| Jazz moderne |
When listening to Fallows, you can’t help but immerse yourself in the innovative music offered decades ago by groups like Soft Machine or Gong. A music which has taken, like many jazzmen wishing to free themselves from the shackles of absolute respect for compositions, circuitous paths in which the freedom to improvise was not a passing anecdote, but one of the inseparable parameters of their concerts and albums. With her first solo saxophone and electronic record, Caroline wanted to free her music while freeing herself.
As Caroline says: “I made everything you hear on this recording in a zone where I forgot myself and the expectations placed on me by internal and external forces. I re-imagined without limits. Sometimes I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere, but I recorded all of it.”
To achieve this liberating feat, Caroline wrote and improvised Fallows’ music in Ucross, Wyoming, during an artist residency that allowed her all the time and solitude needed to let her creative power run free without boundaries or constraints.
Caroline has spent nearly two decades refining her voice, from her years in Chicago’s experimental rock scene with the band Zing! to collaborations with Nicole Mitchell, Craig Taborn, and the late Geri Allen. But Fallows marks a decisive step inward as she offers twelve tracks in a state she describes as forgetting herself entirely. The result sounds like nothing else she has made, and indeed, like very little else in recent memory, as Jack Kerouac did by publishing his now famous “On the Road”, which has become a cult book for several generations.
The album opens with Springtails and Flower Sway, whose lilting, sampled saxophone textures pull the listener into an altered state with startling immediacy. Davis opens a door and invites you to walk through it with her, taking you by the hand to guide you on ‘her’ path. Impossible to resist her. The ride continues…
Yellow Phlox offers softness and layered harmonies that carry unmistakable traces of Harry Nilsson’s melodic generosity and Brian Wilson’s layered vulnerability — yet these are not imitations. They are absorbed, composed, and made entirely new. Caroline’s compositions convey emotions, allowing listeners to connect on a deeper level. And it’s an emotion that we feel throughout the album and that makes us feel so close to Caroline.
Field recordings gathered at Ucross surface, most evocatively in Bongos and Knahk, two tracks written outside Davis’s cabin, beside the creek. Another sign of this total freedom to compose when Caroline wants, and where she wants. Free from everything.
A few tracks are dedicated to ancestral figures who shaped Davis’s musical imagination: Steve Lacy, the Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, and the formidable Geri Allen, with whom Davis was lucky enough to study.
With Underground Caroline leads us on a path of pure creativity: she drags an aluminium can filled with water across the surfaces of her saxophone, producing sounds that are at once industrial, aquatic, and deeply organic. It is transportive in the truest sense. You are somewhere else entirely while it plays. You are with Caroline, you are close to her, and she invites you to participate in her creations. You are no longer a listener, but you are part of the music you hear, you too are free, just like Caroline.
Will Caroline Davis be for music what Jack Kerouac was for literature? Let’s think about it while listening to this album, taking the road through the fallow fields of musical creation in the 21st century.
Moving between energetic exchanges and dreamlike passages, the recording Caroline Davis’s creative process and her shared curiosity for sound. An unusual and immersive listening experience that highlights the rich possibilities of the saxophone in contemporary jazz.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, March 21st 2026
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Tracklisting:
Springtails
Flower Sway
Mars
Yellow Phlox
Bongos
Knahk
Cloudburst
Holocene Rhythms
Lacy Steve
She Know She Is Water
Underground
Barbara Allen (for Geri)
Alto saxophone, Organelle, Compositions, Improvisations – Caroline Davis, except Barbara Allen (traditional)
Samples – Thích Nhất Hạnh (She Know She Is Water), Connie Crothers (Cloudburst)
Field Recordings – from the land at Ucross in Wyoming
Recorded in Ucross, WY at Jesse’s Hideout One March 5-27, 2025
Edits and Production – Caroline Davis
Additional Production, Mix and Master – Joseph Branciforte
Artwork – Tulu Bayar
Photography – Claire Fowler
Design and Layout – Dylan Aiello