Kris Davis Trio tease and tickle the Vortex
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
If ‘too many piano trios’ is a bellyache that has rumbled around the jazz body politic for some time, this was a dose of strong medicine against it.
Hailed for its performance at last year’s Vision Festival, Kris Davis’ outfit provided a quite gripping example of how fresh the format can be, presenting a sound that, while marked by the sensibilities of New York’s improvised music scene, had an individuality and sense of purpose germane to the Brooklyn-based, Canadian pianist.
The bulk of the music was drawn from the current album Waiting For You To Grow, which was inspired by her experience of pregnancy, and the expectations, projections, imaginings and above all physical realities of new life. On many occasions the compositions vividly conveyed all of the above, none more so than the quite startling ‘Hiccups’, a piece in which Davis’ responsive and dynamic partners, double bassist John Hébert and drummer Tom Rainey, came into their own. As the title suggests, this was an evocation of bumps, jolts and little kicks inside, but Davis did not reduce the form to anything as transparent as a succession of broken grooves or melodic tease and tickle. The hyper-rockabye derived more from a sharp tension between different implications of tempo and meter by each player, as if they were in a post-Ornette/Blackwell marching band where the idea is to move in spirals and circles rather than straight lines. The rub being that the points of overlap were dramatically precise, and that the second half of the piece, where the trio settled into a more regular beat, didn’t forego the playful internal jockeying that had marked the first.
If that composition showcased the band’s quality in expansive mood, then there were moments where the onus was on spare phrases. But they often grew. At one point Davis played a skewed, walking line in the low register, and then turned each note into a deliciously dense chord to create a sensation of weight gain amid forward motion. Elsewhere her right hand work was slightly glacial but not bloodless. While the oblique character of some of her songs may prompt the tag of avant-garde, Davis’ idiomatic range is too wide for that, and in this respect she joins a group of stellar pianists – Taborn, Lossing, Delbecq – for whom the key creative ethos is ‘traditions’, not tradition.
– Kevin Le Gendre