Francis Davis
speaker
7 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Francis Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You're listening to Fresh Air and this is Interval. I'm Francis Davis. The first jazz group I ever saw and heard in person was a quartet led by pianist Jackie Byard at a concert presented by the Philadelphia College of Art around 1966. I remember the tenor saxophonist Joe Farrell stepping down off the bandstand during a long drum solo and pulling a cigarette from the pack
in the breast pocket of a sports coat and asking me, did I have a match? And I remember Jackie Byard springing a brilliantly executed stride passage in the middle of something else, a convoluted single-note solo played free of tempo.
I laughed out loud in relief and delight, and Jackie Byard craned his neck around to see where the laugh had come from, and seeing me, or not seeing me, nodded and laughed loudly himself. I tell that story, well, I tell it first of all because it's a story I enjoy telling, but I tell it also because it refutes or at least clarifies a statement made by Jackie Byard and often quoted.
I don't play all their styles tongue-in-cheek, he's often said. I think what he means is his intention is not satirical. Nothing is being mocked. I don't think he denies or would deny that the effect of his juxtapositions is contagiously humorous. Jackie Byard is a one-man jazz repertory, Catholic rather than eclectic. His style is no mere crazy quilt of unrelated references, but whole cloth.
He's able to hear premonitions of bop and of the avant-garde in the work of people like Fats Waller and James B. Johnson, and able to hear echoes of the old and the new. And most importantly, he's able to demonstrate this kind of insight in his solos.
piano plays softly
Thank you.
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