Kris Davis: Run the Gauntlet

For her first trio outing as a leader since 2014's Waiting For You To Grow (Clean Feed Records), daredevil pianist Kris Davis takes on her inspirations and mentors on the whirlwind Run the Gauntlet.

Dedicated to the beacons who have guided and supported her searching, inventive way—Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Marilyn Crispell, Angelica Sanchez, Sylvie Courvoisier and Renee Rosnes—Davis enlists longtime friend and collaborator drummer Johnathan Blake alongside well respected and well-traveled bassist Robert Hurst (Mulgrew Miller, Diana Krall, Branford Marsalis) and brings her cinematic empathy, jagged longings, and angular missives to the fore.

The supremely explosive and relentless title track launches Run the Gauntlet into the heady stratosphere of many of Davis' finest works, like 2019's Diatom Ribbons (Pyroclastic), Save Your Breath (Clean Feed Records, 2015), and Rye Eclipse (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2008). An incessant inventor and instigator, the track is an exhaustive yet invigorating gauntlet of vamps led by Davis that Blake muscles into a clean, empirical form. Invoking the spirit of the six women she has dedicated her music to, Davis is at peak here: a mad, Grammy-winning scientist unafraid to break all expectations. It is as thrilling a piece as Davis has ever recorded. But true to her exploratory nature, the opener only lights the way for other impossibly grand moments. The rubato "Softly, As You Awake," highlighted by Hurst's emotive bowing and Davis' ghostly phrases, slides in and out of focus. Reaching back to her son's initial steps, the jumbled "First Steps" leads into the jump-cut glory of "Little Steps." Then, reflecting the compositional approach of Allen—a little bit of bop and a dollop of pop—"Heavy-Footed" comes as close to a standard song form as Davis has come in a long time. Blake and Hurst lace in and around the pianist's tight melodic manipulations with veteran ease, setting up a reverie that can go in any direction in future iterations.

The ruminative, refractory eloquence of Blake's "Beauty Beneath the Rubble" and the subsequent "Beauty Beneath the Rubble Meditation" recall the drummer's open-hearted moments from 2023's exemplary Passages (Blue Note). Davis breaks the contemplative mood with the headstrong and unyielding "Knotweed," a tumbling bash of a performance that keeps everyone on their collective toes. The loosely propulsive subtext of "Coda Queen;" the gauzy muse of "Dream State," and "Subtones" illusory free improvisation close out the not-soon-to-be-forgotten accomplishment of Run the Gauntlet.