Caroline Davis had been a saxophonist for nearly 20 years before she decided to focus her energies on playing jazz full-time. For more than a decade Davis, 31, was an academic first and foremost, but after earning her PhD from Northwestern University in 2010, she began cultivating her talent in earnest—and it’s blossomed spectacularly. Her first album as a leader, Live Work & Play, comes out early next month, and it reveals her to be one of the city’s strongest and most exciting jazz saxophonists. Mike Allemana, longtime guitarist for the late, great saxophonist Von Freeman, plays in Davis’s quartet on that record, and he’s had front-row seats for her rapid development: “It seemed like every week she was advancing leaps and bounds.”
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Davis was born in Singapore to a British father and a Swedish mother; work took her family to Atlanta when she was six, then to Dallas when she was thirteen. In Atlanta, then home to national breakout artists such as En Vogue, OutKast, and Jodeci, she fell in love with hip-hop and R&B. Her father listened to Sly & the Family Stone and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and frequently sang along to the horns. After enrolling at the University of Texas at Arlington in 1999, she played saxophone in various school ensembles. She’d started out in a premed program, but that hadn’t stuck. “I quickly realized, after one semester, I couldn’t handle the stress and intensity of all of that memorizing,” she says. “So I changed to psychology.” Because her academic load wasn’t too heavy, she decided to pursue a double major, adding jazz.
“It was kind of a hobby,” she says. “It was more something I wanted to do on the side.” Through college she played in local salsa bands and occasionally sat in with a jazz combo led by a friend. The summer between her junior and senior years, though, she attended the Litchfield Jazz Camp in Connecticut, an experience that energized her—she’s returned almost every year since, first as a student and now as a teacher. The camp also made her realize how limited her perspective on jazz was.
Davis and her husband divorced in 2009, and she finished her degree in 2010. From that point forward she devoted herself to developing as a musician. She became a regular at Freeman’s jam sessions, and Allemana noticed. “The first thing that impressed me about Caroline was she was one of only a handful of young players that came down early to hear Von, and then sit in,” he says. “She really tried to absorb Von’s vibe—musically, socially, philosophically, spiritually.”
Sun 10/28, 10 PM, Hungry Brain, $7 suggested donation.
Caroline Davis Quartet, Luke Polipnick Quartet
Thu 11/1, 9 PM, Elastic, $8, all ages.
Caroline Davis Quartet
Wed 11/7, 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, $5-$10.
