunier. You're also the leader of the quintet featured on the 2018 Heart Tonic release and the co-leader of Persona (with pianist Rob Clearfield), Maitri (with Ben Hoffmann on vocals and keyboards), Whirlpool (with guitarist Jeff Swanson and drummer Charles Rumback), and Pedway (with bassist Matthew Golombisky and drummer Quin Kirchner). Are all of these outfits still operational?

All these groups have been active at points in my life, but at the moment, my primary focus is on three projects:

Caroline Davis Quintet: We've been on a bit of a hiatus this year, mostly to give me some time to write more music for the band but have some things planned later in the fall. I'd say this is my outlet to write within the jazz context, but I'm expanding to include strings in the next book of music.

Maitri: This is a project focused on songwriting, with some R&B and indie influences. Ben and I write a lot of the music together, and there's very little room for improvising here. I'm going on tour in mid-August with Ben, and we have been slowly working on a new album, to be released in late 2020/early 2021.

Alula: Alula is my newest project, and there's a ton of open space for improvisation, especially over structures with less traditional harmony. We use electronics in this band, too, and I use a Line 6 DL4 (a guitar pedal) for my saxophone. I'd say this has been consuming more of my energy lately, as I just released an LP in May with New Amsterdam Records. Since Greg has moved to LA, we've been doing local performances with Dan Weiss, and I'm putting more energy into a lengthier tour scheduled for spring 2020.

2. Being bass-less and with Mitchell setting piano aside for synthesizers, Alula's much different from the standard jazz trio. Could you elaborate on text accompanying the album that states its material was “motivated by the study of an anterior digit on a bird's wing”?

The book of compositions written for Alula initially came about after I read a passage in The Sibley Guide to Birds. I remember reading about this magical structure on bird wings that appears during moments of takeoff, flight, and landing, and I was immediately drawn to it. I've since done more research on it, and the alula structure is composed of a digit bone and several feathers. Some of the music (“Coverts,” “Vortex Generator,” “Landing”) is more loosely based on the alula functions that I've read about, but for other compositions (“Wingbeat,” “Scapulars”), I took number combinations to develop the pieces. For “Wingbeat,” in a scientific report on Eurasian magpies' wingbeats, I used some wingspan-to-bird size relationships to develop two ordered pitch groupings. The saxophone / high synthesizer voice has twenty-nine, and the low synthesizer voice has fifteen. The prime number twenty-nine denotes the uniqueness of this structure, and fifteen is divisible by three and five, asymmetric numbers, that reflect the general shape of the structure.

3. How much control do you like to exercise over the musicians' playing when you're the leader and composer? How much direction, for example, did you give Mitchell and Saunier before recording the Alula tracks?

There are of course moments of improvisation written into my scores, and Matt's parts are pretty much written out in the way I'd like for them to be played. All that being said, there's a lot of room for individual changes; for example, I'm not too picky about register shifts, so if Matt wants to take move things up or down by an octave or two, it's fair game. I'm also very open to whatever happens during a performance, and I'm never trying to control anything to happen or not. I like when musicians have freedom to explore, and I trust them in those ways. In the studio, things went pretty smoothly; I had some comments for particular songs and we added layers of synthesizers as we went along, but it all happened fairly quickly (over about eight hours).

4. It's not uncommon for a contemporary jazz musician to have an academic background, but in most cases it's involvement in a music program at Berkelee or the like. You, on the other hand, earned a doctorate in Music Cognition at Northwestern University in Chicago in 2010, obviously making you the exception to the norm, and you've also been a guest educator at a number of different educational institutions. How specifically has that background informed your playing style and your approach to composition and improvisation?

For me, I tend to keep the academic thinking away from my playing, improvising, and composing, especially in their present moments. There are certain things I've learned about the way we organize information that have helped me strategically memorize music, and recently I've been checking out more of Charles Limb's work on improvisation and the brain. Some of this research shows that when we're improvising, our brains aren't self-analyzing. I almost fell off my chair when I read that; I mean, it's what we all want, we just want to be right there in the moment, playing and experiencing the music as it comes to us. I also learned a lot about research at Northwestern, and my pathways of inspiration do reflect that—I tend to get into a certain topic and let that naturally inform my composing, but it always depends on the medium. For Heart Tonic, I did lift some arrhythmias that I heard on recordings in some of those pieces, but some of that music was based on my research of what patients feel, day-to-day, when they have an arrhythmia.

photo: Jacob Hand

5. As someone listening from the outside, I'm fascinated to think about what's going on inside a jazz musician like yourself when you're improvising. How much of what you're playing during a solo is analytical, conscious, intuitive, and/or completely unscripted?

Intuitive playing can lead to a lot of complex music. Some of my greatest highs have come when the written music becomes a part of me, and I naturally create new melodies, progressions, rhythmic variations over set forms—spontaneous, but related to the form. I find this question to be fascinating, and I think there's a continuum of how much of what we play is improvised versus worked out in the practice room. For me, I strive to be a player who is of the improvising mind, but when tempos get fast and there's less time to truly improvise in certain settings, there are bits of language that I gravitate towards. This isn't like a cut-and-paste kind of thing; rather, it's that these bits help me in the search for more juicy ideas that will water the seed of the music itself. With regard to the language bits, as I'm calling them, these are ideas of my own that I've worked on and incorporated into my playing. It takes months to do this kind of thing.

6. For both Alula and Heart Tonic, you drew upon extra-musical elements, aspects of The Sibley Guide to Birds for the former and cardiology for the latter, with its compositions conceived with the beat of the human heart in mind and specifically the condition known as “arrhythmia." Do you foresee yourself drawing from other areas of interest for future releases, such as the quintet follow-up to Heart Tonic? How does the writing process differ for you when there's no extra-musical content and you're confronting a blank page?

Regarding Alula, I'm digging into the study of this structure for the next set of compositions--photos, drawings, ratios—this is my current inspiration. Many composers have found inspiration in the study of birds (Messiaen, Bruckner, Ralph Vaughan Williams), their calls, their flight patterns, and this is my passion at the moment.

For the quintet, right now I'm writing without any extra-musical content. The main thing that brings me to the blank page is my grief, as my dad died about six months ago. I have been slowly recovering, but I don't think I'll ever be the same. It's the sadness that is feeding my work.

photo: Jacob Hand

7. You're now Brooklyn-based, but six years ago you moved from Chicago where you were part of a close-knit music community. Why did you decide to make the move, given how fertile Chicago is as a jazz center?

I always wanted to live in New York, and it seemed like the right time to make the move. The family I've been a part of every summer at Litchfield Jazz Camp/Festival is mostly New York-based, and I felt a lot of personal inspiration from those people, like Julian Shore, Mario Pavone, Jimmy Greene, Albert Rivera, Claire Daly, Jon Michel, Mike DiRubbo, Sean Pentland, Zaccai Curtis, Luques Curtis, Nicole Zuraitis, and Carmen Staaf, to make that move.

8. How difficult was it to effect the transition from one to the other, and did the reputation and connections you'd established in Chicago enable you to make the move seamlessly or did it feel like you were starting from scratch?

It was very hard to leave Chicago; I even left a nice teaching position there to pursue this lifestyle, but I know I made the right decision as I feel more creatively fulfilled than ever. I'm not sure if that has to do with New York, it might just be where I am in my life. Chicago did that to me too, but I was in this place of teaching a lot there, and here I'm at a place where I'm not doing that as much, and I can focus on writing more.

In certain ways, yes, I did feel like I had to start over, but it strengthened me, and I've been doing that kind of move for years and years—Singapore to Atlanta to Dallas to Chicago to New York, with many stops in Sweden along the way; my immediate family taught me how to adapt, and I've felt alright about that process since I moved here.

photo: Kelly Fleming

9. I'm guessing your having moved around so much has had a profound impact on who you are and the way you see the world. How long did you live in Singapore and in what ways has that experience affected your outlook and musical approach?

Yes, my parents loved traveling when I was little, so I logged a lot of miles in places like India, China, Tunisia, New Zealand, Australia, and all over Europe. My mom is especially one who tends to move often, and that sort of restless nomadic spirit runs through my veins. I love traveling, especially to play in far away cities, and I'm sure that seed was planted years ago when we lived in Singapore. I remember loving fun foods also, fish ball soup being one of my favourites as a little girl. My parents thought it was gross. I have a huge love for Asian foods in general—Japanese, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian—I can't get enough of it. So if you see me out there on the road and bring me a box of this stuff, I'd love you forever.

Musically I'm not sure; I guess I listen to a wide variety of music, like most musicians, and I naturally want to incorporate different sounds and textures. Not really unique to where I grew up, but a potential influence. One thing I aim for is to find a way to play my instrument in a unique way, something that pushes me (and hopefully others) in new directions. I think it's a common thing amongst people I relate to.

10. Steve Coleman's said to be one your biggest influences. In what ways has he influenced you? Who else has been critical to your development as a player and composer?

I met Steve at Von Freeman's jam session at the New Apartment Lounge, in the early 2000s. I know he had been going there for years, but that's when I was going there weekly to hear Von. I've been to a lot of Steve's workshops and practiced some of his concepts, but not totally in depth the way many have. Through the years, he's helped me to develop certain things about my playing because he's radically honest about what he hears.

Some of my other influences come from outside of jazz music: David Bowie, Deerhoof, SWV, Carla Kihlstedt, Laurie Anderson, Webern, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Bartok; some within jazz: Geri Allen, Lee Konitz, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Melba Liston, Chris Speed, Patrice Rushen, Von Freeman, John Hollenbeck; and some within film: Charles Burnett, Agnès Varda, Ingmar Bergman, Jane Campion.

September 2019