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As far back into her childhood as she can remember, jazz saxophonist Caroline Davis would spend some time in her mother’s native Sweden. And as part of the trip, they would make a stop at the prison where her uncle was incarcerated for 12 years. Firsthand, Davis says, she got to see “what that life had been like for him and for people in that community.”
It wasn’t until years later, during the pandemic lockdowns, that Davis started to more fully realize the impression that that experience had left on her and how it affected her family. Soon thereafter, she began to get involved with the movement to support the ever-growing prison population here in the U.S. She joined projects writing letters to prisoners and played benefit concerts for imprisoned men and women.
“I’ve become friends with some of those people who are still in prison or have been released from prison since then,” Davis tells WW, speaking from her home in New York City. “I feel very much a part of the movement and [am] slowly gaining the trust of more people and working with more incarcerated people over time.”
The work that Davis—who will perform as part of PDX Jazz Festival on March 2—has been doing in support of abolishing the carceral state has also fed into her creative world.
Her most recent album, Captivity, recorded with a new lineup of her project Alula, features the voices and names of people throughout history believed to have been wrongly imprisoned—from Agnes and Huguette, two French women who were branded as heretics and burned at the stake in the 14th century, to Keith LaMar, an Ohio prisoner sentenced to death for his alleged role in the 1993 Lucasville prison riot.
The music that surrounds those voices is an impassioned mix of acoustic and electronic elements. Turntablist Val Jeanty cuts fervently through each track, treating powerful samples of speeches and readings from people like Joyce Ann Brown, a woman who spent a decade in jail for a crime she didn’t commit and became a prisoners’ rights advocate, as the raw material for her impressionistic scratching.
Davis works in drawn-out chords and punchy runs of notes, finding the perfect middle ground between Jeanty’s squiggles and sonic manipulations and the freeform rhythms of drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Chris Tordini.
Captivity is another bold leap forward for Davis in a career full of them. The 42-year-old has been appearing on stages and recordings since the early ‘00s, working alongside a continually rising tide of adventurous players like bassist Matthew Golombisky and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier and legends like Lee Konitz.
Some of Davis’ most vital work is helping bring about more gender equity within the jazz community as a founding member of the group This Is a Movement.
“That organization is based on the tenets of Black feminism that certain people, like Anna Julia Cooper and Daphne Brooks, have laid out,” Davis says. “People who have laid out the structures for fighting the fight and fighting for the rights they deserve. I see it as standing on the shoulders of these women. We’ve learned so much from them.”
Davis’s support for these just causes doesn’t end with the music. At most of the stops on her current West Coast tour, she will participate in teach-ins and other events to draw attention to the abolitionist movement and the prison-industrial complex.
On March 3 in Portland, Davis and activist Adam Carpinelli will lead a community discussion at 1 pm Propulsion Zone about art and justice for incarcerated people. Joining her will be rapper Mic Crenshaw; Trish Jordan, the executive director of Red Lodge Transition Services, an organization that supports Indigenous people newly released from prison or treatment; and Nate Query, the Decemberists bassist who works with a program to help prisoners at Columbia River Correctional Institution write and record music.
“I’m connected with a lot of people on the inside and people who are working for the cause of abolition on the outside,” Davis says. “So I’m slowly working toward building that community and figuring out what needs to happen next.”
SEE IT: Caroline Davis plays Jack London Revue, 529 SW 4th Ave., 866-777-8932, pdxjazz.org. 8 pm Saturday, March 2. $29.75–$238.50. 21+.