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Two formidable solo artists and bandleaders in their own right, saxophonist Caroline Davis and guitarist Wendy Eisenberg wrote their new duo album Accept When (Astral Spirits) between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. Bill Orcutt, local legend reimagining blues guitar along the fissured landscape of American Primitivism, shares the bill.
We wrote “Accept When” between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space. Our friendship, the quality of attention that colored the light of that and all our other practice spaces, became the basis for our activity and growth as songwriters and our relationship as improvisers. Friendship, how we relate to each other, is our nucleus: the central and essential part of our movement; the positively charged central core of our atom.
A nucleus is supposed to be an especially essential form in eukaryotic cells. Their nuclei are surrounded by a membrane, which in that world permits them to be said to have “true nuclei.” Even their smallest parts, their organelles (incidentally also the name of Caroline’s keyboard heard throughout the record), are held by that membrane. The deepening of our musical friendship, the affordance of space we give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders we write of the preciousness of our existence - all of this we put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats.
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, beckoning new vistas among curious listeners. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs, who treated her as their own. Her family moved to the United States, Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B and 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 seven albums, and her active projects include Portals, My Tree, and Alula. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.
Over the last five years or so Wendy Eisenberg has been keeping listeners guessing. Nominally an improvising guitarist, they don’t recognize any musical limitations, perpetually finding ways to apply a deeply exploratory practice to a wide variety of contexts. Eisenberg plays solo guitar as well as banjo in both acoustic and electric settings, warped post-punk songs in the trio Editrix, delicately dangerous guitar music in the critically acclaimed Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, country-free jazz in the band Darlin', with Lester St. Louis and Ryan Sawyer, febrile post-Prime Time free jazz in Strictly Missionary, and punk-prog in a trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. As Eisenberg told fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi in an interview for Premier Guitar in 2021, “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Their musical range isn’t a glib manifestation of eclecticism, but a genuine artistic essence.
Bill Orcutt is the former guitarist and founder of the notorious 90’s group Harry Pussy, and his sound is a stuttered reimagining of blues guitar, weaving looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician... a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance."