feature photo: Claire Fowler
Sometimes to find your inner self, you have to take respite from the outside world. That’s what alto saxophonist, composer and bandleader Caroline Davis did when she spent a four-week residency in northern Wyoming, where she recorded set of tracks in a cabin there, on the fallows. Fallows (March 27 2026, Ropeadope Records) is unlike anything Davis has ever done before, stepping mostly outside the jazz genre and her jazz persona to follow a muse that’s looks at art and the world it inhabits on natural, spiritual terms.
Probably the first-ever record made in Ucross, Wyoming, Fallows takes advantage of the serenity offered there to create music with a mind freed of clutter. Accordingly, it’s an un-self-conscious set of recordings, made without any consideration of how the public might receive it. Davis comes across the artistry here honestly. You won’t hear rapid note runs and clever phrasing. This is about feel and texture, with little regard for how it’s been done before.
Being far from civilization doesn’t mean abandoning technology, in this case. Davis was able to greatly expand the sound palette through use of an Organelle, a portable, “endlessly hackable” electronic musical instrument that functions as a customizable computer running user-created patches. It combines a wooden keyboard and physical knobs with a Raspberry Pi processor, allowing it to act as a synthesizer, sampler, or effects unit, often using Pure Data. (If that explanation for what an Organelle is reads like AI, well, that’s because it is.) This little computer about the shape and size of a power strip opened the door wide for Davis to quickly realize what she might have been hearing in her head without any outside help and take her saxophone to new places.
The device will work only as well as the imagination will take it and Davis showed the imagination to take it far. Take, for example, the opening track. On “Springtails,” Davis layers her saxes like a string section and mashes it up against an African styled beat as her lead saxophone emits an unusually high tone that borders on soprano sax territory. For “Mars,” the lineup of saxes are made to sound like a cathedral organ, creating a solemn, dark sonority that provides the right backdrop for first the lonesome lead sax and then the buzzy synth noises that follows.
There are reminders spread throughout that this music was conceived and carried out in the midst of nature. The soothing sounds of running water –a creek, perhaps — provides the backdrop for the lightly prancing saxophone of “Bongos.” Bird sounds are sampled into “Yellow Phlox,” a three part-harmony of saxes and not much else. Davis’ saxophone billows into the void during “Cloudburst,” painting a sonic imagery of the remoteness and vastness of the Big Sky Country located near where she made this recording.
Other times, Davis’ muse takes her to the opposite side of natural sounds. “Flower Sway” is free-form electronica deftly using sampling and looping, as is “Holocene Rhythms,” which is built on an angular, mechanical rhythms.
While this isn’t a ‘jazz’ record per se, jazz is never far from mind. Like Steve Lacy, Davis plays outside the fringes of traditional jazz for “Lacy Steve” and also like Lacy, and although she’s on alto sax, some of the timbres she plays on it simulates Lacy’s.
The last track is more conventional in song structure and arrangement than the rest of the album, but no different from most of the songs in that it, too, conveys peaceful solitude. The traditional folk song “Barbara Allen” is recast with a discreet bass line behind the sax and an organ-like, single chord sustained throughout. That sets the stage for Davis to give a spotless, heartfelt performance on her unadorned alto sax.
Fallows is different because the perspective is different. The world is chaotic and scary; it’s up to us to find the beauty that transcends all that. Caroline Davis found it in the American Rockies and shares it with us through these recordings.
Pre-order/order Fallows from Bandcamp.
- Caroline Davis – ‘Fallows’ (2026) - March 24, 2026
- Finely Tuned Elephant – ‘No Goats’ (2026) - March 23, 2026
- Michael Formanek – ‘New Digs’ (2026) - March 19, 2026
