Alive with nurturing visions of simple sonic offerings to morph our present situation, Caroline Davis’ main reason for playing music is to connect with others. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs. Her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B & gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone 6 years later. Today Caroline’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to this shifting environment. As a leader, she has released 8 albums. Her active projects include jazz-leaning Portals, experimental R&B My Tree, & protest band Alula. She has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star Alto-Saxophonist (2018) and has been included in numerous Reader & Critics Polls. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, DownBeat, and many international publications. She is active as both a side-person and a leader in a diverse set of expressions. She has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, Wendy Eisenberg, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, & Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants & residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella Residency, BringAbout Residency, Avaloch Farm Music Institute Residency, The Jazz Gallery Fellowship, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition. Caroline’s awards & recognitions are plentiful. She has been involved with various mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz (2006), the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program (2011), and Jen Shyu/Sara Serpa’s Mutual Mentorship Program (2020). Davis was the recipient of CMA’s Performance Plus Grant (2021), NYFA’s City Artist Corps Grant (2021), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-2020); and she was a fellow-in-residence at The Jazz Gallery (2022) and composer-in-residence at MacDowell (2019), Avaloch Farm Music Institute (2023-24), and Civitella (2025). Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition. As a teaching artist, Caroline brings her unique knowledge of music and psychology to her teaching. She offers a yearly Jazz & Gender course at The New School, co-taught with Sarah Elizabeth Charles, and private lessons at Manhattan School of Music, and has been invited to institutions of all levels as a guest educator. Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar). She is organizing community events as “Community Conversations on Art & Justice for Incarcerated People”, showcasing the intersectionality between liberation and art of all forms.
I had a chance to catch up with Caroline ahead of the Portals November 5th show in Madison at Art Literature Laboratory. We talk about this event being an immersive sound experience, drawing upon the idea of mourning & ancestral communications as textural entities. The music has been mindfully written to offer connections to Caroline’s ancestors, biological and chosen, who have transitioned, and the elements they liked to explore through the life-cycle portal. Through this music, the ensemble engages in the connective tissue between dual & non-dual realms of existence. We get into how show got the right pieces in place for this group, the latest album Vol. 2: Returning & the poetry that inspired so much of these moments. We make sure to find time to talk about just what she is doing within the prison abolitionism movement. As always, it is not only the artists and their art. it is the people.
Photo By: Michael Jackson
