Milky smoke from an incense stick is pirouetting around a dozen porcelain cats and one bowl of dry-roasted peanuts. Alto saxophonist Caroline Davis lights a candle. Then she opens a copy of Before The Trees Turn Gray. It’s a collection of poetry written by her English grandmother, Joan Anson-Weber, who passed away in 2010. “I think it’s important to build an altar for people we’ve lost,” she says. “Bringing together all these elements of her was something I really wanted to do.”
The altar is part of a video published on Davis’s YouTube channel to promote her 2024 album Portals, Vol. 2: Returning (Intakt Records). Vol. 1 was released in 2021 after the unexpected death of her father. This time, the compositions engage with her paternal grandmother – with a sharp focus on the emotions, rhythms and ideas captured in those pages of poetry. Some tracks incorporate freely interpreted spoken-word recitals of Anson-Weber’s verse.
So far, the Brooklyn-based saxophonist has released eight albums as leader and has appeared on dozens more as a collaborator. She’s a versatile player, comfortable in fully improvised settings and more straightahead contemporary contexts. Her work includes two records from a project called Alula. “With Alula, I’m interested in how we deal with mass incarceration in the United States,” she says. “With Portals, I’m looking at how my ancestors have influenced my work.”
Anson-Weber had a profound influence on Davis. She studied piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, later entertaining her granddaughter by playing pieces by Tchaikowsky or Chopin. They also sang How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? and other nursery rhymes together. Portals, Vol. 2 offered Davis an opportunity to reconnect with that shared love of music, while examining some of the grief and trauma that shadowed her grandmother’s life.
“People could just engage with the record and not hear any sense of grief at all,” Davis says. “Especially with the way people listen to music these days, which is like… one song. But I made this album for people to listen to from front to back. It’s an experience.”
That experience depicts ancestral connections in a variety of ways. The dialog between Davis’s saxophone and Marquis Hill’s trumpet is perhaps most striking. The instruments articulate composed material with contrasting timbres and inflections. Their improvisations enact the conversation of families, with common mannerisms and blunt contradictions. “Through the history of jazz music, we’ve tried to make horns sound like the voice,” she says. “And I wanted all of us to engage with the sound of my grandmother’s voice and with her spirit, which has been such huge part of my life.”
Several sections of the record include audio of Davis’s grandmother from family videos. “I love spending time in the studio playing open,” she says. “I let the band hear her voice and we improvised, taking that sound as a prompt. There was no written material on those tracks.”
On Darien, the album’s muse is heard pointing out “two southern fishermen, fishing for catfish”. She speaks in polished received pronunciation and her tone suggests such a scene is something of a novelty. “It might remind everybody that I’m an immigrant to the US,” she says. “No person in my family has been born in America. But a lot of people forget that because I don’t sound like I’m from anywhere else.”
Davis was born in Singapore but moved to the US when she was six years old. An organisation in her adoptive land, Chamber Music America, provided funding that made it possible to pay band members for extensive rehearsals. It also enabled Davis to select a mentor. “The person who immediately came to mind was (flutist) Nicole Mitchell,” she says. “I brought unfinished sketches for the band to interact with and Nicole guided us. She helped us more deeply connect with what we wanted to communicate to our audience.”
In that spirit, Davis views the album as a true collaboration. “It’s not really my record,” she says. “It’s my grandmother’s record and it’s the people in the band’s record. With Portals, I’m more interested in having everyone featured. I was looking for generosity and I wanted to share. That was resoundingly clear for me in making this record.”
There won’t be any sharing on Davis’s next release, however. “I’m doing a couple of residencies in some very quiet spaces in 2025,” she says. “One is in Wyoming and one is in Italy at Civitella Ranieri. I’m looking forward to engaging with the saxophone more, from different points of view – like texture and extended techniques. I’m creating sample packs that I can use in an electronic way.”
Looking ahead, the Portals series is developing into a ritual – much like constructing a cat-heavy and snack-laden altar. Davis’s maternal grandmother passed away in 2018 and is a leading candidate to inspire Vol. 3. “She was a dancer and I’ve been playing with dancers recently, doing more improvisational material,” she says. “I’m pretty sure that’s where I’ll go next, but I have to be careful because it’s so emotional and can be painful to open up these places. It’s a ritual, yes. But I just want to engage with music for the fun of it at the moment. That’s what I’m doing with the solo work.”