Kris Davis and the Lutoslawski Quartet - The Solastalgia Suite (Pyroclastic Records, 2026)

By Brian Earley

One transitions into interlude; nobody starts there. Unless you are listening to pianist Kris Davis’s latest release from Pyroclastic Records, The Solastalgia Suite. Or unless beginning is merely transition.

This sets up only the first of many questions about arrival and separation in Davis’s powerfully titled suite, a sequence of songs dealing with the lived experience of watching your world crumble around you. That is to say, solastalgia: remembering when autumn in New York did not commonly see temperatures of 70 degrees Fahrenheit (November 2024, when Davis recorded this album, completed the warmest fall in the history of NOAA’s climate record), or when Calgary, the city of Davis’s youth, did not see over 120 smoke-filled hours more than its average (the city’s province of Alberta was particularly ravaged by wildfires that year).

On Solastagia Davis has been commissioned to create a work for her piano with Poland’s Lutoslawski Quartet by the Jazztopad Festival. The string quartet comprised of Roksana Kwasnikowska (first violin), Marcin Markowicz (second violin), Arur Rozmyslowicz (viola), and Maciej Mlodawski (cello) consists of a set of virtuoso string players who have performed in a variety of adventurous jazz and classical formats (see Schoenberg concertos with Jacek Kapszyk or Kenny Wheeler or Uri Caine) according to the Wroclaw/National Forum of Music website.

The piano quintet moves from “Interlude” as introduction into “An Invitation to Disappear,” where a violin sings alone until the other strings gradually circle around and console it. What is remarkable compositionally about “An Invitation” is just how little material Davis provides for herself, as she allows the strings long stretches of pianoless song. Her disappeared piano enters around the two minute mark on a melody just crooked enough to create an atmosphere of malaise and exits within one minute. At 4:12 the music resolves into silence, only to transition into a string supported homophonic piano melody that weeps in a minor key and gazes in a stunted wonder that may be the most moving moment of the entire suite. It is an invitation to hide as much as it is an appeal to gather together and witness what is being lost right in front of us.

The string harmonics and upper register piano of “Towards No Earthly Pole” depart from grounded midrange and seek outwards, a movement that does not find its likeness until the suite’s penultimate piece, “Life on Venus.” “Life on Venus,” however, is alien with its one violin sawing over rattles of strings, ominous low-bowed cello, and liquid piano chords landing in intervals between. If home cannot be compassed at an Earthly pole, it most certainly is not on Venus. Unless the alien world of Venus is now Earth, yielded to the pressures of climate change just as the soft and strange atmosphere of the music erupts into a cacophony of forte strings in the final work, “Degrees of Separation.”

And “Degrees” is violent, loud, startling in its sudden dynamic attacks, and the longest piece on the album. The music separates into quiet retreat before lurching back to shake the listener’s attention. However, only small degrees separate the human ear’s vastly different perceptions of decibels or hertz. In the arrangement of the solar system, only one degree separates our planet from its toxic twin, and only 2.5 degrees Celsius separate a livable home and a world we watch disappear.

The Solastalgia Suite leaves little room for comfortable anchoring: the music slides into transition even as it ends. The beginnings we assume are only so by our expectation of introduction. The conclusions are not certain departure, but may start again to arrive at new hemispheres of sound, or maybe single piano keys ascend out of perceivable pitch towards endings unknown.

One can listen to The Solastalgia Suite here: