Caroline Davis: Solo
Caroline Davis: Solo
The Green Room at Crosstown Arts
Friday, October 9th, 2026
Doors open at 7:00 PM | Show starts at 7:30 PM
$20 in advance (plus fees) | $30 at the door
Caroline Davis explores sonic textures offered by interactive technologies, sharing sounds from the saxophone that she considers to be distinctive and quirky. Her solo performances are chosen spontaneously, given the atmosphere of the room and the people present.
She makes use of Pure Data patches developed by the open sources community surrounding the Organelle (the technobear, shreeswifty, critterandguitari, tony j morton, nobuyasu sakonda, soxsa, varicela, nicky-system, samesimilar, and chrisk).
The music during this performance will pull from Caroline’s recent solo album, Fallows, created during a time of rest on land in Ucross, Wyoming. Bell hooks was a constant source of inspiration during this time, through the following ideas: love as a practice of freedom, radical openness, maintenance of commitment, using community as a means of escape, belief in one’s capacity to transform, what it means to listen, and eliminating elimination.
Caroline Davis is a Brooklyn-based saxophonist, composer, and activist, whose work is driven by a desire for connection and a belief in music’s capacity to expand listeners’ ears, minds, and hearts. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition, she is the recipient of the DownBeat Critics Poll Alto Saxophone Rising Star Award, as well as fellowships from NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, Chamber Music America, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her residencies include MacDowell, The Jazz Gallery, Civitella, and the Rockefeller Estate, and she has served as a mentor for New Music USA’s Next Jazz Legacy program.
Davis’s work spans a wide range of creative contexts, rooted in improvisation and social inquiry. She has released eight albums as a leader and collaborated with artists such as Allison Miller, Lee Konitz, John Zorn, Angelica Sanchez, The Femme Jam, Miles Okazaki, Nicole Mitchell, Rajna Swaminathan, and Matt Mitchell. Her most recent release, Portals, explores themes of grief and memory, and she is also a contributor to Terri Lyne Carrington’s New Standards, a landmark collection of jazz compositions by female-identifying composers.
In addition to her work as a performer and composer, Davis is a dedicated educator, teaching courses on gender in jazz at The New School and maintaining a private studio at the Manhattan School of Music. Her artistic practice is deeply intertwined with advocacy, including work for gender equity through This Is A Movement, and for current and formerly incarcerated individuals through initiatives such as Justice for Keith LaMar, Freer Records, Keys Beats Bars, and Creative Beyond Incarceration.
