Alone with Nature: A Conversation with Caroline Davis on ‘Fallows’

Historical literature is replete with stories of humans being alone with nature. There is some romanticized notion that when one is out in nature, they are fully removed from conversation and community. Consider Henry David Thoreau in Walden (Ticknor and Fields, 1854), “By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude.” Or as the father of the American National Parks system, John Muir, noted, “To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness.” But is one ever truly alone? Or is the removal from civilization merely a shifting in perspective and form? Saxophonist Caroline Davis’s Fallows (Ropeadope, 2026) is more than a beautifully textured recording; it is a deep introspection into the surprising complexity of what it truly means to be alone.

In its strictest sense, Fallows is a solo saxophone recording. It follows a lineage that stretches from Edward Lefebre in 1889 through Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, and Anthony Braxton to Josh Johnson. Further, the album was born in rural serenity. Conceived at an artists’ retreat in Ucross, Wyoming, a town with a population of less than thirty, the record’s origins could not be more removed from the hustle of a flourishing metropolis. And yet, the record captures something more than an artist alone with her horn.

For starters, the album incorporates field recordings Davis captured by temporarily abandoning a recorder in an open field. In the abstract, one would think the approach would result in emptiness. No sound, just a blank tape. But instead, she discovered the music inherent in nature itself- things like the calls of birds, babbling water, and the whoosh of wind- that are far too often overlooked by human perceivers. The saxophonist directly lays into the fact that, even in the most seemingly isolated environments, these sounds exist and communicate with humans.

The track “Knahk,” where she doubles herself on saxophone to evoke a call-and-response between emulated goose calls, is a perfect example. If one were not aware of its origins, the piece would sound like a free-form duo between two horns. But knowing the backstory, one cannot help but recognize the goose call beneath it all. This, of course, raises the question of how far removed human and animal sonic expressions truly are. “Yellow Phlox” extends the concept to higher-pitched bird calls while the echoeyness of “Cloudburst” similarly uses a rustling pattern to suggest the musicality of rain.

That is not to say the album is overly ambient. Instead, the duality of nature’s beauty and turmoil is well reflected, with the latter evident in the nasty funkiness of “Holocene Rhythms.” Same with the glitchy, chaotic march of “She Know She is Water,” which also includes a sample of a speech by Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, in which he draws philosophical connections between human existence and the flow of water.

However, to some extent, the relationship between human and natural sounds lies only at the surface of Fallows. One must also consider the methods through which the two interact on recorded media. Essential to this experience is Davis’s use of an organelle, an open-source synthesizer that adopts community-made patches. In adopting these patches, to some extent, Davis invites the input of those not at UCross with her to be part of a seemingly isolated endeavor. This, in turn, raises the inherent question – even if not interacting with nature, if such is even possible – are we ever truly alone? Or do our lifetime of interactions with others in our own communities inevitably shape our perspectives such that a piece of those neighbors is always carried with us?

In this sense, it is also significant that the pieces on Fallows are mostly based on improvisations. Such composing captures the artist at their moment of creation, but it also shows we do not exist in a vacuum, as the messages and lessons of our elders, peers, and even our youth pass through us as well. That is not to minimize the distinctiveness of each soul but solely to note that the environment of our lives inevitably shapes what results. Davis’s choice to incorporate the spoken word of Connie Crothers at the end of “Cloudburst,” where she states that “each one of us is a unique dimension of reality,” addresses this directly.

It is all too easy to label Fallows as a solo saxophone voyage through wilderness. And one looking for a powerful statement on the capacity of an artist in the 2020s to expand their artistic vision in that context will certainly find it here. But Davis’s work is so much more than a showing of artistic prowess. It is a deep philosophical tome disguised as a record.

We sat down with Davis to discuss the record’s origins and the breadth and limits of isolation.  

PostGenre: You were doing solo performances back in 2021 with “Oscillations.” How much do you feel you have changed in terms of solo performance over the last five years?

Caroline Davis: In 2020, just before the [Coronavirus] pandemic, I started playing more music in New York that was more skillful in terms of polyrhythms and polypulses. I wanted to find practical ways to work on that area of music. During the pandemic, I almost exclusively worked on solo performances exploring that space. I recorded videos of my solo explorations and slowly put them out. But those videos were mostly little tiny exercises that I could do on a weekly basis to improve my skill with that rhythmic understanding of pulses happening at the same time.

With Fallows, I was more concerned with writing and improvising music that felt really good to me. It was less about going to my usual ways of composing. Everything came from improvising, dreaming big, and coming up with ways to interact with the technology. Technology is a big part of the album, and I define that term broadly. Technology can mean anything from the organelle I’m using to the loop station with a couple of pedals. But it can also refer to when I use an aluminum can on the saxophone for one of the tracks. I consider that to be a part of technology or a part of the media. Now, because of technology, you can essentially play with multiple instruments. It’s easier than ever to create a solo album.

PG: You mentioned using an aluminum can filled with water as a way to prepare your alto sax on “Underground.” Where did that idea come from?

CD: I’ve always been very interested in prepared saxophone. Piano players prepare their instruments, and I love prepared piano. I love listening to people who work in that realm.  I love Sylvie Corvoisier and Kris Davis. I know Marta Sanchez has been doing a lot of work in that area, too. But I haven’t seen a lot of people doing similar things on the saxophone, and I was curious to know and see how that might work. So, I’m just starting in one place, which is doing this piece with something simple – an object a lot of us drink out of.

PG: The prepared saxophonist who probably stands out most is Sam Newsome. But, as you said, it is pretty rare for an artist to play a prepared saxophone.

CD: Yeah, Sam’s a friend and a huge influence on me. I’ve played a little bit with him. At one point, he had a band with four soprano saxophones, and we all used his preparations – balloons, wind chimes, and tubes. It was so amazing. But, you’re right, outside of Sam and a few other people, the prepared saxophone is not terribly common. I’ve also seen Christine Abdelnor, a French saxophone player, use a plastic water bottle inside the bell of her saxophone before. That was really cool. I know many trumpet players do that as well; playing with mutes is a type of preparation, but some go beyond that, too.

PG: As far as Fallows in a broader sense, what led you to decide to go beyond experimenting with solo performance using electronics and to turn it into an album?

CD: I was fortunate to get a residency opportunity at Ucross in Wyoming. The land at Ucross is so vast and had very few people; there were only twenty-eight people in the entire town of Ucross. There’s pretty much nobody around. I went hiking every day and walked along the creek. I saw some of the mountains and formations. It is an incredibly vast place and, except for some trees planted by Ucross’s founder Raymond Plank, is largely open land. It’s fascinating to be there and experience the feeling of being able to see super far. I also talked to some of the ranchers, people who had lived out there for decades. In some cases, their family had been on that land for hundreds of years. It was cool to sit outside, in a place with no Wi-Fi or cell towers, and imagine what life was like there hundreds of years ago when their families settled there. I started to imagine what people were thinking about, and how people lived their lives on this land, what they ate, and what they knew about the land around them.

Recently, my main passion in life has been playing in front of people, so I’ve been touring a lot as a solo artist. And because I’ve done all these shows and a lot of the shows have been improvised, I wanted to come up with more of a repertoire that I could perform solo for people. It was really nice to have four weeks at Ucross to develop that material. I don’t know if I would have been able to do that if I had stayed in New York, distracted by so many different things.

PG: New York City certainly would have produced different field recordings.

CD: Yeah, exactly.

PG: In terms of the field recordings, what was your process for integrating them into the music? How did you decide which recordings to use on the album?

CD: Well, the ones that I put on the album were taken from when I had walked pretty far away from my cabin and left my recording device at that location and walked away. When I came back later to get it again, I had a couple of hours’ worth of recording. I did that a few times.

PG: Were you ever surprised at what you found on the field recordings?

CD: I was very surprised by what I had heard. I would listen to the recordings while I was eating or taking a break, and it was amazing to hear the sounds that birds and nature make when you’re not around. There were a lot of birds that I hadn’t really heard before. That land has been declared an important bird area, and there were some birds on the recordings that I was unfamiliar with.  There were also geese honking. Actually, one of the geese sounds was so prevalent every day that I ended up naming a song -“Knahk”- after the sound they made. It was funny because I had heard the geese a lot and they were making the same sound, in the same pitch, every time they passed by. My piece was an answer to the geese that were honking a lot.

PG: For “Bongos,” which is through-composed, did you use traditional Western notation or did you adopt shorthand notes since you were writing for yourself?

CD: I wrote “Bongos” in shorthand because I wanted it to be more of a piece where there were these few voices hocketing back and forth. I wrote shorthand on the staff. Wrote it down by hand. I have since written it out on the computer, so it looks nicer. But when I was writing it, I wrote it out by hand on staff paper. But I mostly wrote it in traditional notation. I pretty much improvised all of the rest of the album’s music and, over time, they took more song-like shapes. Basically, I turned on the recorder and recorded hours of my working out a song itself, which then eventually became what is on the album.

PG: Because the pieces are mostly based on improvisations, are they wildly different each time you perform them live, or have they mostly settled into more structured forms now?

CD: I’m still working it all out. Live, I can’t always bring all of my gear with me, and that limits some of what I can do. My performances are always intended to play the record for people and will most likely be that. There’s also an extra piece that isn’t on the recording that I play on the road.

PG: But presumably, both because of how small the actual instrument is and because it is so central to Fallows, you will be traveling with the organelle. What led you to work with the organelle?

CD: I was looking for an all-in-one processing and synthesis box that also has samplers inside of it and found the organelle gave me exactly what I wanted. It is limited in certain ways, but it’s the best device I have found to incorporate all the things that I want to do, which is to call up samples. When I went on tour for Alula Captivity (Ropeadope, 2023), I used the organelle often for that purpose. To perform solo with Fallows, I wanted to build upon the ability to call up samples to also add effects to the saxophone and duplicate myself or harmonize myself. I also wanted to create some drumbeats. All of the drumbeats that you hear on the album were created using the organelle. The patches I used were either ones that I worked on myself or were very generously offered to the community by others on the Critter & Guitari forum. I love that the organelle is an open-source platform that allows everyone to benefit from shared resources. Everyone’s on that forum helping one another and sharing. MaxMSP forums are like that too, but the fact that the organelle runs on pure data and uses a free open source software really fosters a great community where people love to share.

PG: In terms of using other people’s patches, what was your process for selecting which would fit best for the record; did you do a lot of listening and experimenting?

CD: Absolutely. Because when people share their patches, they share their pure data files, I was able to go into the pure data file and l mess around with a patch if I wanted to. Or I could ask questions about what I might want to modify. There’s some patches that are really cool but sometimes need a little tweaking for what I need. For example, there’s a patch I use a lot – it is on the track “Springtales”-  that I love. But it also has a squelchy sound that starts every note, and I don’t love that about it. So, I’ve been talking to the person who made that patch and trying to figure out a way for me to modify it to remove that issue. Everyone in the community is so nice and generous.

I would say, though, that it takes significant patience to work with the patches. You can go to the organelle website, look at all of the patches that are available, and download all of them. That is exactly what I did. Then I put them all on my organelle. And I spent hours going into every single patch and writing notes for myself about what I did and didn’t like about each of them. That process took months. And sometimes, I still forget about some of the patches and what they can do. It all takes a lot of patience. It can be so overwhelming.

PG: There are just so many great patches to experiment with. For instance, the one inspired by J Dilla.

CD: Oh yeah, “Dillalicious.” That’s a good patch. At the beginning, I took the strategy of using the same patches over and over. But I definitely tend to gravitate toward specific ones. Some of my favorites are the “granular synthesis” patch, the “guitar to synth” patch, and the “LFO synthesis” patch. I also love the “old-timey piano” synthesizer. And someone made a “Juno” patch that really solid. There’s another really good drum sampler, “Euclidian Rhythms,” that I love. For that one, someone went in and recorded real drum sounds. I really love that patch because it sounds so real.

PG: What was your process for integrating patches? 

CD: Every track followed a different process. For “Springtales,” I started with the drumbeat and used it as a palette. Then I recorded a little grain of myself playing a pattern on the saxophone. I messed around with a particular pitch grouping, froze it, looped it, and then used the pitch wheel on my looper. If I perform it live, I would use my foot pedal as a pitch wheel generator thing.

But then, for “She Know She is Water,” the track started more with the “old-timey piano” patch. When I was experimenting with that patch, I started imagining a glitchy drumbeat in the background. I made a drumbeat on the “Euclidean Rhythm Sampler”, and then sequenced that drumbeat. I started messing around with the length of each of the hits, and that’s where the glitchiness came into play. And, so, on that track, you can hear the patch opening up and can also program that over the sequence in the organelle. You can essentially play along with a sequence that’s shifting over time, which is what I ended up doing for that track. I also knew that I wanted to have saxophone on the track, and played over those two components, the piano and the drums. I essentially tried to fit my sax inside of what was going on the rest of the track. In doing that, I also used my looper to catch some of those moments and repeat those phrases. I also wanted to have a sample of [Vietnamese monk and peace activist] Thích Nhất Hạnh as part of that track. I looped various sections of his sample , taking parts of the sample and cutting off other parts. It’s similar to what a DJ would do, which is a little different than most of the rest of the album.

PG: To ask you one last thing, about the saxophone, you can also hear the legacy of solo saxophone recordings on Fallows, aside from the electronic samples and patches. Fittingly, one of the tracks is dedicated to Steve Lacy, who had released significant solo saxophone records during his lifetime. You had worked with Lee Konitz, who, again, was a bit of a pioneer on solo saxophone recordings. Did you learn anything about solo performance from working with Lee?

CD: I learned a lot from him.

I went to see Lee play solo a couple of times, and he would play solo in front of me when I took lessons from him. Most of the time, he would perform solo in the context of a standard. There were maybe twenty songs that he loved to play over and over. He would then come up with solo versions of those pieces and make them sound like it was a whole band performing. He could make his saxophone tone sound so full. You didn’t need anything else, you just could listen to him play. It was so special. And sometimes, if he was playing with a band, he would play solo for like five minutes before bringing the rest of the band in.

I feel that Lee taught me how to connect to harmony and melody. He was so good at outlining harmony. He made it so you knew exactly where you were, even though he wasn’t playing intervallically. He would just play melodically One of the biggest things he would always bring me to was the importance of melody and playing melodically. Emphasize melody, no matter what else you play.

Lee also tried to push me to play something different every time. Jack DeJohnette used to focus on that, too. When Jack passed away, there was a quote floating around that every time he sat in front of the drums, he wanted to be able to play something new. I think that’s something that connects all of us influenced by Black American music. We are trying to get better at playing and connecting with the ancestors, even as we keep doing our own thing. We all strive to both connect with the past, even as we move forward with the future.

‘Fallows’ is out now on Ropeadope Records. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Caroline Davis is available on her website.

Photo credit: Claire Fowler