Kris Davis and the Lutoslawski Quartet's "The Solastalgia Suite"

It's long been my belief that our poor stewardship of the planet is the defining issue of our time, and we keep creating other emergencies that take our eye off the ball as Earth's habitability by us continues to diminish. Canadian-American pianist-composer Kris Davis makes such ecological dread the focus on her new album, an eight-part suite for piano and string quartet, performed with Poland's renowned Lutoslawski Quartet. The title The Solastalgia Suite comes from a term coined by philosopher Glenn Albrecht to refer to "a form of homesickness while we are still at home" -- a form of "[grief] for the landscapes and ecologies we knew."

"I see the changes when I go back home to Canada," says Vancouver native Davis, and I can remember back in the '80s when the Canadian parliament was debating whether to sell glacial ice to the parched American Southwest. The glaciers are gone now, and states like mine are taxing their already overstressed water infrastructure by building AI data farms that consume millions of gallons of water. So the theme of Davis's new piece is timely and hits close to home.

While her compositional ambition hasn't been as expansive as her contemporaries Ingrid Laubrock and Mary Halvorson's, she has alternated relatively straight jazz work with her own trio and Dave Holland's quartet with more experimental ventures (the bass clarinet heavy octet Infrasound, her hip-hop adjacent work with Diatom Ribbons). Her influences include composers Luciano Berio, Olivier Messiaen, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and a commission from Poland's Jazztopad Festival provided the opportunity for this collaboration.

A jarring and turbulent "Interlude" raises the curtain with a mood of edgy unease. "An Invitation to Disappear" offers a gentler and more ruminative response, skirting despair with the barest vestiges of hope, transitioning seamlessly into "Towards No Earthly Pole," where the composer's prepared piano dialogues with spectral strings. "The Known End" opens with Stravinsky-esque slashing strings, to which Davis responds with her most fervent playing here. 

The elegiac "Ghost Reefs," inspired by Davis's compositional studies with AACM eminence Henry Threadgill, laments the passing of coral reefs destroyed by warming ocean temperatures, while the echolalic "Pressure and Yield" depicts a planet in seismic disturbance. "Life on Venus" evokes a chilly alien landscape -- but there is no Planet B. "Degrees of Separation" concluded the suite on an unsettling note, reminding us of the interconnection of all life on Earth and the importance of environmental justice to the survival of us all.

Kris Davis continues to surprise us with the scope of her art and her willingness to take on new challenges. This stunning new work speaks clearly to our historical moment, and makes a strong case for her place among the most creative musicians of her generation.