Jazz reedist Caroline Davis will be in town this weekend with her band Whirlpool. Says Peter Margasak about the group and their new record, “Late this summer they released their debut, This World and One More (Ears and Eyes), which demonstrates Davis’s adaptability to more ethereal and abstract terrain; unsurprisingly they tackle ‘Whirlpool,’ a tune by drummer Paul Motian, who veiled the steely power of his music with plush harmonies and gauzy atmospheres. All three musicians contributed tunes to the recording: Davis’s ‘Freedom Waves Flotilla,’ with its rising-and-falling grooves, allows her great latitude on alto saxophone, so that she can ride the crests of its waves with striated upper-register cries and hug their troughs with graceful, patient shapes that maintain the song’s thread even when they’re not explicitly melodic. Rumback’s lovely, multipartite ‘Dragons in Denver’ gives his cohorts lots of mood and tempo shifts to improvise over, easing naturally from turbulence to calm; the drummer directs traffic and works the gas pedal without drawing attention to himself. Davis gets the lion’s share of the spotlight (and makes excellent use of it), but these aren’t verse-chorus-verse structures, with their attendant strings of solos—Whirlpool’s episodic compositions privilege an ensemble sound that demands full engagement from everyone, and the album proves they can deliver.”
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Sun 12/1: Guillermo Gregorio Emsemble at Constellation
