Leaving It All Out There article @ All About Jazz

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Evan Parker,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Ralph Alessi,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Kris Davis,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Van Morrison and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Marc Ribot. Since 2012, Davis has played in

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Alexander Hawkins‘ thrilling trio alongside double bassist

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Neil Charles; the trio’s Carnival Celestial (Intakt Records, 2023) is essential listening.

With his band Human, Davis has released the acclaimed albums Being Human (Babel Label, 2013) and Fractured Lands (Babel Label, 2017). After a long hiatus from recording as a leader, Davis returns at the head of the Stephen Davis Unit with The Gleaming World (577 Records, 2025)—a visceral slice of contemporary jazz that speaks volumes for Davis’ writing and arranging.

The Stephen Davis Unit, which features alto saxophonist

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Angelika Niescier, tenor saxophonist

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Tom Challenger, double bassist

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Nick Dunston and pianist Hawkins, took its explosive live bow at the Brilliant Corners jazz festival in Belfas in 2024. Now the Stephen Davis Unit is ready to take on the rest of the world.

All About Jazz: The Gleaming World is a tremendous album. You must be very pleased with the way it has turned out, no?

Stephen Davis: Yeah, in terms of the music and the band and how the recording came out, I’m pretty happy with it. And so far, it’s been quite a nice response.

All About Jazz: The album marks a departure from your previous releases on a number of scores, doesn’t it?

SD: It does. I have released a few records as leader on Babel Label based in London, but I’ve never released on an international label. This is my first international release, as a leader, anyway. The label I’m working with in New York, 577, they’ve been really good at to work with, with the pre-publicity and getting a bit of a buzz around it.

AAJ: 577 Records is certainly well-established label—pretty legendary, in fact.

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Federico Ughi and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Daniel Carter (577 Records founders) are both still going strong, aren’t they?

SD: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a lot of great UK people on the label like

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Mark Sanders,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Pat Thomas, Paul Dunmall and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Olie Brice. It’s a label that chimes with what I do as a player.

AAJ: You are in very good company on this label, not forgetting people like

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>William Parker, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Benny Maupin,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>James Brandon Lewis,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Joe McPhee and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Wadada Leo Smith. I was listening to something that Michael Tilson Thomas recorded with 577 there a while ago which was really fantastic. Yes, it’s a spectacular roster of artists.

SD: Yeah, the other people on 577 are doing similar types of creative music so it seems like a good fit. And thankfully, they liked the music and wanted to do it.

AAJ: How did you hook up with 577 Records?

SD: Once I had done the recording and got through the mixing and mastering stage I started looking for a label. I could have gone down the route I’d done before and release it on the British label Babel, but to be honest, I sort of wanted to try and do something different. It was just asking other musician friends about, you know, who I should go to with this album to put out.

It was a call between, should I just do this myself and pay a PR person and put it out in Bandcamp. It’s not a bad model financially to go down that route, depending on how you do it. I did look into that in detail. But the advice I got from other musicians was basically, look, if you do get a label interested, the difference is they’re going to get more people to review it. and if it gets some nice reviews, then we’ll hopefully get festival work. For me, it’s a festival type of band.

Yes, we could play in a jazz club, but really, I feel like the music and the sort of essence of it would work really well in festivals. And nowadays, if you have more than three people, you really need to approach festivals to get enough funds to do a project like this, because the clubs don’t have enough money, frankly, to pay five people anymore.

AAJ: Whatever way you look at it, jazz, improvised music, it is minority music. It’s a precarious living.

SD: Yeah. I actually went to maybe four or five different labels and some came back really interested. One label in particular wanted to release it in 2026. And it was just too far away.

AAJ: You’re on to something new by that stage. The impetus has gone.

SD: Yes, exactly. When 577 came back and said they were interested I was very glad to hear it. Right’ let’s do it. They’ve been great. I’ve really enjoyed working with them so far.

AAJ: I know what you mean when you say The Stephen Davis Unit is a festival band. You guys really blew the audience away at Brilliant Corners in 2024. It was an electric atmosphere. Actually, 577 Records has its own festival in New York, but what I didn’t know was that it also runs festivals in Morocco and Italy. You should be a shoo-in for those, you would hope!

SD: That would be amazing, absolutely. But we’ll see. The bassist, Nick Dunston is actually from Brooklyn, though he lives in Berlin.

AAJ: We’ll talk about the musicians, of course, but I would like to ask you first about the genesis of the music that became The Gleaming World. Was it music that had been percolating in your head for a lot of time or did it come to you in a rush of inspiration?

SD: It’s a good question. Music is percolating in my head a lot of the time. Well, you know, I am one of those people who gets ideas, I write little sketches down. Sometimes I record at a piano and sample it onto my phone for another time. I am always writing. Sometimes I even write behind the drums when I come up with rhythmic things and I’m thinking about how a bass line, or a melody would work inside of rhythm. So, there’s always stuff going on.

AAJ: But the period spent in Tinahely, Wicklow, provided the impetus, didn’t it?

SD: Yeah, I got the Navigator Residency from IMC (Improvised Music Company) last year. It’s a residency that buys you time out of your life to go and do something and I used that to go to Wicklow. I just brought a laptop and some scores. I paint as well. Art things. I just spent 10 days walking around the forest in Wicklow. There’s an amazing forest down there that had 600-year-old trees, some of the oldest trees in Europe. Just beautiful. That residency really distilled down some ideas I had into compositions, which turned out to be about eight compositions.

AAJ: Did you have the musicians you wanted to work with in mind from the start?

SD: Originally, I was thinking about just the lovely relationship that Neil Charles, Alexander (Hawkins) and I have, and then how that would work with two front horn players. I couldn’t make it work with Neil for whatever reason—I think he was on tour with another project. And then straight away, I just thought of Nick. There’d been a situation in Germany where we had a gig and Neil couldn’t do it. Nick Dunston had stepped and learned all the trio music and did a stellar job. I really enjoyed playing with him.

And then the more I thought about Nick, that sort of led me in different pathways of thinking about the other two members. When I write any music, I’m always really thinking about the player and how they’re going to approach anything that I write.

AAJ: That was the

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Duke Ellington way. It seems really logical—almost ensuring originality and personality in the playing.

SD: A lot of classical composers, if you talk to them, they’ll just write the score for an orchestra or for a pianist, but they’re never really thinking about the personality. I think that’s something very significant and different with jazz or, let’s say, new music, creative music, improvised music, whatever you want to call it. They’re always writing for a player in mind. And there’s a big reason for that, because a lot of our music isn’t fully composed. It has elements, obviously, of improvisation. So all of my compositions were just really little platforms to let these players express themselves and interact with.

AAJ: Was the writing methodology different in any way compared to your way of writing in the past? You were in a very different sort of space, a very beautiful space, you had time, and yet a very specific time frame …

SD: The methodology I used was different because I brought art with me. I paint and draw a lot. A lot of the composition started off as sketches because I had a commission for a dance project last year and I was working with three dancers and three musicians and a lot of the music I wrote for that project, I was watching the dancers. I would spend time just sketching their movements and then I went away and looked at the movement and shapes and rhythms and tried to score around the movement. That was quite a new process for me that I enjoyed, and I thought with this project I’m going to do something similar.

I was out in the forest drawing. I wasn’t really drawing trees, but I was reacting artistically to things that were happening, reacting with paints and pencils. Then I would spend a bit of time at the piano using my laptop, some software that I use and my drums. I had my drums with me, and I had a lot of electronics as well which of course, weirdly, I never used on the gig or the recording. I played completely acoustically, but I was using a lot of samples and electronics.

So, I was sort of submerged in sounds and submerged in the forest a lot. The more I worked on the scores in Wicklow the more the personnel were starting to come into my mind. The music really came out of that time in Wicklow, when I galvanized all those ideas and, you know, formed it into what it became. Yeah, it was definitely a different process than I’ve used before.

AAJ: I love the interaction between the horns of Tom Challenger and Angelika Niescier. They both play a storm; what drew you to them?

SD: I have always got on well with Tom on a personal level and have really enjoyed his playing when I heard him on different projects. Out of all the London tenor players, he always just stood out for me as having a real lyrical approach to playing, very melodic and lyrical when he wants but also marries that with a very sort of abstract sense of space as well, and how he approaches phrasing and interaction. I was always into that sound and always had him in the back of my mind to do a project with him someday.

AAJ: Angelika Niescier did a great duo album with Alexander Hawkins, Soul In Plain Sight (Intakt Records, 2021). Did he recommend her?

SD: Yeah, Alexander turned me on to her. He had worked with her on a couple of other projects as well. He said, ‘listen there’s this German saxophonist, Angelika, and she’s just incredible.’ I met her in Cologne when she came to see the trio with Alexander. We had a coffee, and I really liked her as a person. I knew she was an absolute killer player. The way she plays on alto is quite different to the way Tom plays. Angelika has a very different, rhythmical, fiery kind of language. Tom is coming from for me a different approach and I wanted two players that would complement each other in some ways but also subvert each other. That’s exactly how it felt in the studio and how it felt when we played live. They’re both just so supportive of the whole project but very individual in their approach.

AAJ: The contrasting styles and their chemistry work really well. You go back a long way with Alexander Hawkins; when did you first cross paths?

SD: Oh my god. that’s a while ago! You know back in the day there weren’t that many piano players in the UK playing in a sort of free context, other than maybe Pat Thomas,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Matthew Bourne and maybe

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Kit Downes as well.

AAJ:

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Django Bates?

SD: Yes, Django was a big influence on me. I got lucky to be around Django and work with him a little bit, and yeah, he can play anything. But Django then left London so there was a period where I was just working with Matthew, and there weren’t many other piano players that I was that interested in because they were all playing, you know, more mainstream jazz.

Then I heard this pianist from Oxford on the radio one night and it was Alexander. I was like blown away, I was like, wow, this guy’s incredible, I particularly love working with piano players, I mean, if you said to me, you know, you can only pick one other instrument to play with for the rest of your life, I would pick a pianist, and it would probably be Alexander, to be honest. For me, Alexander is the kind of musician that’s going to be talked about for the rest of time—he’s that special, you know, and I think most people would agree.

I just wrote him an email, and I said, ‘I heard you on the radio, I loved it.’ And then he wrote a lovely email back. When I had my project called Human, I did two albums for Babel. For the first album I was putting together a band. I had written music for trumpet, violin, piano, and drums, which is an unusual setup. I thought of Alexander, and I just approached him and said, ‘look, would you be interested in doing this recording in London for Babel?’ He had released on Babel, I think, at that point, a trio record, and so he came back, said, ‘yeah, I’d love to do it.’

I got

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dylan Bates, Django’s brother, and I got ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Alex Bonney on trumpet. I met Alexander in London, we did a rehearsal, then went straight into the studio and made that record. All the music I had sent him was tricky music somehow, and he did a lot of work on it, and played amazing. We got on like a house of fire, and I just knew, after that, we would work together a lot.

AAJ: And how did the trio come about?

SD: I got quite lucky in that he came to Belfast to do a show with his trio, which originally was Neil Charles and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Tom Skinner. Tom got sick or something, and Alexander called me and said, ‘will you do this trio gig?’ So I learned all his trio music really quickly, like in a day. He loved what I did on the gig, and I think Tom Skinner, at that point, was kind of moving into the band Smile with Radiohead, and he was sort of busy. I’m not going to say I took Tom Skinner’s gig, but Tom basically didn’t do much of the trio work, and it became what it is now, Alexander Neil and me. That’s really how that relationship developed.

From there I did some of his large groups, I’ve done the band with Shabaka (

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Shabaka Hutchings), you know, all sorts of projects. Obviously the Braxton band was the pinnacle of him trusting me to play with, you know, one of the elders, like Anthony Braxton.

AAJ: Working with Braxton in 2020 (see YouTube below) must have been a pinch yourself experience, no?

SD: Absolutely. Alexander had worked with Braxton on a couple of occasions, one being that he did his Sonic Genome, as it’s known, which is the big piece for something like 80 musicians. That was in Italy, in a huge museum somewhere, with amazing players like

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Mary Halvorson, and I think

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Craig Taborn might have been on it.

Alexander being the multiverse that he is, he knows a lot about Braxton’s music, I mean, a lot more than a lot of people. He can really tell you a lot about his back catalogue, and he can play these pieces, you know, because Braxton’s music, if you ever look into it, is not just the new piece that Anthony writes this year—it’s all related to the first piece he’s ever written, and it’s all in one big loop, so a Braxton opera might have something in it that happened 40 years ago! When you’re in his sort of inner circle, you start to understand the history of his musical identity, and his compositional approach.

Braxton and Alexander had got on great and long story short, Braxton, once every 10 years over his career, he likes to do a thing where, he calls it “touching the tradition,” where he puts together a band and plays music of his elders, you know,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Charles Mingus, and

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Cecil Taylor,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>John Coltrane, whatever. He wants to play the music of where he came from, and so he has done that over the years.

We just got lucky that he wanted to do it, and he asked Alexander, he said, ‘look, I want to do standards with you, and I don’t want to put up a band, I want you to put who you like to play with.’ I mean, Alexander could have chosen anybody. He could have chosen a very big-name drummer and I’m sure it would have been great, but he chose people that he works with, and he trusts. He knows we’ll take chances, that we’ll challenge him, and he’ll challenge us. He picked, you know, Neil and I, and we were very grateful to have that experience.

AAJ: So Braxton didn’t know you at all before that tour?

SD: Anthony didn’t know me from Jack. I remember him saying to me after one of the early rehearsals, ‘Why don’t I know you? You’re incredible!’ I was like, ‘well, I live in Belfast, you know, and you live in Connecticut, or wherever … ‘ So yeah, that all came about Alexander and trust. It was beautiful.

AAJ: You must be really chuffed that the nine-gig tour was documented in a monumental 13-CD box set?

SD: Oh yeah, it’s just incredible.

AAJ: What strikes me about that release is the vastness of the repertoire. I think there were around 70 different songs on that release. Also the range of music—

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Gigi Gryce,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Sonny Rollins, ,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Thelonious Monk, Antônio Carlos Jobim,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Wayne Shorter, Simon and Garfunkel, the theme tune from High Noon, even “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf…” did you have to learn all these songs, or did he just call them on the bandstand?

SD: We rehearsed in Oxford for three days, Ian, and we rehearsed 95 pieces.

AAJ: Holy crap!

SD: I’m not joking! The man is in his late 70s, and the energy he has, and the hunger for music and playing is unparalleled. Yeah, I mean, the concerts were over two hours every night, non-stop. Sold out audiences. The energy he puts in when he plays, like, I’ve never seen anything like it. He collapsed on stage one night in Poland. Yeah, he went down playing.

AAJ: And he’s still going strong at almost 80.

SD: When you work with someone like him there’s something you realize, it’s that he’s not messing around. This is his life, you know? You really got that from him when you talked to him about music. Like, he would talk to us about his people that he respected, Coltrane, Charles Mingus or

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Sam Rivers, and his experiences being around his elders. There would be tears rolling down his face when he’d tell us about them. So it was just an incredible experience on so many levels—musically, but also personally. Just being around the man is just very, very special, and I feel very lucky that that recording is there. When I’m dead and gone, it’ll always survive, and I’m on the record with him. It really was the pinnacle of my career.

AAJ: So far …

SD: Yeah, so far.

AAJ: I was dipping into the box set in the week leading up to this interview, reminding myself of how beautiful the music is. What a souvenir for you!

SD: The set lists were beautiful too. I’ve kept them all, you know, it was so personal. He wrote some really interesting stuff in the set list. It wasn’t just a list of songs; it was little things that he thought about, where it’d be something simple like, ‘I want Neil to start this tune, but I want him to think about this …’

And I’ll tell you one; there was a ballad we were playing one night, he wrote something very beautiful on the set list, he said, ‘I want you guys to think of children playing in the woods when we’re playing this ballad.’ Okay. And that sounds so, like, arbitrary, but actually, you know, if you’re playing a ballad, and you’re thinking about children playing in the woods, having fun, it puts you mentally, conceptually, in such a different place than you might otherwise be, you know. Yeah, so he’s thinking, on another level.

AAJ That’s very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. If there’s one thing you took away from that experience of playing night after night with Braxton, what do you think it was?

SD: That’s a really good question. I think my answer to that would be the honesty that I might not have had before. What I learned from Braxton was that when he approaches it, the seriousness and the honesty, and how when you go to play music in front of an audience you leave everything out there on stage. You can’t walk into it half-hearted and try and just get through the gig. And maybe before I worked with him, I might have done that a little bit in a certain context. I think now, since I’ve worked with him, when I play, there’s a different honesty to what I do. It might not be any better technically, or whatever, but there’s an honesty. I hope that people can feel that I’m trying to do something here. It might not always work, but I’m honestly trying.

AAJ: When you say an honesty, do you mean a sort of an emotional intensity or connectivity, if that’s the right expression?

SD: Absolutely, that’s it. It’s almost like technique goes out the window. I mean, I can play my instrument, Alexander’s exceptional, Braxton can really play, but you rise above technique, and all these approaches you learn, and find something personal about yourself and really leave it out there. That’s where we’re all aiming for. I’m not saying I’m there. I’m trying to get there, but every so often there’s a wee chink of light I maybe find and that’s where I want to be. That’s where I want to stay, you know, because I don’t want to be a drummer that plays like other drummers.

I love

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Tony Williams,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Elvin Jones,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Tom Rainey, whoever it is, I love all these great drummers, and I’ve learned so much from them, but I have to find me in there. That’s the hardest thing in this music. If you get it, then you’ve got something to say, but there’s a lot of people that are just playing what they’ve heard before.

AAJ: Absolutely, and I think probably you have a better chance of getting there, of developing your own sound if you write your own music or if you approach the music in a free, improvisatory spirit.

SD: Yeah, that’s a good point.

AAJ: Coming back to your album, The Gleaming World, the title is inspired by Seamus Heaney, is that right?

SD: Yeah. I’ve read a bit about him, and I visited his grave once as well, when we were down there in Bellaghy. He wrote these words in a letter to someone—I hope I’m right about that—and the words were “glory be the brightness to the gleaming world.” I don’t know if it’s a biblical thing or a Seamus Heaney thing, but I just love that, “glory be the brightness to the gleaming world.”

What I felt with that little phrase was, where we’re at in the world right now is horrible, and I just like this idea of bringing some light back into the world. How do we do that at all? So with this project, I’m hoping, and a lot of people have said that when they heard the band live and the record, that they feel that although it’s avant-garde music in a way, and there’s some challenging listening, there’s an essence of light and happiness and a sort of energy about the music that sometimes doesn’t come across with avant-garde music.

Avant-garde music, or I don’t know what you want to call it, can feel a little bit standoffish to audiences, and I was really trying to write music that had a lot of danceable pulses and happiness within it. There’s a lot of major tonality and harmony, and stuff where it’s just written in major chords, and then there’s a lot of weird stuff as well.

AAJ: It is grooving avant-garde stuff. The composition “Whale Song” sounds celebratory to me.

SD: Yeah, that’s great. That tune, weirdly for me, is like an Irish reel or something. I love Irish music; my dad was either playing traditional Irish music or doo-wop, so I grew up on that. But then another friend of mine,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dave Kane, said to me that it really reminds him of

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Brotherhood of Breath. I wasn’t thinking about South Africa or anything of that sort, but he hears that in it, so that’s lovely.

AAJ: I can understand where Dave Kane is coming from. Did you come across any whales in Wicklow?

SD: (laughs) There’s a great drummer you’ll know,

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dan Weiss, I really love his playing and music, and I follow his career. He was playing in a club called Blue Whale in Los Angeles with his band. They were playing this tune, and somebody had recorded him on their phone taking the drum solo. The bass line and the left hand piano and we’re playing this ostinato repeating and he was blowing over it on the drums. I was transfixed by this solo because he had studied a lot of tabla, and he had a lot of Indian rhythms in there and stuff. So I transcribed a lot of it and tried to learn what he was doing.

But through that process I sort of stole the idea and that bass line in Blue Whale that just goes the whole way through it. There are different intervals, but it’s this idea of this constant pulse and you notice it’s the only tune I take a bit of a solo on. It’s coming from Dan Weiss. It’s nothing like him. It’s nothing as good as what he’s doing, but it’s my little homage to him in a weird way. When I heard him play that, it stuck with me so much what he did.

AAJ: I am sure he would be interested to know that. I guess the impetus for this album, in a way, comes from the Improvised Music Company and your residency in Tinahely, Wicklow, a program that they’ve been promoting now for a number of years. The music got its premiere in Belfast at Brilliant Corners thanks to Moving On Music. These two organisations, Dublin-and Belfast-based, are really fundamental in promoting this sort of creative music throughout Ireland, North and South.

SD: The whole thing wouldn’t have existed without either of them, of course. IMC have been fairly important, but I am obviously from the North so I’m on the periphery there. Moving On Music have been there for me my whole career. Brian Carson (MOM founder) in particular when he was there, but Paula (Kiernan) as well, and Mark (Reid) and Mick (Michael Bonner) that are doing it now. They have been so supportive over the years. A lot of stuff I just couldn’t do without them. In particular, Moving On Music, for me, has been a lifeblood of being able to make noise.

AAJ: Moving On Music is 30 years old this year.

SD: That’s amazing. You know, I wouldn’t have had half the music education I had if it wasn’t for Brian Carson. He brought bands into the Queen’s Festival when it had money. I’ve seen incredible bands like

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>William Parker or

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Dave Douglas or

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Han Bennink with Clusone 3, or

”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Jimmy Smith. You just never got to see that sort of stuff when I was 19. It’s very important to me, Moving On Music.

AAJ: Finally, Stephen, what ambitions do you have for this album, The Gleaming World, and for this band going forward?

SD: I’m trying to put a tour together, an Irish-UK tour. It might happen later this year. If not, definitely something in 2026. But yeah, the plan is to try and tour it here and then hopefully more international work, with the label being in New York. Let’s hope that the album’s reviewed nicely and people are interested in the music. But yeah, the ambition is to get the band out working on the road for the next year or two. It’s a live band.

And I’d love to do something with a guest artist, you know. I talked to Moving On Music about this, but I’d love to bring someone in to work with the band, like an elder. I don’t want to name names, but you know, there’s a few people I’ve thought of—just somebody to come in and sort of throw the band into another space.

AAJ: It would be fantastic to see this band go from strength to strength. I wish you every success with this album, with the tour, and with the Stephen Davis Unit having a long life.

SD: Thanks, Ian. Thanks so much.

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