THE NAKED CITY : CAROLINE DAVIS – JAZZ AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

When it comes to music festivals specifically celebrating the creative output of women, Australia would seem sadly lacking. Admittedly Queensland currently stages the Mooloolaba Music Rockfest and Sistahood Rising in Western Australia has a strong music component. That’s a start but there is obviously a long way to go right across the country in matching an often male dominated monopoly. Fortunately the Sydney Women’s International Jazz Festival has been breaking new ground for over a decade with an event that goes from strength to strength.

Beginning this week and running through until November 5, the festival will feature no less than eighteen different events with artists from all over Australia and the world. From the City Recital Hall with three-time Grammy Award-winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant to intimate volunteer run venues like Monday Night Confessions in Camperdown and Johnston St Jazz in Annandale, there is a superb diversity of music on offer.

Jazz has always been a vehicle for social and political protest and jazz musicians have often been at the forefront of movements such as the fight for civil rights on the part of Afro-Americans. Artists such as Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and more recently Terri Lyne Carrington are synonymous with music that highlights injustice and cries out for change.

This year’s Sydney Women’s Jazz Fest is particularly proud to include the celebrated saxophonist, composer, and vocalist Caroline Davis, known for not only her ground breaking music but her focus on often neglected social issues like the appalling state of incarceration in the US and throughout the world. Caroline has released six albums under her own name and has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star. She has shared the stage and recording studio with artists such as Lee Konitz, John Zorn, George Cables, Angelica Sanchez, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Nicole Mitchell, Miles Okazaki, Geoffrey Keezer, Rajna Swaminathan, and Billy Kaye, to name just a few and sings and writes songs with the experimental R&B band, My Tree.

Caroline’s newest album, Alula: Captivity, highlights the strength of those who have been, and those who are still incarcerated. It situates her compositions alongside the lives of eight heroes who kept hope alive through incarceration. Her first encounters with the prison system began when she was only ten years old, visiting her uncle, in prison in Sweden. She recalls:

“I will never forget the look of the guards, the smell, the sound of the doors locking, and the look on my uncle’s face. With one glance he communicated an internal acknowledgement that he did something wrong, but also, not knowing how to exist in a society that had no interest in helping him grow and change. It’s as if he was never given a chance once he made a mistake; he was abandoned.”

This Saturday, the very atmospheric St Stephens Church in the CBD is home to one of the festival’s many highlights when Caroline and her band are part of a unique double bill that features a performance from Debora Petrina and Giovanni Mancuso from Italy, utilising an innovative combination of live music and film.

October 28

St Stephens Church, 197 Macquarie St, Sydney

sima.org.au/event/caroline-davis-nuovomondo-symphonies/