Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg

APPEARING: MANHATTAN MARATHON @ The Neilma Sidney Theatre, Performance Space NY

Friday, January 10, 2025

Caroline davis

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.

Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.

Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (Jazz & Gender at The New School and This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar).

Wendy eisenberg

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.

Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. They also write words about music and other things, and have published work in John Zorn's Arcana series, The Contemporary Music Review, Talkhouse, and Sound American.