This year’s Awards for instrumentalists advance a multi-year trend by the JJA’s voting members to recognize accomplished women among the multiple nominated finalists. Drummer and educator Terri Lyne Carrington (Musician of the Year), pianist-composer Kris Davis (Composer and Pianist of the Year), saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin (Up …
Not content with forging new models on the bandstand, pianist Kris Davis seeks to achieve similar ends with her Pyroclastic Records imprint, which she has set up as a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting innovative artists who create art for …
Kris Davis – Diatom Ribbons (Pyroclastic) At a glance, an odd candidate for consensus: Kris Davis, an improviser-composer with the instinct of an alchemist, made Diatom Ribbons by drawing inspiration from oceanic microbiology, tectonic movement and piano precursors ranging from …
Kris Davis, 39, has spent years as her generation’s powerhouse pianist in waiting. No longer. On “Diatom Ribbons,” her skills as a composer, band assembler, system builder and improviser — a musical auteur, basically — come fully into focus.
The best music—within the jazz world and beyond it—can contain a multitude of ideas and sounds, reference endless genres and tell listeners something about the moment that it was recorded, as well as the past. Diatom Ribbons—and actually a lot …
Hands down, my favorite album of 2019 is the singular jazz/poetry collaboration between Berkeley clarinetist/composer Ben Goldberg and poet Dean Young, Good Day for Cloud Fishing…
If Chris Lightcap and company prove anything here—besides the fact this work compels many repeated listenings—it is that the intersection of jazz and rock can represent a flash-point of inspiration as potent as the convergence of material and musicianship.
Aided by Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Esperanza Spalding, the New York pianist and her band mix lyrical song form, turntablism, and avant-garde strategies in unusually fluid fashion.
Diatom Ribbons is her 14th recording as a leader and marks a new chapter in her career as she keeps writing and playing with imagination, courageously looking forward.
Cross fertilization has been at the heart of jazz since its inception when African rhythms met European instrumentation. That stylistic melange is taken to another level in the cultural melting pot of New York City.