Saturday May 9 * doors at 6:30, music at 7 * $20-30

Transparent Productions presents:

Caroline Davis (alto saxophone, voice, electronics), Dustin Carlson (guitar, electronics)

Caroline Davis and Dustin Carlson’s new album, Sprites, is a meeting between two improvisers in New York, who straddle the boundaries of several expressions of music. The sounds on this album are all improvised, with no written music or thoughts about the music exchanged before performing live in front of a sweet audience. Sprite holds several meanings, a fairy creature from old times, a ghost, a wild electrocurrent coming out of the tops of clouds when lightning strikes, and a repeating bitmapped image over a static background. The tracks of this album embody each one of these definitions, and with each repeated listen, you, too, will begin to see them.

https://outofyourheadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sprites

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 eight albums: Live Work & Play (2012), Doors: Chicago Storylines (2015), Heart Tonic (2018), Alula (2019), Anthems (2019), Portals, Vol. 1: Mourning (2021), Alula: Captivity (2023), and Portals, Vol.2: Returning. Her active projects include jazz-leaning Portals, experimental R&B My Tree, and protest band Alula. She has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star Alto-Saxophonist (2018) and has been included in numerous Reader and Critics Polls. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, DownBeat, and many international publications.

Davis is active as both a side-person and a leader in a diverse set of expressions. Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, Wendy Eisenberg, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye.

Caroline’s awards and recognitions are plentiful. She has been involved with various mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz (2006), the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program (2011), and Jen Shyu/Sara Serpa’s Mutual Mentorship Program (2020). Davis was the recipient of CMA's Performance Plus Grant (2021), NYFA's City Artist Corps Grant (2021), Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2019-20); and she was a fellow-in-residence at The Jazz Gallery (2022) and composer-in-residence at MacDowell (2019),  Avaloch Farm Music Institute (2023-24, 26), BringAbout (2024-25) and Civitella (2025). Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition. As a teaching artist, Caroline brings her unique knowledge of music and psychology to her teaching. She offers a yearly Jazz & Gender course at The New School, co-taught with Sarah Elizabeth Charles, and private lessons at Manhattan School of Music, and has been invited to institutions of all levels as a guest educator.

Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar). She is organizing community events as “Community Conversations on Art & Justice for Incarcerated People”, showcasing the intersectionality between liberation and art of all forms

https://carolinedavismusic.bandcamp.comhttps://www.carolinedavis.org/

About Dustin Carlson:

“Dustin Carlson's music bespeaks a fascination with the many varieties of time, its colors, flavors, densities, textures; the motions of time, its extremes of slow growth and quick change. And also with the layering of time, the machinery of orbits, concentric loops, the human body that is a cosmos of looping circulatory systems escaping gravitational force to lumber into movement and execute some flashy moves at a party, at a ceremony, with stars in its veins, a sun in its stomach and arms that span galaxies … this is what only music, when it is truly music, can reveal and teach. Funk is the preacher…”. — Michaël Attias

“Dustin Carlson just surprises me with each new project, f***ing genius “new music” composer/conceiver-cum-americanonical-singer/songwriter-lyrical noiseblaster-brilliant guitarist with his own voice, but a voice that keeps shifting around in further & otherly ways (wtf is a "brand", anyway? he's still in motion, oh yeah he is; music).” — David Torn

https://www.dustinjcarlson.com/