Caroline Davis: Fallows
Ropeadope Records

Every album saxophonist Caroline Davis has released has been adventurous in one way or another (see, for example, 2019's trio date Alula), but Fallows, pitched as her “debut solo release of saxophone and electronics,” pushes that to a further extreme—commendably. While she's a sought-after, Brooklyn-based freelancer you might see on any given night contributing to a colleague's set at NYC's The Jazz Gallery, on Fallows she's alone and giving full and free rein to her imagination and artistic impulses. There's nothing safe about the music; instead, it's Davis “out there,” following her instincts and experimenting playfully with samples, field recordings, electronics, and Organelle (a processing and beat-making machine), her alto saxophone the centre of the creative storm. Spread across a dozen pieces, the results are unpredictable and engrossing.

How adventurous is it? “Holocene Rhythms” could pass for a Davis homage to J Dilla's Donuts, whereas “She Know She Is Water” suggests some Robert Rauschenberg connection in the way elements coalesce into some trippy collage of musical scraps, voice samples, skittering beats, and chattering synths. The fertile seed for Fallows was planted during a March 2025 artist residency at Ucross in Wyoming that allowed Davis to enter, in her words, “a zone where I forgot myself and … re-imagined without limits.” Abetting her process was a Mary Oliver poem “Fall Song” (1984) that reads, in part, “now is nowhere except underfoot, moldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries—roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water.” Drawing for inspiration from a sprawling ranch setting teeming with rocks, water, and birds, Davis embraced the possibilities the residency afforded by gathering field recordings and improvising and writing, all of it collected and then sculpted into its released form.

As stated, alto sax inhabits the music's centre, but Fallows isn't the sound of Davis strutting her chops; instead, saxophone here acts as one organism-like part of a fully alive ecosystem. Though Davis's interest in electronics began two decades ago when she was living in Chicago and working on her doctorate, the residency gave her an opportunity to pursue the interest even more. Fallows isn't a “jazz” album (whatever that is), though Davis does as jazz artists often do in honouring those who inspired her, in this case figures such as saxophonist Steve Lacy and pianist Geri Allen. Davis met her through the International Association for Jazz Education's Sisters in Jazz program and honours her memory with the heartfelt ballad “Barbara Allen (for Geri),” the traditional the only non-original on the album.

“Springtails” finds Davis both operating as beat-maker and delivering a constellation of alto saxes, one the singing lead and the others a fluttering background collective. Ideas spill forth helter skelter, the piece a vibrant, freewheeling statement of intent for the project in toto. Each track successively expands on the album's scope, “Flower Sway,” for instance, distancing itself from the opener with its convulsive stream of flickering synth warblings and a beat pulse that's as contorted as it is skeletal.

Davis created “Mars” after seeing the planet in the night sky at the site, and its combination of lead saxophone and synthesizers calls to mind the kind of improv Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul once engaged in as Weather Report co-leaders; emerging halfway though is a pulsating electronic drone one might imagine as some transmission sent from Mars to mystified earthlings. Gentler in tone is “Yellow Phlox,” where layered saxes pulse softly as bird calls and water noises pry their way into the arrangement. Continuing on in that vein, “Bongos” and “Knahk” couple hocketing saxes with the flowing stream of a creek outside Davis's cabin. The eyes are again cast skyward for “Cloudburst,” a ruminative meditation illuminated by her ghostly alto. The set's most experimental cut might be “Underground” for its juxtaposition of eerie saxophone multiphonics and hollowed-out scraping sounds, sourced apparently from a water-filled aluminum can being dragged across the instrument's surfaces.

May 2026