Caroline Davis: The Saxophone Reimagined in the Fallows
Armed with a saxophone, an Organelle, and an aluminum can, Caroline Davis spent a month in Wyoming making her debut solo record—and thinking about freedom in all its forms.
Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on saxophonist and composer Caroline Davis.
Her new album, Fallows, just came out on Ropeadope Records. Caroline made it alone during a residency in Ucross, Wyoming—improvising and recording in a cabin, using prepared saxophone techniques and a unique instrument called an Organelle to process and build sounds she’d never put to tape before. The result is twelve tracks that use the saxophone as raw material rather than a lead voice.
We talk about how that music got made, what it means to deliberately avoid the sound of your own instrument, and Caroline’s work teaching music inside Sing Sing prison.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Caroline Davis’s album Fallows)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Caroline Davis at carolinedavis.org
• Purchase Caroline Davis’s Fallows from Ropeadope Records, Bandcamp, or Qobuz, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Caroline Davis — All About Jazz profile
• Fallows review — All About Jazz
Label and Residency:
• Ropeadope Records
• Ucross Foundation — the Wyoming artist residency where Fallows was recorded
• Ucross Foundation — Native American Fellowships
• Civitella Ranieri Foundation — the Italian residency Caroline attended in 2025
• Tulu Bayar — Turkish artist who made the paper artwork for Fallows
Instruments and Technology:
• The Organelle — Critter & Guitari — the hardware synthesizer/processor central to Fallows
• ORAC by Technobear — Patchstorage — the community-built patch framework Caroline used on the record
• Pure Data — the open source programming language underlying the Organelle
Collaborators, Influences, and References:
• Steve Lacy — soprano saxophonist (1934–2004), honored in the track “Lacy Steve”
• Geri Allen — pianist and mentor; “Barbara Allen (for Geri)” closes the album
• Thích Nhất Hạnh — Vietnamese Buddhist monk; a sample of his voice appears on “She Know She Is Water”
• Connie Crothers — pianist from the Lennie Tristano lineage; a sample of her playing appears on “Cloudburst”
• Lee Konitz — Caroline’s teacher; alto saxophonist (1927–2020)
• Sam Newsome — soprano saxophonist; prepared saxophone pioneer cited by Caroline as a major influence
• Christine Abdelnour — French experimental alto saxophonist; a formative reference for prepared saxophone technique
• Anna Webber — saxophonist and composer, cited for her work with venting vocabulary
• James Falzone — clarinetist whose solo tour performance is discussed in the episode • James Falzone on The Tonearm Podcast
• Kris Davis — pianist and founder of Pyroclastic Records; cited as a touchstone for prepared piano • Kris Davis on The Tonearm Podcast
• Sylvie Courvoisier — pianist cited for her prepared piano work • Sylvie Courvoisier on The Tonearm Podcast
• Juana Molina — Argentine singer-songwriter and electronic musician; cited as a major influence in the world of looping
• Oren Ambarchi — Australian electronic musician; cited as a listening influence
• Qasim Naqvi — New York-based composer and modular synthesist; a frequent collaborator
• Wendy Eisenberg — guitarist and songwriter; a friend and frequent collaborator
• Marta Sanchez — pianist and composer; mentioned as releasing a new single
• John Zorn — avant-garde composer and saxophonist; a collaborator cited in the episode
• Mary Lou Williams & Cecil Taylor — Embraced (Pablo Records, 1978) — recorded live at Carnegie Hall, April 17, 1977
• Annette Peacock — a pioneer in electronic music who combined her voice with one of the first Moog synthesizers in the late 1960s
Labels and Organizations — Current Listening:
• Out of Your Head Records — Adam Hopkins’s artist-run label; praised in the episode
• Pyroclastic Records — Kris Davis’s artist-run label; praised in the episode
Advocacy and Justice:
• Musicambia — the organization through which Caroline teaches music at Sing Sing Prison and other facilities
• FREER Records — nonprofit label for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated musicians; Caroline is on the board
• Keith LaMar — keithlamar.org — death row prisoner in Ohio whose execution is scheduled for January 13, 2027; wrongfully convicted per advocates
• Jalil Muntaqim — political prisoner (Black Panther Party) with whom Caroline corresponded; released from prison in 2020
• The New School — Jazz & Gender course — co-taught by Caroline Davis and Sarah Elizabeth Charles
• Sarah Elizabeth Charles — vocalist, activist, and co-teacher of the Jazz & Gender course at the New School
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
The Tonearm — Episode 303: Caroline Davis
Lawrence Peryer: Hello, and welcome to The Tonearm, where we connect you with the people and ideas moving culture forward. I'm your host, Lawrence Peryer. We're putting the tone arm's needle on Caroline Davis, a saxophonist and composer based in New York. Her new album, Fallows, just came out on Ropeadope Records. Caroline made it alone during a residency in Ucross, Wyoming, improvising and recording in a cabin using prepared saxophone techniques and a unique little instrument called an Organelle to process and build sounds she'd never put to tape before.
The result is twelve tracks that use the saxophone as raw material rather than a lead voice. We talk about how that music got made, what it means to deliberately avoid the sound of your own instrument, and Caroline's work teaching music inside Sing Sing Prison. Here's Caroline Davis.
I would love to start with understanding a little bit about the genesis of the recordings, and by that I want to understand the element of Ucross. Did you go there knowing this is what you were going to come out with? Was this your submission, or did you get there and make it up on the fly? I'm really curious about the role of the residency in the record.
Caroline Davis: In my application I said I wanted to make a record there. I wanted to take the saxophone and make it not sound like the saxophone in certain ways, because I'm not the biggest fan of listening to saxophone music, which is really funny for me to say as a saxophone player. But a lot of the music I listen to is not played on saxophone, and the players I adore are at the forefront of that list. Speaking of the record, one person I tried to honor on it is Steve Lacy [EDITORIAL NOTE: "Steve Lacey" throughout the original transcript; corrected to "Steve Lacy" — the soprano saxophonist (1934–2004) — confirmed by press release and album track title "Lacy Steve."] — he's a person I love and listen to all the time. But I didn't go in knowing this is what would come out of everything.
I did go in knowing that I really wanted to find a way to make the saxophone sound different, so I was looking into prepared saxophone. You're hearing a lot of experimentation on many fronts — mostly with this electronic processing unit I have, the Organelle. But I also wanted to explore acoustic processing of the saxophone without any technology. That's one track on the recording, but I did a lot more experimentation. There are hours of me getting leaves from outside and putting them inside of the tone holes, and I realized a few times I had messed my saxophone up. I had to call these repair people in Wyoming and they said they were about three hours away, only open on certain days, and I didn't have a car. So I figured I should be a little more careful with the preparations I was doing with these objects I was finding outside. But I was coming up with really interesting sounds. One of my favorites was with an aluminum can.
So no, I didn't go in knowing what I was going to get at the end, but I knew that I wanted to explore and spend more time understanding what the saxophone was capable of.
Lawrence: Tell me about the aluminum can.
Caroline: I got some seltzer from the grocery store — Ucross is a really tiny town of twenty-six people, so it wasn't actually in Ucross; it was in Buffalo and Sheridan. We would go to those two larger towns, about thirty to forty minutes away. I got some seltzer and was thinking about what objects could sound nice being dragged across different parts of the saxophone, like the bell. I turned up the microphone as loud as the input would allow and dragged the can on the bell. It produced this really creepy underground sound, like you're in a tunnel and something is scraping against the wall. [EDITORIAL FLAG: "And then I just hella re there" — original text garbled; likely describes applying heavy reverb or letting the sound sustain. Please clarify and verify.] There's water in the can, so I was messing around with that as well. It took me to a different place. I was in my headphones, really listening to where it would take me, and then I was improvising over that. But yeah, it was just a regular can of seltzer.
Lawrence: It wasn't some kind of special seltzer?
Caroline: No. (laughter)
Lawrence: Did you record the Organelle there as well, or did you just lay down all the saxophone?
Caroline: I recorded the Organelle, yes. The Organelle community is really very generous with every patch that's ever been made. A lot of the patches I'm using on this recording were made by other people — one of them is Technobear. He's been really useful and helpful. He's the person who made ORAC on the Organelle, and if I ever had issues I would go on the forum and ask, and he would get back to me. I was using those samplers to make the drum beats you're hearing. I made all those drum beats and then would use them as a sequence, adding and detracting from the sequencer using the loop station. I made all the other background parts mostly with saxophone. There's one piano patch on one song, but most of the other material is saxophone.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about that device — that instrument. What led you to it? What's attractive to you about it versus any other type of synthesis device you could work with?
Caroline: If I weren't as lazy, I think I'd probably delve more heavily into the world of modular synthesis — euro racks and everything. I look up to so many people around here who devote their lives to that way of making electronic music, because I love the idea of things changing all the time. I really love the idea of irregularity, something that's never the same. A lot of my favorite electronic music artists use that setup — Qasim Naqvi, who I play with here in New York, is a favorite of mine. And Oren Ambarchi [EDITORIAL FLAG: "Oren Ambrachi" in original; corrected to "Oren Ambarchi," the Australian electronic musician. Please verify.]. I know he uses different designs in his setup.
With the Organelle, I had seen someone use it as a device for generating sounds through a controller at a show — it was a bass player — and I was curious about what it was doing. I asked her about it and she said she didn't use it very much, but that it can be useful for processing if you want to practice certain sounds. I did a lot of research and really loved the idea of having a piece of hardware where you can pull up different patches and process yourself. You can create drum beats, use it as a sampler, use the patches to create synthesis. It's running on Pure Data, so it's kind of like Max/MSP, but a little more open source and sometimes buggy. I love the community structure of people sharing this open source software and this open source patch-making platform. Even though Max/MSP is maybe a better way to make patches, and there are pedals that allow people to do that, there's something really wonderful about it. There's a guitarist I'm really inspired by named Matt Sargent. He uses a pedal setup and patches to interact with when he plays guitar.
Lawrence: It's got a very interesting tonal quality in that, because of the software-driven nature of it, it would seem to be sort of infinitely flexible. I don't know if it's your usage of it on this record or what, but it has this sort of organic, analog nature to it. It sounds like wood. It's really interesting.
Caroline: I love how you said that. There are so many developments with all the patches people have been making, and they're also developing new models now — I think they have an S2 model now. It's really intuitive. The device has these nice wooden buttons on the front, and you can turn on a speaker, so you can kind of use it as [EDITORIAL FLAG: "a waiting pose" in original — text garbled; likely describes a standalone practice or portable use mode. Please clarify and verify.]. I've done that on the road. When I'm writing music, I'll use it as a piano and try to figure out sounds and ideas. You can also use it as a sequencer and connect it to a MIDI clock you're referencing with other devices.
And again, what I was saying before about community and keeping everything in the family — I really love that part of music, because some things can get really insular or individualistic, and this community is just not that. It's so beautiful, so sharing, so open and generous. That's another reason why I've gravitated toward this device.
Lawrence: It's interesting that you keep emphasizing the community aspect of the device, given that my impression from reading some of the materials around the making of the record is of being alone — going to the residency, living in your own space, having time to spend exploring the instrument. There's an aloneness and a communal aspect to this. I wonder if that resonates. Could you unpack that a little bit — the solitary nature of this record?
Caroline: When I was practicing in that little cabin, you are alone, but there's nature everywhere — the Bighorn Mountains in the distance and a creek. The man who made all of Ucross possible planted some trees, so now it's been declared an important bird area. There are birds there, which is unusual because the rest of that area doesn't have that many trees. But I didn't feel that alone. The residency experience at Ucross involves — at that time there were twelve other people there who were writing books and poetry and making visual art, and we would come together at dinnertime for a communal dinner. I never really felt alone there. There are residencies that offer complete solitary time with no other people present, but one thing I love about the residency community is that there are always people there. You can talk to them about the book they're writing, which chapter they're on — the dinners are always so fun.
And then the nature is pretty special. I would go for runs most days, and there were these groups of cows that would come right up to the fence. I've never really experienced that. How sweet and gentle they seemed to be. And there were birds constantly coming over and sitting in front of the window — turkeys and grouse, geese making all kinds of noise, and deer everywhere every day. So it didn't feel completely alone. But the process of making things did feel like I'm sitting in a room doing this one thing and trying to get somewhere, and some days were really hard and other days were easier.
I read somewhere that Ralph Waldo Emerson, when he would get into a flow state where everything was just coming out, would stop and put the paper away so that he would come back fresh and be excited to go again the next day.
Lawrence: Yeah, I've heard that.
Caroline: What a process, what a way of doing things. I was trying a bit of that, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. It's just up and down with the creative process.
Lawrence: It takes a lot of faith to turn the faucet off when it's flowing like that. To me, that's terrifying. If I feel like I'm in the zone, I sort of go past the point of exhaustion.
Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. It's nice to just get it all out. I know a lot of artists who want to get everything out because they're afraid that if they don't get it out now, it won't be there tomorrow.
Lawrence: Today might be the last day I'm capable of this! (laughter)
Caroline: That's a real thing. I've definitely written pieces of songs, had to go somewhere, come back, and thought, "What the hell was that?" It takes me a second to get back into the zone of what I was thinking or doing.
I woke up at around three in the morning the other day and wrote something because it was coming to me. The next day I looked at it and had no memory of doing it. It was so wild. I've talked to John Zorn [EDITORIAL FLAG: "John sworn" in original; corrected to "John Zorn," with whom Caroline has collaborated per press materials. Please verify.] about that before, and he said his favorite time to write is also in the middle of the night. You're kind of not yourself, and nobody's awake, so it feels like all the energy of the place is open for you to take.
Lawrence: There's something very special about those hours between one and four or five in the morning.
Caroline: Yes. Where everything feels okay. It's ripe. Let's go.
Lawrence: You talked about exploring with the horn while you were out there. What was your experience with that type of approach? Were you able to do things you weren't able to do before?
Caroline: To go back to the preparation thing — I know preparation is more of a piano thing, and I really love all the pianists here who are doing things with piano preparation, namely two of my favorites: Kris Davis and Sylvie Courvoisier. There are many other people, but those two really come to mind. I was thinking: what could we do? The saxophone doesn't really engage in a lot of that. But there is someone in France I really admire who has been doing a bit of that — her name is Christine Abdelnour, a really wonderful experimental alto saxophonist. I really admire what she's doing. I think she sometimes uses a plastic bottle or a can inside her bell as well. That's one thing I really wanted to capture on recording. I've done a lot of that in live shows — I was playing last night at Sisters with Sally Gates, doing a bit of that with a microphone and a piece of paper to start the set, creating this flapping, noisy, distorted sound against the neck of the saxophone. That's something else I didn't put on the record, but it's something I want to get into more for a future solo record.
I didn't put these tracks on the record, but I was trying to come up with some more [EDITORIAL FLAG: "a tubes" in original — text garbled; possibly "études," as in short exercises built around venting technique, which would fit the context. Please verify.] where I would just use venting on the horn to create a more percussive track — a consistent rhythm with pitches that don't quite exist, somewhere between the pitches. It would be more of a timbre and sound like a drum. I was working on that, but I didn't put it on the record. And then the practice of the electronics is really intense. I've never gone that deep, and it required a lot of practicing: what is this thing, what is this patch, what can it do, what are all these buttons doing? It takes hours. It's a different instrument, and you have to shed it. I'm still practicing it for the shows coming up on this tour.
So there are endless possibilities. That was another thing I got really deep into at the Ucross residency — just having the time. I had hours to learn more about the Organelle, to learn how to utilize all the patches. I learned more about writing my own patches in Pure Data. All this stuff was just the daily work I hadn't done before.
Lawrence: Your mention of the venting technique — I was at a performance a couple of weeks ago and it was a clarinet player, and he was doing that. There was this mesmerizing quality to it. It became very repetitive, and somewhere between the tone and the rhythm, I found it very compelling for something so simple, or seemingly simple. Who was that? Do you remember? [EDITORIAL NOTE: Speaker attribution correction — this paragraph was attributed to Caroline Davis in the original but is clearly Lawrence's voice, describing a performance he attended. Reassigned accordingly.]
Lawrence: James Falzone.
Caroline: Oh, James Falzone. I love him. He's so great.
Lawrence: Yeah. He's wonderful. I live out in the Seattle area — I moved out here from New York. He was doing a performance. He's one of my favorite clarinetists.
Caroline: He's something else. And he's on a solo tour right now, I believe?
Lawrence: He is. It was the opening night of that program he's doing.
Caroline: That's so cool. I was sad to miss him out here. I also saw that he's using a foot pedal — is that like a harmonium kind of thing?
Lawrence: Yeah. Exactly.
Caroline: That's so cool. I really can't wait to see him. He's one of my favorite clarinetists too. Another person I know who has looked into the venting language on the saxophone is Anna Webber [EDITORIAL FLAG: "Anna Weber" in original; likely "Anna Webber," the saxophonist and composer. Please verify.], and she has developed some vocabulary with venting, which is also really important to me. I spent some time in my own notational style, in my journals, creating a language for the venting options I like best. That took time — it was more of me learning this language for myself. And also the idea of multiphonics. I'm getting more deeply invested in multiphonics on the saxophone.
Someone who has been really influential to me in that world is the living legend Sam Newsome, who plays soprano saxophone. He is one of the best musicians I know who engages with multiphonics. If you haven't checked out his music, I really recommend Sam Newsome.
Lawrence: So you'll listen to Sam Newsome play saxophone?
Caroline: Oh yes, absolutely. Anything that Sam is on, I have. I remember learning about him the first time through a jazz camp called Litchfield Jazz Camp [EDITORIAL NOTE: "Lichfield Jazz Camp" in original; corrected to "Litchfield Jazz Camp" per Caroline Davis's Wikipedia biography.] in Connecticut when I was a kid. He wasn't on the faculty, but the person I met on the faculty was Dave Berkman — he's still around, a wonderful pianist. He had made a record and Sam was on it. I bought the record and thought, "Oh my God, this is the best saxophone player I've ever heard in my entire life." Then I moved here and have played with Sam. He had a band of [EDITORIAL FLAG: "forced soprano saxophone players" in original — likely "four soprano saxophone players." Please verify.] and I was in that band with him. He's also doing the prepared saxophone — he uses tubes added to the mouthpiece, wind chimes, balloons. He's just the most creative spirit I've ever met and a huge inspiration to me.
Lawrence: I'm bouncing around a little bit, but you mentioned the communal time with the other artists — the meal times at the end of the day and things like that. Is it also a forum to work out artistic problems or to influence each other? I can only imagine an environment where you put a small group of artists who are immersed in their work — not just people who happen to be artists but who are actually there working — and bring them together daily. There's a charge in the air, an exchange. The crux of what I'm asking is about those influences and being in an artistic community. Do you find that the next morning, while you're working, they're there with you — metaphysically?
Caroline: I'm down with that kind of thought. One enjoyable thing for me as a musician is to be around non-musicians. We're around musicians so much, and I love musicians, but I also really love non-musicians. Being around a filmmaker, for example — talking to this filmmaker about another filmmaker I really love, hearing her take on this person we both know. Or I was at a different residency last year in Italy [EDITORIAL FLAG: "called Ella" in original — likely "Civitella," per Caroline's website biography, which lists her as a fellow-in-residence at Civitella (2025). Please verify.] where I befriended a group of poets. I loved talking to them about poets, hearing their take on who's good and who isn't, understanding why — ogling over certain poems together — or they would like this book but not that book. I loved that process of getting to know their world through mine.
Then they would ask me about people in music, and I'd be like, "Yeah, this person is an asshole," or, "I would never work with them," and they'd be fascinated. You're stepping into their world in certain ways, and you start to understand that we're all kind of the same — we just have different interests and different lanes.
I would get so inspired by their work. There was a person at Ucross working on a book about the food industry — he had worked at a very well-known fast food place for a time, sort of undercover, and was using a lot of that information in the book. Because nonfiction isn't doing very well right now, to see how inspired and dedicated he was to uncovering the information about this industry was just so inspiring to me. And seeing people's visual art — the visual art studios were right next door to me, so I would go and visit. There was a woman there making paper from found grass at Ucross. She would create this pulp, dry it out, and press it into paper. She ended up doing the artwork for my record. I loved her work so much. Her name is Tulu Bayar — she's Turkish, and her whole process for making paper and telling stories through her visual art was just like: I have to get you involved in this project. I was really inspired by the people there, and it took me to a place.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about the role of the ancestral figures on the record — Steve Lacy, Geri Allen, et cetera. What did those people give you that made it important to acknowledge them, and how do they manifest through your work?
Caroline: Two of the people I mentioned I was fortunate enough to meet — Geri Allen and Thich Nhat Hanh. I didn't get to know Thich Nhat Hanh very well. I went to a meditation retreat at a center here in New York and he was there. He led guided meditations with us and we did walking meditation, so we didn't have an especially personal connection. But Geri I worked with very closely, and she helped me believe that my voice was something unique. She kept in touch with me and asked how I was doing on a regular basis, and I would go and see her play. The last time I saw her was at the Village Vanguard, right when she was starting her program in New Jersey for young girls in jazz. That was a really special initiative she believed very strongly in, and she asked if I would be interested in participating. But she left us too soon.
The other two people I mentioned, Steve Lacy and Connie Crothers, are musically speaking at the highest peak for me in their ways of accessing flow. Connie comes from the lineage of Lennie Tristano — she was a student of his — and I met her because Lee Konitz, who was my teacher, mentioned her. I went to see her play the few times she was performing here, saw her out in the community a few times, and I never got to study with her, which I was really sad about. She also left us too soon. I listen to her interviews a lot and her music all the time. I also met her collaborator Richard Tabnik, an alto saxophone player here who's on a lot of her records. I learned a lot about her through him.
Steve Lacy, who I didn't know personally, is obviously one of the masters of the soprano saxophone, and his solo records in particular — not just the Monk records, but some other solo records, Sands [EDITORIAL FLAG: "Sands" — unverified as a Steve Lacy album title; possible transcription error. Please verify.] and others — where he explores different textures on the horn and different ways of playing. His sound is the woodiest you can imagine on the soprano. I just love him so much. Those two figures have been so influential to the way I hear music, because they're just in my head, even though we never met and never played together.
Lawrence: When you were talking earlier, I don't know how serious you were about not listening to the saxophone. I've talked with other artists and there's a spectrum, because everybody is so unique in their approach to their work. Some people don't listen to a lot of music for fear of being influenced, or don't listen to artists who play similar instruments because they don't want to steal licks or things like that. I'm curious what it's about for you. Do you not like the sound of the instrument, or what's going on there? (laughter)
Caroline: I think generally speaking, your first point was good, because it's something I do on a regular basis. It's always in my face — on my body and in my mouth — so I want to take some time away from it to gain perspective from another world. I'm trying, texturally, to make my sound more like the voice in certain ways, or like trumpet, or maybe I want it to sound like flute here. How can I make it sound percussive? Can I make this accent sound like the piano? What texture can I live inside?
Versus spending an earlier part of my life totally immersed in Charlie Parker, or totally immersed in Joe Henderson [EDITORIAL NOTE: "Joe Hendrickson" in original; corrected to "Joe Henderson," the saxophonist. Context strongly supports this correction.], Sonny Rollins, and some other people who have been madly influential to me — Lee Konitz, Lester Young. I've spent hours transcribing and trying to learn about them, hearing their sound in my head. I think that process of immersion or imitation is useful sometimes, but it can be a little damaging if you stay inside of it for too long, because then you never become yourself — you're just always trying to be someone else. There are a lot of people who sound like John Coltrane because he was just such an untouchable and incredibly talented human being. That's another influence of mine. I think there will never be another one of him, ever. So trying to imitate and copy too much isn't what I'm so much interested in.
I'm not listening to a lot of saxophone music right now because I'm really just more interested in other textures and how they can manifest themselves on my instrument. I'm not the only one who does this — Sam Newsome, I'm sure, has a similar way of looking at the horn. I still enjoy listening to that music. I was listening to Charlie Parker the other day and really enjoying myself. But I think it's a difficult instrument to get a good sound on. It's an easy instrument to learn — if you're just learning how to put your fingers down and press buttons, very easy — but to get a good sound on it is really tough. There are people who have really mastered tone on the horn in different ways, but there's also a lot out there that I can't listen to because sound is number one for me — sound, time, rhythm, creativity.
Lawrence: I get that from some of the names you mentioned. When I think about someone who clearly spent time on their tone, Joe Henderson would be pretty high on my list.
Caroline: Yes.
Lawrence: I could listen to him endlessly.
Caroline: Me too.
Lawrence: What are you drawn to? When you're reaching for something to put on, do you have a go-to?
Caroline: That really changes from week to week for me. Right now I'm listening to a lot of newer music — well, that's not true, because I was just listening to the Annette Peacock record called X-Dreams or something like that. I was listening to it literally yesterday and really enjoying myself. And James Blake's new record.
Lawrence: Oh, my son loves that record too.
Caroline: Yeah. I think it's called For Trying Times or something like that [EDITORIAL FLAG: James Blake album title uncertain — please verify exact title.]. I was listening to Yebba's new record too. There are a lot of jazz musicians on it — Nate Smith, James Francies — that's been on my rotation lately. And then all my friends' records. I'm playing tonight with Marta Sanchez — I was just listening to her new single and she's coming out with her record in a couple weeks on Out of Your Head Records. Everything that Adam Hopkins is putting out on Out of Your Head Records is smashing. I've been checking out the catalog there, and Pyroclastic too — just spending time with certain labels, seeing who's putting out new music. My friends — there are some great younger alto saxophone players I'm really interested in, out here and also in LA: Nicole McCabe and Alden Hellmuth. Both of them have put out records recently.
I just spent time saying I don't listen to saxophone music, and I just named all these people. (laughter) That's so funny. I listen to a lot of music — different songwriters. I love songwriting. My friend Wendy Eisenberg is putting a record out, and their music is great. Maari [EDITORIAL FLAG: "Maari" — unable to verify identity from available materials. Please confirm.] is wonderful, always putting out new music. My friend Qasim Naqvi put out an orchestral piece that I've been listening to a lot. And then I was listening to the Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor record Live at Carnegie Hall [EDITORIAL NOTE: "live by Carnegie Hall" in original; corrected to Live at Carnegie Hall — please verify exact title.]. That's an interesting meeting of two minds from before. That's an older record. And of course, Annette Peacock's is older too. Sometimes when I want to zone out I'll gravitate toward electronic music — not that it isn't something to pay attention to, I don't mean it that way. If I want to relax a little more, I'll put on someone like Oren Ambarchi. His music isn't just for relaxation — it's just that I can find myself in a zone that's almost tantric when I listen to it.
Lawrence: I was curious about your interest in electronic music and how you're incorporating that.
Caroline: Another influence in the same vein — if I want a little more energy — is Juana Molina. She's an Argentine singer-songwriter who also makes electronic music in her setup, and looping is her whole thing. I'm such a mega fan of what she does. She's another big influence in the world of electronic music.
Lawrence: When you were talking earlier about being out in nature and encountering the other creatures at Ucross — the animals you saw every day — I'm curious what you knew about Wyoming before you went there. Were you surprised by what you found? Had you been to Wyoming before? What was that specific place experience like for you?
Caroline: I had not been there before. I was trying to go in without much expectation, partly because I didn't have access to a car. Where we were is in the north-northeast corner of the state, very close to the Montana border. I've been to Montana quite a few times, but mostly to Missoula and the west side of the state. So the landscape there was an interesting difference — there are fewer trees in the mountains, and you would go for a hike and get to the top of a precipice and just look out. No trees anywhere, which is not how it is on the West Coast — sorry, on the East Coast. But I did feel a lot of native spirit there. There were also these places where buffalo had been corralled and would jump off cliffs — that's how they would be killed — and the craters formed by these massive animals falling were still there in the land. It's amazing to be able to see that part of how people lived there.
I didn't go very many places. It was really just Ucross, with Piney Creek — the name of the creek that served the whole area. There may be just one or two areas of native land in Wyoming. There's more native land in the surrounding states like the Dakotas and Montana, where native people are still living. I really wanted to try to visit, but it was too far away.
In Montana, I have visited land where natives are living, visited schools on that land, and it's been a really unique and spiritual experience. I'd really love to do more of that in the Dakotas. I have some friends who are working for the Land Back initiative, and I've been trying to connect with them to see if there's a way to work together at some point.
Lawrence: You know, I'm from the East Coast originally as well. The Native American experience was always so abstract coming from the East Coast — if we learned about it at all, it was something that happened hundreds of years ago, like the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and that kind of thing. To come out here and be in the Pacific Northwest, not only is the presence of the people still real — the place names, the way we live together — but the experience of the struggle they had with settlers and with white people was not that long ago. The last armed conflict in the Seattle area was around 1918. Up until very recently there were people alive who would have experienced it, or witnessed it, or certainly knew about it firsthand. That's been a very eye-opening part of moving out here, even in my own limited way as a middle-aged white man. It's very different from spending so much of your life on the East Coast.
Caroline: I would agree with that. There's a lot more going on, and a lot more opportunity. Ucross even has a fellowship for Native American artists across all genres of art. When I was there, there was a Native American art exhibit happening at the art gallery on the land. All the art being showcased when I was there in March of 2025 was made by native visual artists. There was a photographer — I'm trying to remember the name — who had dressed in traditional native costume and was on the Ucross land, interacting with all the buildings there and taking photographs of those interactions. I thought that was such a really interesting way to deal with it: they're dressing up like the people who used to live on this land specifically. There were a few different nations — the Cherokee Nation, Lakota, I think Oglala Lakota, maybe Shoshone. They were showcasing the traditional dress of all these nations and interacting with the structures and buildings that exist on this land now.
It was a really captivating exhibition, and really appropriate for us to be there and see it — to have visions of what life must have been like on this land before we got there. How do we honor the people who were here before and bring them into the community? It's really cool to see how they've been doing that and making space for natives at the residency.
Lawrence: I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the interest in the work you do alongside the justice system, and how and if it intersects with your artistic pursuit.
Caroline: Most of my interest in advocacy has been in two worlds: gender advocacy and advocacy for incarcerated people.
For gender, I've been working at the New School. I teach a course on gender and jazz with my colleague Sarah Elizabeth Charles. She started the program there and we've been doing that together for about eight years now. That's been a beautiful community to continue every semester — talking through issues that continue to plague the jazz and improvised music communities with respect to gender expression and sexual orientation.
The other side of my advocacy has been through the prison industrial complex. I have a family member who was previously incarcerated, which is partly how I got involved with advocacy — I started realizing as I was getting older how much the system had affected my family's life. That was not here in the United States, because my family's from Europe, so a different carceral system. But I started contacting people here, namely political prisoners who had been involved in some kind of cause and had been locked up because of it — people in the Black Panther Party, Angela Davis and Jalil Muntaqim. Both of those people are still living, out of prison. I know Angela was only in prison for a very short time. Jalil was in prison for over forty years, and I befriended him by writing letters to him. The awareness of freedom fighting and how that can affect your freedom is just a wild set of circumstances I've learned about through contact with both of them.
I also perform with a group working toward freedom for Keith LaMar, a person on death row in Ohio who was wrongfully convicted for a crime he did not commit and has been in solitary confinement for over thirty years. His execution date is set for January 2027. I'm going to visit him on Sunday. I also go semi-regularly to Sing Sing Prison in Ossining with Musicambia, an organization that provides music classes for people inside — not just at Sing Sing, but also at Rikers Island, and at other facilities: Bedford Hills in New York, which is a women's prison, and a facility in South Carolina. I think there are others in Kansas and Missouri as well. They've been expanding their work to other states, which is beautiful. I've really been enjoying those classes and getting to know the guys in there. It's been an amazing experience.
So it's several levels of involvement. I would call myself a prison abolitionist, even though I'm very much woven into the fabric of activities inside prisons. It's a confusing and often cognitively dissonant way of life, because I know that prison abolition isn't possible at this moment. It's going to take a lot to reverse this whole system — we have two million people now who are locked up in immigration detention centers, jails, and prisons.
Lawrence: And now there's a financial motive.
Caroline: Yes. I'm also on the board of a wonderful record label called Freer Records. We put out records by people who are either still in prison or who have recently been released and want recording careers. That's the basis of the label, and the work has been so illuminating — to see people making music and trying to make a better life for themselves, because getting out and then trying to build a life is one of the hardest things a human being can do. Even just getting an ID — I was talking to one of the artists affiliated with Musicambia a couple months ago, and he was having a problem just getting an ID. He had to track down his mom, whom he didn't have a great relationship with, to have her call a place in Colorado to get his birth certificate reprinted. Meanwhile he can't work because he doesn't have an ID. The whole thing is completely broken.
I'm just trying to do as much as I can, but sometimes I have to step away a little because advocacy work can completely take over your life. It's there, and I'm doing the best I can, but I'm mostly here making music, practicing, and touring. I've been trying to balance all of that.
Lawrence: Well, thank you for that work and for the music and for your time. It was great talking with you.
Caroline: Thanks, Lawrence. It's really been a pleasure.