The pianist Kris Davis and her trio with Robert Hurst on the double bass and Johnathan Blake on the drums has put in the hours since the release of their acclaimed debut Run the Gauntlet, which means in airports and hotel lobbies and all those other spaces seemingly designed to distress and disorientate as well as up on stage where they might feel more at home.
Lost In Geneva – their second album and the first project to be released on Davis’s new imprint 4166 Records – nods to travel mishaps, apparitional cities and last-minute arrivals at impossible to find venues but also to the camaraderie that might be forged through shared life on the road. A couple of years on from the release of Run the Gauntlet the pianist and bandleader Davis says:
After playing together so much and getting to know each other musically and otherwise, I’ve come to realize what makes this band shine. It’s been fun to play the same music night after night and find a way to have a different experience every show. We’re digging deeper all the time, and this trio has become focused on the smaller details within the structure of the pieces. It’s all about those little discoveries and shaping the music together.
That potential through variation and repetition for small epiphanies to be grasped by an ensemble in full flow will be fulfilled time and again on Lost In Geneva but its opening track ‘The Subtext’ refers to the implicit meanings which are wrapped up in texts and conversations rather than spiritual manifestations or extended bodies dislocated in space.
The piece begins in media res or in the very swing of things with Davis’s hurried opening swiftly accompanied by Hurst’s rubbery yet skittish bass and Blake’s quickening drums. Tumbling notes and pooling hesitations from the piano seem to betray an air of anxiety while passages of rapier wit or spirited confab tend to stall out through the repetition of a pensive and head-butting motif. Still urged on by the bass, the conversation does become more amiable and the trio adopt a gentler tone. But it doesn’t hold for long and soon enough pendent or fraught chords are parrying an agitated if musically bravura display from Blake who lashes away from behind the drum kit.
As the piece develops each player (and especially the bandleader) seems to enjoy the thrusts and the perilous frisson of such dynamic interplay, which is ripe with connective possibilities even if the interlocutors remain to some degree stranded or simply in the zone. ‘The Subtext’ then opens Lost In Geneva with propulsive urgency and rhythmic complexity, its brisk stride calling to mind the work of Geri Allen one of the six female pianists (alongside Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Carla Bley, Renee Rosnes and Sylvie Courvoisier) who received a dedication on Run the Gauntlet.
‘Congestion Pricing’ is billed as perhaps the first musical ode to the toll on vehicles south of 61st Street in Manhattan, with Davis a longtime resident of New York City. The toll has produced all sorts of positive outcomes from shorter transit times and fewer road accidents to greater pedestrian footfall and improved air quality. Yet the introduction to ‘Congestion Pricing’ sounds almost menacing or foreboding, dwelling within uncertainty as a solo Hurst delivers low rumbling plucks of the double bass.
In fact there is a kind of observational equanimity to the piece, which begins life somewhat pensively before with a lovely burgeoning quality the three musicians find their groove. Amid curious, blocky chords and a circuitous bass line Blake develops a limber Afro-Cuban percussive rhythm, almost like a loose rumba clave. It is a process of discovery, these deft and willing ambulators exploring as if for the first time the streets where they live.
After a brief lull sparkling glissandos and spritzer bubbles from the keys are accompanied by a brisk clopping rhythm that retains the Latin flavour of the piece. The trio go around the houses then fall into a sashaying glide before they embrace the night for its wilting grandeur and intoxicating possibilities, at last staggered and tipsy as they turn out the lights. It’s a heady piece which suggests that there might be some life in this idea of walkable, breathable cities.
The title track ‘Lost In Geneva’ on the other hand portends to capture ‘the fog of temporal and geographical disorientation caused by jet lag and unfamiliar surroundings’. Evolving over the past few years of live performance, it was introduced to a wider audience last November as one of the four pieces the trio played during their Tiny Desk Concert for NPR.
And from its first glimmering keys ‘Lost In Geneva seems to marry a propensity for the torch song and that late-night atmosphere – portrayed here through suspended chords, lapping glissandos and halting piano runs – with something more nebulous or flickeringly candlelit. Blake’s deft brushwork effects a kind of doubling both for the way that it pans the mix and for its blend of softness and control, a sense enhanced by the varying wash of the cymbals and some scribbles and scrapes while Hurst’s bass throbs or takes meandering strolls. Even when they try for a groove before the close there is a sense of their efforts being forestalled or of the trio doubling back on themselves, but ‘Lost In Geneva’ carries the affair off anyway with grace and something approaching panache.
‘Where Does That Tunnel Go?’ is decidedly more upbeat. A new take on a track from the 2010 album Good Citizen where Davis led John HĆ©bert on the double bass and Tom Rainey on the drums, here Hurst bolts forth bracingly while Blake grasps for his coattails in a bid to keep up. Again the drummer imbues the composition with a lithe and pliable Latin rhythm, his varied career right from some of his earliest stints with Oliver Lake, Roy Hargrove and David SanchĆ©z no doubt standing him in good stead.
‘The Ballerina’ is a piece that Davis has explored in other contexts (notably in duets with Ingrid Laubrock and Craig Taborn) before finally giving it a soft landing right here in the middle of Lost In Geneva, as though with a pliĆ© which is to say a slight knee bend. Yet if your notion of the ballet is all tutus and pirouettes ‘The Ballerina’ seems inclined to tease the listener as it opens through trepidatious keys and percussive scrapes. Hurst bows a tense and eerie drone while Blake splashes lightly over his kit or drags the end of his stick in pooling motions across the tops of his cymbals, before this most tenebrous of rhythm sections drops out of the mix.
Davis begins to set something up as she plays steadily or rocks with a note of insistency in the middle keys before Hurst returns on the double bass with a more pronounced beat. Perhaps this is a Black Swan conception of Swan Lake, residing in the shadows and glinting out of the darkness but even before the composition begins to glide and pick up the pace – which it does over the final ninety seconds courtesy of bright piano runs, a more bounding bass pattern and some crashing percussion – there’s a kind of lilting or sashaying quality to the piece, which teeters and jetĆ©s and appears ever so nimble while remaining deftly poised or thereabout.
Lost In Geneva is about as listenable as jazz or any music gets. It excels again and again by virtue of its deft rhythmic interplay, combining straight-ahead jazz which moves with a staggered and swinging gait with more finely sculpted classical airs and with a contemporary penchant for harmonic clusters and the way that texture creates space. The record’s spirited vigour and the suppleness of those rhythms allow it to gently stir the atmosphere or reward closer listens, as impressions flow like from a wellspring.
Kris Davis moves easily between such contexts. This is a lighter though no less substantial work than her collaboration earlier this year with the LutosÅawski Quartet on The Solastalgia Suite, an engaging but sometimes uneasy or elegiac project rooted in the climate crisis, environmental change and ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home’.
Her work with the Borderlands Trio scrabbled and swept over the terrain in a rapt cycle of wandering and terraforming. Diatom Ribbons meanwhile explored the hidden realm of unicellular microalgae, which are invisible to the naked eye but produce around half of our atmospheric oxygen. Davis drew inspiration from the formal or visual properties of these diatoms – noting ‘huge blooms sometimes appear as beautiful zigzags and ribbons. Up close under a scanning electron microscope, you can see these incredible, ornate structures’ – as she steered a cast of old and new collaborators including Esperanza Spalding, JD Allen, Tony Malaby, Ches Smith, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, Trevor Dunn, Val Jeanty and Terri Lyne Carrington.
When she took that project to the Village Vanguard she became only the fourth female instrumentalist after Shirley Horn, Junko Onishi and Geri Allen to lead a recording from the iconic venue. Diatom Ribbons Live at the Village Vanguard roiled the waters as Davis added the guitarist Julian Lage to the rhythmic sway and textural fizz of Dunn, Jeanty and Carrington. But while the two albums were markedly different the birdsong of Olivier Messiaen proved a connecting thread, from ‘Corn Crake’ and the broad influence of his Petites Esquisses d’oiseaux to a live ‘Bird Suite’ which evoked Messiaen and Paul Bley while serving as a tribute to the blues calls of Charlie Parker.
‘The Bluesy Bird in Bob’s Backyard’ is a Robert Hurst composition which tips its beak to Davis’s recent engagement with Parker and Messiaen while echoing the soulful cries of an avian visitor to his own back garden. The piece is preceded by the spontaneous group introduction ‘Mourning Dove’ where antsy keys and watery shakers lead into a rubbery bass which evokes the image and effect of melting vinyl. ‘The Bluesy Bird in Bob’s Backyard’ then springs to life with shuffling propulsion and a crisp three-note motif as the Kris Davis Trio frolic and flutter through a series of spry moments, with Hunt’s bobbing bass in the second half adding to the abiding sense of alertness and verdancy.
‘Nature piece 5’ feels like a change of pace. An arrangement by Davis of the last of five short piano pieces composed in 1951 by Morton Feldman, this rendition feels bluesy and funky for the way that the trio chop up a halting groove. ‘Clues’ seems to retain a similar palette and temperament, which is to say haltingly offbeat and full of short staccato phrases even once it has built up some momentum. In fact these ‘Clues’ are courtesy of Johnathan Blake who has taken Thelonious Monk’s piece ‘Evidence’ and flipped it backwards. ‘Clues’ first appeared on his 2012 album The Eleventh Hour and the drummer resolves it here through a big barrelling and multilayered climax.
By contrast ‘The Deer Fly’ is fluid yet circuitous with moments of hesitancy, well befitting the subject matter which in the pianist’s own experience implicates a ‘nasty’ bloodsucking fly prone to diving at the heads of hiking New Englanders. So as Lost In Geneva draws to a close we learn that sometimes it might be better to stay out of sight, out of mind.
The album closer ‘Northern Flicker’ is the second group improvisation that began life as an introduction to ‘The Bluesy Bird in Bob’s Backyard’. Its serpentine rattling conjures furtive landscapes, something like the backwoods or outback. Davis utilises more piano preparations – in her own words using a pencil eraser between the strings of her instrument, some fridge magnets and gaffer tape – and at one point another high-pitched tone resounds like a gong or church bell as ‘Northern Flicker’ proves a watchful end to a vibrant album, the trio slowing their restless momentum as they band together to gaze out from a shared spot.
