BILLIE DAVIES– Hand in Hand in the Hand of the Moon
Cobra Basement
Billie Davies: drums; Alex Blaine: saxophone; Braden Lewis: trumpet; Evan Oberla: trombone; Ed Strohsahl: bass.
Billie Davies is a very accomplished free-jazz drummer. Born in Belgium, she now lives in New Orleans, having spent much of her life living peripatetically. The press release and liner notes of this CD are full of stories and these provide both an introduction and, I think, an explanation of her playing. Previous reviewers have made much of the self-taught nature of her drumming. While this is a feature of one of the stories in the press release, I defy any listener to distinguish her playing from someone ‘schooled’ in jazz drumming. There is a vitality and fluidity in the way that she plays the drum kit and this is what I mean by the idea that her stories explain her drumming; she speaks through the drums to the other players on this dates, asking questions of them and replying with the fusion of styles that she has built up over her travels.
One of the stories concerns her being offered a place at Berklee by Max Roach, but turning this down in order to travel and play across Europe and North Africa. Another story has her improvising drums while the painter Serge Vandercamp paints over three consecutive nights of a full moon in 1995. It is this latter event that the recording celebrates. The recording session itself is interesting. As the linear notes explain “This music was recorded live in one take on an afternoon in April with all musicians in one 600 square feet room”. To inspire the players, a slide of the photographs from the time when Vandercamp painted and Davies drummed was shown continuously. For each of the movements in this ‘jazz symphony’ one of Vandercamp’s paintings was placed in the room so all the musicians could see it. One might imagine this as some sort of invocation of the spirit of the dead artist (Vandercamp died in 2005) and that New Orleans was an appropriate place for such a ritual. Musically, there is a strong sense of the New Orleans funeral, with the sax, trumpet and trombone working some slow marches in the early movements and picking up the tempo later on. Throughout, Davies drums with a spare intelligence, creating a pulsing dialogue between her playing and the other instruments. The movements involve short phrases that players introduce, that others pick up and pick apart and then replace with new ones. The detail of the phrases and the ways in which the collective development of the pieces works so well make it difficult to see this as a fully improvised set. However, the liner notes provide a helpful description of the pieces in terms of their keys (moving from D/D#, to C/C#, G/G#, F/F#, E, A/A# and ending in B) with the whole symphony working through the whole-tone scale. How the pieces themselves relate to the paintings is not so easy to discern (although the CD helpfully provides reproductions of the paintings, should the listener wish to contemplate these as the music plays). This is probably less important for the listener to appreciate the music than it was as an inspiration for the players. What is recorded here is strong evidence that Billie Davies is great jazz drummer working free-jazz into conversational and inspirational music.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
Cobra Basement
Billie Davies: drums; Alex Blaine: saxophone; Braden Lewis: trumpet; Evan Oberla: trombone; Ed Strohsahl: bass.
Billie Davies is a very accomplished free-jazz drummer. Born in Belgium, she now lives in New Orleans, having spent much of her life living peripatetically. The press release and liner notes of this CD are full of stories and these provide both an introduction and, I think, an explanation of her playing. Previous reviewers have made much of the self-taught nature of her drumming. While this is a feature of one of the stories in the press release, I defy any listener to distinguish her playing from someone ‘schooled’ in jazz drumming. There is a vitality and fluidity in the way that she plays the drum kit and this is what I mean by the idea that her stories explain her drumming; she speaks through the drums to the other players on this dates, asking questions of them and replying with the fusion of styles that she has built up over her travels.
One of the stories concerns her being offered a place at Berklee by Max Roach, but turning this down in order to travel and play across Europe and North Africa. Another story has her improvising drums while the painter Serge Vandercamp paints over three consecutive nights of a full moon in 1995. It is this latter event that the recording celebrates. The recording session itself is interesting. As the linear notes explain “This music was recorded live in one take on an afternoon in April with all musicians in one 600 square feet room”. To inspire the players, a slide of the photographs from the time when Vandercamp painted and Davies drummed was shown continuously. For each of the movements in this ‘jazz symphony’ one of Vandercamp’s paintings was placed in the room so all the musicians could see it. One might imagine this as some sort of invocation of the spirit of the dead artist (Vandercamp died in 2005) and that New Orleans was an appropriate place for such a ritual. Musically, there is a strong sense of the New Orleans funeral, with the sax, trumpet and trombone working some slow marches in the early movements and picking up the tempo later on. Throughout, Davies drums with a spare intelligence, creating a pulsing dialogue between her playing and the other instruments. The movements involve short phrases that players introduce, that others pick up and pick apart and then replace with new ones. The detail of the phrases and the ways in which the collective development of the pieces works so well make it difficult to see this as a fully improvised set. However, the liner notes provide a helpful description of the pieces in terms of their keys (moving from D/D#, to C/C#, G/G#, F/F#, E, A/A# and ending in B) with the whole symphony working through the whole-tone scale. How the pieces themselves relate to the paintings is not so easy to discern (although the CD helpfully provides reproductions of the paintings, should the listener wish to contemplate these as the music plays). This is probably less important for the listener to appreciate the music than it was as an inspiration for the players. What is recorded here is strong evidence that Billie Davies is great jazz drummer working free-jazz into conversational and inspirational music.
Reviewed by Chris Baber
