When I reached saxophonist Caroline Davis this week, she was driving on Highway 80 somewhere between Michigan and Iowa, on her way to a gig. In other words: already in motion.
That feels like the right place to find her. Because the music she’s making right now lives in motion too—between composition and improvisation, between technology and nature, between past and present.
Her new solo project, Fallows, comes to Roulette in Brooklyn on April 7. It’s a performance built from saxophone, electronics, and real-time construction. It’s music she’s only just begun performing live on this tour.
“These are the first shows,” she told me. “Every night is sounding different, quite different.”
Davis was born in 1981, the same year the Ucross Foundation was established, where she would later make this music. She notices these alignments. “There’s no way the universe isn’t involved with this synchronicity,” she explained.
That sense of connection runs through everything she does. There are her musical influences—artists like Eddie Harris, who expanded the possibilities of the saxophone through electronics.
“I would’ve never been able to figure out how to do any of this if it wasn’t for Eddie Harris… working with Bob Moog to develop a synthesizer for his live performances,” Davis told me.
There are her teachers, like pianist Geri Allen, who helped her think about music as an experience.
“She taught me about the concept of events in the music… what is the possibility of this event living beyond the stage so that they’re taking it home with them,” remembered Caroline.
And there are other guiding voices too like soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and pianist Connie Crothers.
She said, “My playing really comes very deeply from Steve Lacy’s sound… and Connie Crothers and her practice of improvising and uncovering her true self.”
There’s also a spiritual dimension to her work, shaped in part by the teachings of the Buddhust monk Thích Nhất Hạnh who she studied with, and who taught her the significance of water. “We are all water,” she told me.
Water, in particular, became a guiding image for Fallows. Water as memory. Water as survival. Water as flow.
Fallows was created during a residency in rural Wyoming, on land shaped by centuries of human and natural history. Davis found herself imagining the lives that unfolded there long before her.
“I would sort of envision and have dreams about what they were doing there,” she remembered.
She walked along ancient paths, conjuring animals at the water’s edge and contemplating a landscape that still holds those traces. And all of that came out in the music she created.
At the same time, Davis is a practical musician; on the road, building this music night by night. Onstage, she uses loops, electronics, and live processing to construct each piece in real time. The compositions are there but they’re only the starting point.
“The seeds are the same, but every night is sounding different,” she told me.
Part of that is craft, an understanding of pacing, of how to create shape and impact in a performance. But part of it is something else less tangible. Call it vibration. Call it resonance. Call it the invisible forces that connect one moment to another.
For Caroline Davis, all of it is in play.
Caroline Davis performs Fallows at Roulette in Brooklyn on April 7.
