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Retrospectives (In The Key Of Jazz)

Billie Davies

Label: Cobra Basement
Released: 2025
Duration: 01:30:51
Views: 3,332

Tracks

Hollywood Boulevard From The Window; Do Do Kindje Doo; Sunraaah; Melancholia Abstractissimus; Improvisationality; An Improvisation; An Improvisation Too; Art.

Personnel

Additional Personnel / Information

Billie Davies: Hybrid Drums; Oliver Steinberg: Electric and Acoustic Bass; Daniel Coffeng: Electric Guitar Synth; Evan Oberla: Piano.

Album Description

Press, Booking, Management:
Cobra Basement
Bandleader: Billie Davies - West Palm Beach, FL - Tel: (+1) 561.875.1153 | Email: [email protected] I web: https://cobrabasement.blogspot.com/
Available on Vinyl and CD: https://elasticstage.com/BillieDavies

A retrospective of never before released music created during a 6 year period, 90 minutes of Free Improvisation, Beyond Jazz, Avant-garde in the key of Jazz music.

All of Billie Davies' music is improvisational. A conversation between musicians, a joint emotional expression inspired by a certain common feeling, thought or perspective that is being communicated to an audience, a listener, a community. An expression that is free of dogma and styles or fashions or politics or religions or trends. An expression that comes from way deep down and can stand on its own and is a reflection of our society, our tribe, our life, our universe.

Billie Davies always has a folder with recorded improvisations that she adds to whenever something musically great is recorded, and so we thought that exposing this music to be heard, creating and releasing an album, celebrating the music that was created primarily with Billie Davies playing her acoustic Sonor basswood drum set she played for a last time in December of 2018 at the Art Klub in New Orleans, even-though she would sometimes combine that set with her electronic drum set (Hybrid Drums), as on Sunraaah and Melancholia Abstractissimus, until around 2014/15. She now plays exclusively on her Yamaha DTX-700 series electronic drum set as on "Thinking Of Marie Laveau", "On Hollywood Boulevard", "Whadeva" and "Pandemos". She completely stopped rehearsing and writing for projects in 2018, as was the case with the musical adventures around "Perspectives" in 2018, they just started playing around on the words of Billie Davies and on each other's expressions, "Whadeva" in 2020 and "Pandemos" in 2021, celebrating the freedom of expression, the freedom of playing, the avant-gardist free improvisation that has become so very primary with her, that is the purpose, that is the intent of this album, so you may hear, so you may experience your own perspective when you listen.

The musical improvisations on "Retrospectives (In The Key of Jazz)", these works of art, are some of the favorite moments of what happened around Billie Davies in Hollywood, Los Angeles and New Orleans between 2012 and 2018, resulting in this heartfelt music, uncompromised and freely improvised and expressed with full passion and intensity straight from the heart and the soul, in the moment. This music was mostly recorded by Mike Davies during rehearsals, only the very in-crowd got to ever hear these.

"I want to end up with music that is not written down but is felt and expressed at that moment of playing, of recording, of performing, of expressing. This deliberate moment of choices, chances and inspirations may become a specific type of music, but it never ends up being a predetermined or planned music, the notes played are never written down. I just want to end up with something where I hear unexpected, emotional, passionate, challenging music never heard before." Billie Davies.

"Billie Davies' music is unapologetically moving in the direction of “true art” and plays with colors, moods, movements, feelings and interactions, a paradoxically more advanced concept of expression. John Cage among others developed a type of music named aleatoric music, a music in which some element of the composition is left to chance and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). Visual art, as it becomes more abstract becomes more like music: an art form which uses the abstract elements of sound and divisions of time. In turn, Billie Davies is creating music which is becoming more like a visual art form, a way of creating an 'inner' object and projecting it outwards through sound, believing that art is no longer something remote, but life itself, be it constructivist or pluralist in essence. Disintegration of conventional ideas of form and matter is underlying the divorce of the concrete and the abstract in modern art. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, John Cage described music as "a purposeless play" which is "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living" You never really know what’s going to happen when you play abstract music. Our relative lack of knowledge may seem instantly intimidating. We can never take the full measure of musical infinity but we can listen to it as Billie Davies continues her ascent." - (An excerpt from the article "Music in the realm of abstract surrealism? – An analysis of something not to be analyzed." by Daniel Coffeng, 2013)

The artists on "Retrospectives (In The Key Of Jazz)" are musicians that answered her call over these specific 6 years of recording albums and performing on her acoustic or hybrid drum set from 2012 to 2018, these pieces of music have never been released and are all improvisations that happened during rehearsals and/or performances in between or leading up to her album projects in Hollywood, Los Angeles and in New Orleans.