Caroline Davis, saxophone; Wendy Eisenberg, guitar

“We 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 our nucleus: the central and essential part of our movement; the positively charged central core of our 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 our musical friendship, the affordance of space we give to the possibility of synchronicity, the reminders we write of the preciousness of our existence - all of this we put into these songs for you, to help us all accept these miracles and metaphors, in our lifeboats.”

Caroline Davis’s expression covers a wide range of styles. As a saxophonist and composer, she has released six albums and has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star. She has worked with Lee Konitz, John Zorn, Angelica Sanchez, The Femme Jam, Rajna Swaminathan, and Terry Riley. Caroline has been a resident fellow at MacDowell, The Jazz Gallery, The Rockefeller Estate, and ICE Ensemble Evolution, and a recipient of Jerome Hill, CMA, and NYFA fellowships. She is an advocate for gender equity (This Is A Movement, The New School) and justice for incarcerated people.

Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, pedals, the tenor banjo, the computer, the synthesizer and the voice. Their work spans genres, from jazz to noise to avant-rock to delicate songs; their performances span venues, from international festivals to intimate basements. Though often working solo as both a songwriter and improviser, with acclaimed releases on Tzadik, VDSQ, Out of your Head, and Garden Portal, they also perform in the rock band Editrix, and in endless other combinations of their heroes and peers including Allison Miller, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, Billy Martin, and Caroline Davis. They are also a writer on music and other things, with published essays on music in Sound American, Arcana, and the Contemporary Music Review.

Photo by Adi Meyerson