Kris Davis is everywhere in New York these days, playing aggressively brilliant piano with a wide range of creative musicians. Her ears are huge. She listens like few other musicians, attuned to her collaborators with a hair-trigger intensity. She can be a beautiful player, a pastoral accompanist, and moments later she can fly into daring and percussion dialogue that fully embraces dissonance. Her piano rocks as much as it coos. But all of Kris Davis’s moves on the piano are driven by her ears. She plays in and of the moment.
Her latest, Duopoly, is an ideal vehicle for demonstrating her musical empathy. She pairs herself here with eight fellow musical explorers in intimate conversation. Two other pianists share the sonic space with her in real balance. Two very different guitarists join her on a stage always defined by Bill Evans and Jim Hall. Two reed players from the generation before hers provide her with astonishing daring. And two drummers highlight the drummer in Davis herself. Moreover, the program as realized is tightly imagined: a sequence of eight written tunes with each guest, arranged in pairs of matching instruments, followed by the eight free improvisations with each in exact reverse order.
If you don’t know Kris Davis, this is an ideal introduction, demonstrating a huge range of her strengths and interests. With such a range of sounds and modalities, it’s hard to know where to start in describing the experience of Duopoly. The duets with Craig Taborn draw my ear, partly because I heard the duo perform a few weeks ago in Washington, DC. “Fox Fire” is their composed “tune” on this collection (and the album’s longest performance at almost nine minutes), but it begins with a long and playful improvisation, with the collaborators beginning in very different registers and then mixing it up in the middle, trading plinks, squiggles, clusters, and dodging jazz melodies. These are pianists seemingly of one mind. tethered by an interest in keeping the playing bouncing — and the truth is, everything is so organically developed that it never becomes clear what part of “Fox Fire” was written by Davis. Their improvisation in the second half is almost pure texture, a reverent and very quiet conversation of silences and chords, patterns and slow rhythms. Most notably, it is not the interlocking set of lines from “Fox Fire”.
It is also instructive to listen to Davis and clarinet master Don Byron slowly develop their connection. Their tune is Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss”, which they inch toward in abstraction and finally, play… a bit of. Byron’s opening melody is a gorgeous, even arpeggio that Davis caresses and then interrupts with rhythmic play. She pecks at certain notes and provokes Byron to play a few licks from Duke’s classic, but what we never hear is the melody on clarinet accompanied by chords. Byron reimagines the melody freely, and Davis… responds. She plays intriguing counterpoint that is its own beautiful thing. Byron is left to a brief unaccompanied cadenza that leads the players into a sumptuous but minimal two-minute tone poem. Because of the disc’s programming, this leads directly into the duo’s free improvisation: an extended tone poem that is particularly beautiful when both players are finding gorgeous harmonics that make the music shimmer and shine. Both performances, ultimately, are at their strongest when they are most subtle.
“Eronel” by Thelonious Monk is set’s other standard, and it also comes into focus slowly as David plays some riveting free music with a Cecil Taylor touch in concert with drummer Bill Drummond. They develop a groove between Davis’s left hand and Drummond’s ride cymbal long before coming together on melody at the end. Their improvisation takes on a different cast entirely, with Davis eventually “dueting” between mid-high register right-hand lines and a single crashing low note while Drummond plays a thrilling counterpoint on toms that has the quality of African polyrhythms. Marcus Gilmore, her other drum partner, is much more aggressive in his improvisation, battling Davis to a standstill on excitement, busy as can be. “Dig & Dump”, written by Davis, is equally playful but it builds more gradually over time. Gilmore, best known for his work in the Vijay Iyer Trio (and also the grandson of drummer Roy Haynes) fits himself into the syncopated groove of Davis’s written funk line beautifully — and you never wonder where the bassist has gone.
The most famous collaborator here is surely guitarist Bill Frisell. Davis’s written tune for Frisell is called (of course) “Prairie Eyes”, and it plays to his strength — creating an open space for Frisell’s unique tone and harmonic inclination. Davis plucks and then hand mutes her piano strings, achieving a delicate underpinning over which Frisell states his case. The theme, when it comes, is stately and beautiful in that somewhat cold, stunning, “open spaces” way. Their improvisation is similarly transparent, like aural icicles melting as the morning sun reaches them. Guitarist Julian Lage uses a more acoustic sound on his improvisation, and it highlights the way that both he and Davis are, essentially, percussive players.
I haven’t mentioned Tim Berne’s alto saxophone, also present, or pianist Angelica Sanchez, who contributes her own tune, “Beneath the Leaves”. Sanchez is another “talent deserving wider recognition”, and she and Davis are on the same wavelength: lyrical as they want to be but perfectly capable of angular or harsh beauty too.
(Also notable: the CD comes with a DVD of a film of all the performances, presenting the duo partners in split-screen side-by-side form. You get to see Don Byron’s cool glasses, not to mention the fascinating techniques and focus of so many great musicians. A fun curiosity, but why not?)
By the end of this long album (16 pieces of music, like different lines intersecting and doubling back on themselves), you’ve heard Kris Davis in many different modes, blending, inventing, listening. She is the recordings’ dominant player, by definition, and yet she covers herself in the experiment too. She disappears into finding so many different forms of common ground. It’s an astonishing feat, and it makes me want to hear her again, undiluted next time.