Kevin William Davis

Kevin Davis is an improviser, cellist and composer. Over the last five years, his work has engaged the discipline and practice of improvisation, facilitating direct research into sound and perception and using it as a vehicle for discovering new cello techniques and compositional strategies. Kevin is also especially motivated by both free improvisation and the post-Cagean continuum. This ultimately led him from his native Tennessee to Chicago where he now lives and works with many like-minded collaborators in the city’s vibrant improvised music community.Simultaneously indebted to the spectrum of Euro-American concert music, American traditions of improvisation and elements of experimental and commercial music, Kevin’s present work is a synthesis of the compositional/improvisational space, striving to create complexity and richness from simple premises. This current work applies internal logic or structural devices to improvised performances, using indeterminate elements to create generative compositions and working with extended, often timbre-oriented cello techniques.