DAVIS: Run the Gauntlet. Softly, As You Wake. First Steps. Little Footsteps. Heavy-Footed. Knotweed. Coda Queen. Dream State. Subtones. Beauty Beneath the Rubble Meditation. BLAKE: Beauty Beneath the Rubble / Kris Davis, pno; Robert Hurst, bs; Johnathan Blake, dm / Pyroclastic Records 36
This album features Canadian pianist Kris Davis, a name unfamiliar to me, in her tribute to six women pianists whose playing profoundly affected her own style: Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Sylvie Courvoisier and Renee Rosnes. I’ve heard all of these except Rosnes, and like all of those I’ve heard except Bley.
Kris Davis, from her Wikipedia page
Davis is quite clearly an exciting, dynamic pianist who works with tone clusters and bitonal harmonies. The first minute or so of Run the Gauntlet consists of a series of crashing chords in a set but irregular metric pattern, not really a theme per se but merely an introduction to her exciting and adventurous style of improvisation. Although she clearly has a good technique, she is not one to just show off her chops, and she really digs into her playing with a deep-in-the-keys touch. Yet as good as Davis is, I was even more impressed by Hurst on bass. This is playing so wildly adventurous and so flexible that it almost sounds as if he were playing a large, deep-sounding guitar—sort of a bass version of John McLaughlin. With such speed and facility, his tone by necessity had to remain light, but when he switched from soloing to accompanying it was clear that he could produce a rich sound when needed. Johnathan Blake is like to many modern drummers nowadays, extremely busy behind the soloists, often to the point of sounding as if he not only doesn’t hear but doesn’t care what they are playing. Seriously, is this the future of jazz drumming? I ask because I hear it far too often in new jazz recordings that I review, and frankly, it doesn’t work. On the contrary, by constantly playing cross-rhythms rather than supporting what the others are doing, it’s much more of a distraction than a support. The only time it sounded apropos to its surroundings is when Davis played a wild, “outside” chorus that suited his chaotic mood. I really wish that modern jazz drummers would listen to the way Ed Blackwell (with Ornette Coleman), Dannie Richmond (with Mingus) or Elvin Jones (with John Coltrane). THOSE were great jazz drummers. Finally, in the closing chorus of Run the Gauntlet, Blake falls in perfectly behind Davis.
Softly, As You Wake, however, is a completely different kind of piece. It opens with Blake playing all sorts of percussion in the background and Hurst playing some almost Middle Eastern figures on bowed bass, and on this track David plays a “prepared piano” that sounds a bit like a gamelan and a bit like a kalimba (one of my favorite instruments in the whole world). Sadly, it’s a fairly short piece, but for as long as it lasts it reminded me of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But Davis has further tricks up her sleeve, and the asymmetric rhythmic support she lays down for herself on First Steps is truly extraordinary; it reminded me a bit of late Tristano, but freakier and more insistent. This one is a piano solo, and in it Davis truly plays some of the most extraordinary jazz I’ve ever heard in my life. She would certainly have impressed, and possibly even inspired, Mary Lou Williams back in the late 1970s.
Little Footsteps has a funky beat to it, almost like an R&B tune only with a bit more syncopation. Here, Blake is more attuned to the trio in terms of his rhythmic accompaniment while Davis alternates between funky and quite sophisticated playing. Apparently, she has managed to internalize all of her musical influences into a style that is kaleidoscopic in its breadth and scope. She can sound like any or all of the pianists who shaped her at any given time depending on her whim of the moment, but what impressed me the most was her uncanny ability to make even the most outré improvisation somehow fit musically into what came before as well as that follows it. Heavy-Footed is another tune built more around a repeated lick than a genuine “theme,” but again, she makes it work because her mind can follow this pattern even when she improvises without sounding as if she is completely shifting gears. You might call her the “automatic transmission” of jazz pianists rather than the “stick shift”! Yet despite the “heavy-footed” opening, this track ends, surprisingly, with her playing quite delicately—yet another gear-shift in her arsenal.
Beauty Beneath the Rubble was written by drummer Blake. Its theme is ambiguous but lyrical as well, and here, too, Blake plays some quite sensitive drums (which, as the composer, he really should). I’m not sure if it’s the particular piano she played or the way the microphones were set up, but Davis achieves an almost bell-like sonority on this one. On the succeeding Meditation, she returns to her kalimba-like prepared piano; this one is a completely improvised piece, often quite loose in theme but with shifting harmonies. Eventually, she simply repeats a five-note lick while Hurst scrapes his bass and Blake stays primarily to playing the edge of his snare drum mixed with intermittent cymbal work. This is clearly the most abstract piece on the CD, and Davis’ sense of the dramatic is shown by her following it with Knotweed, a rhythmically heavy piece with a minimal and multi-tonal theme before getting into her improvisation. As noted above, she has all sorts of stylistic tricks up her sleeve, yet all of them are musical. There’s none of this “throw some notes up against the wall to see what sticks” feel to her music or her basic approach to jazz piano. She keeps her eye on the ball at all times; she is continuously inspired without sounding haphazard. Although playing in entirely different styles and in different centuries, she shares one trait in common with Jelly Roll Morton. Her mind is a steel trap that hears everything done in piano jazz of her time, retains it, and then mixes it all up and pours it out in her own personal manner. (In this respect she is also like Jaki Byard, one of the most underrated pianists of all time.) And in doing so, Davis—perhaps inadvertently—also includes elements of pianists she does not name as an influence, simply because they influenced the players she so admired.
Indeed, Davis’ multifaceted style continues to reveal subtleties and further invention in the remaining tracks on this album, particularly in Coda Queen which is one of those pieces that is both simple and sophisticated at the same time. In fact, one of the wonderful things about this album is that it inspires multiple listenings. Her playing is just too rich and too multifaceted for the ear to catch all the things she does, and can do, the first time through. This album shoots straight to the top of my list, along with Luzia von Wyl and one or two others, as among the most extraordinary and rewarding jazz albums of the year.
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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