Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg with Rhubarb

Improvisers, composers, songwriters and great friends, Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis celebrate the April release of their inside-outside songs and improv duo album Accept When at SPACE.

Wendy Eisenberg and Caroline Davis wrote Accept When between 2022 and 2023, after a long, beautiful period improvising together intimately in the safety of a friend’s practice space.

Our friendship, the quality of attention that colored the light of that and all our other practice spaces, became the basis for our activity and growth as songwriters and our relationship as improvisers. Friendship, how we relate to each other, is their nucleus: the central and essential part of their movement; the positively charged central core of their atom.

A nucleus is supposed to be an especially essential form in eukaryotic cells. Their nuclei are surrounded by a membrane, which in that world permits them to be said to have “true nuclei.” Even their smallest parts, their organelles (incidentally also the name of Caroline’s keyboard heard throughout the record), are held by that membrane. The deepening of their musical friendship, the affordance of space they give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders they write of the preciousness of our existence — all of this they put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats.

Alive with nurturing visions of simple sonic offerings to morph our present situation, Caroline Davis’ main reason for playing music is to connect with others, beckoning new vistas among curious listeners. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs, who treated her as their own. Her family moved to the United States, Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B and gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone 6 years later. Today, Caroline’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to this shifting environment. As a leader, she has released seven albums, and her active projects include Portals, My Tree, and Alula. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.

Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.

Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (Jazz & Gender at The New School and This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar).

Over the last five years or so Wendy Eisenberg has been keeping listeners guessing. Nominally an improvising guitarist, they don’t recognize any musical limitations, perpetually finding ways to apply a deeply exploratory practice to a wide variety of contexts. Eisenberg plays solo guitar as well as banjo in both acoustic and electric settings, warped post-punk songs in the trio Editrix, delicately dangerous guitar music in the critically acclaimed Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, country-free improv in the band Darlin’, with Lester St. Louis and Ryan Sawyer, febrile post-Prime Time jazz in Strictly Missionary, and punk-prog in a trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. As Eisenberg told fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi in an interview for Premier Guitar in 2021, “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Their musical range isn’t a glib manifestation of eclecticism, but a genuine artistic essence.

Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. They also write words about music and other things, and have published work in John Zorn’s Arcana series, The Contemporary Music Review, Talkhouse, and Sound American.

Rhubarb is a music project of synthesizer soundscapes, slow dream pop, guitars sleep-talking and sometimes laying on the horn. This music is about love, remembering, impermanence, dread, sleep, grief, and hopefully, peace.