Kris Davis

Kris Davis has distinguished herself as one of the most inventive and distinctive pianists active in New York’s forward-looking jazz community during the twenty-first century, whether directing ensembles, participating in collective projects, or appearing as a supporting player. Strict self-imposed rules and unconventional strategies mark her process; she sometimes eliminates harmony altogether, concentrating instead on linear material. Her first recording under her own name, the widely praised Lifespan from 2004, already displayed this outlook. Classical modernists and jazz originators both inform her language, as she freely references György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, and Morton Feldman while also invoking Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Herbie Hancock, and Keith Jarrett; the 2011 solo album Aeriol Piano makes these sources audible. She likewise probes intersections between current post-minimalist composition and creative jazz, recalling minimalist pioneer Steve Reich on the 2018 duo album Octopus recorded with Craig Taborn. Further joint ventures appeared with Blood Moon in 2020 alongside Ingrid Laubrock and with In Common III in 2022 featuring Matthew Stevens and Walter Smith III.

Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Davis began piano lessons while still in kindergarten. After relocating to Calgary, Alberta, she pursued classical studies through the Royal Conservatory of Music before moving to Toronto in 1997 on a scholarship to the University of Toronto. Although she had already joined her junior-high jazz band at age twelve, it was in Toronto that she committed fully to jazz, studying with pianists Brian Dickinson and Gary Williamson and working both as a leader and as a sideman on the local scene.

Davis returned briefly to the Canadian Rockies for the Banff Centre’s summer jazz and creative music program in 1997 and again in 2000. There she deepened her engagement with free improvisation through encounters with drummer Joey Baron and the Brooklyn avant-jazz duo of saxophonist Tony Malaby and keyboardist Angelica Sanchez. After graduating from the University of Toronto in 2001, she received a Canada Council for the Arts grant to study with pianist-composer Jim McNeely in New York and relocated to that city the same year.

She quickly began performing in the city’s most progressive venues and, by 2003, had taped her debut leader date, Lifespan, in Brooklyn. Issued the following year on the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent label, the spacious, exploratory sextet session featured saxophonist Malaby, saxophonist-clarinetist Jason Rigby, trumpeter-flügelhornist Russ Johnson, bassist Eivind Opsvik, and drummer Jeff Davis, then her husband. Fresh Sound New Talent continued to document her development, releasing the incisive, angular, non-chordal quartet albums The Slightest Shift in 2006 and Rye Eclipse in 2008, both with Malaby, Opsvik, and Jeff Davis, and the acclaimed trio date Good Citizen in 2010 with bassist John Hébert and drummer Tom Rainey.

After earning a master’s degree in classical composition from the City University of New York, Davis gained wider recognition when New York Times critic Ben Ratliff named her one of four “New Pilots at the Keyboard” in October 2011. By then she had established herself as a central figure in Brooklyn’s creative-jazz milieu, and the ensuing years brought both new projects under her own name and significant contributions to recordings by others.

The Portuguese Clean Feed label played a major role in documenting her work after issuing the Ridd Quartet’s Fiction Avalanche in 2005, on which she appeared. In 2010 the label released the debut of the cooperative trio Paradoxical Frog, uniting Davis with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, newly arrived in Brooklyn from London. Clean Feed followed with Davis’s first solo-piano album, Aeriol Piano, in 2011, the SKM trio session Three featuring bassist Michael Bisio and saxophonist Stephen Gauci, and saxophonist Tony Malaby’s nonet album Novela, for which Davis supplied arrangements and conducted six of Malaby’s earlier compositions. Both Aeriol Piano and Novela appeared on numerous year-end best-of lists. Paradoxical Frog’s second album, Union, followed on Clean Feed in 2012. In 2013 the label issued Davis’s quintet recording Capricorn Climber, with violist Mat Maneri, saxophonist Laubrock, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Rainey, as well as bassist Eric Revis’s City of Asylum, a trio date with Davis and drummer Andrew Cyrille.

Davis continued to push the boundaries of Brooklyn creative jazz on other imprints. Thirsty Ear released her second solo-piano album, Massive Threads, in 2013, and Skirl Records issued the debut of the cooperative quartet LARK, uniting Davis with Laubrock, Rainey, and trumpeter Ralph Alessi. She also became a regular member of Ingrid Laubrock’s Anti-House, first as a guest on the group’s self-titled Intakt debut in 2010 and then as a full member on the 2013 Intakt release Strong Place. Clean Feed returned in 2014 with Waiting for You to Grow, a trio album dedicated to her son Benjamin and again featuring Hébert and Rainey. In 2015 the label presented the octet project Save Your Breath, scored for guitar, organ, drums, and four clarinets and performed by guitarist Nate Radley (her husband), organist Gary Versace, drummer Jim Black, and clarinetists Ben Goldberg, Oscar Noriega, Joachim Badenhorst, and Andrew Bishop. That same year she appeared on Sugar Blade with trumpeter Ralph Alessi and bassist Stephen Davis, on Too Many Continents with Malaby and drummer Nick Fraser, and on RelativE ResonancE with drummer Devin Gray, saxophonist Chris Speed, and bassist Christopher Tordini.

September 2016 brought Duopoly, a live audio-and-video package recorded at Sear Sound the previous spring and produced without mixing, editing, or overdubs by David Breskin; alternating guests included Tim Berne, Don Byron, Bill Frisell, and Julian Lage. Additional 2016 appearances occurred with the Sarah Bernstein Quartet and the Eric Revis Trio. In 2017 she released Asteroidea with the Borderlands Trio alongside Stephan Crump and Eric McPherson and contributed to albums by Kristo Rodzevski, Tom Rainey, Dave Douglas, Max Johnson, Revis, and Sam Bardfeld. The duo album Octopus with Craig Taborn appeared in 2018; further sideman work that year included sessions with Ingrid Laubrock, Francisco Mela, and Michael Formanek. She also contributed the track “Grass and Trees on the Other Side of the Tracks” to the Tzadik anthology Winged Serpents: Six Encomiums for Cecil Taylor. In 2019 she joined Rob Mazurek on Desert Encrypts, Vol. 1 and released her own Diatom Ribbons, ten compositions performed by varying ensembles that included drummer Terri Lynne Carrington, guitarists Marc Ribot and Nels Cline, vocalist Esperanza Spalding, bassist Trevor Dunn, saxophonists JD Allen and Malaby, vibraphonist Ches Smith, and turntablist Val Jeanty. She next collaborated with saxophonist Laubrock on Blood Moon in 2020 and joined guitarist Matthew Stevens and saxophonist Walter Smith III for In Common III in 2022.