A Tribute to Francis Davis

I have been avoiding writing publicly about it in any detail, but Francis Davis, the brilliant critic, who wrote about many things but was perhaps best known for his writing about music, died on April 14. Francis had been sick for a few years with Parkinson's and then emphysema, so his death was not a surprise, but when I saw his wife Terry's phone number as the call came in that night I knew that what I had dreaded for some time had finally come to pass.

I am not going to say too much here just because this is still quite raw, but Francis was a wonderful person who meant a lot to me in his life, and now that he is gone he feels like even more of a presence, as the gap left by his exit is large and impassible. We were friends for about forty years - we met, ironically or not, while waiting on line at the Village Vanguard in the middle 1980s - and what started as something of a musical correspondence turned into a deep friendship. We had many long conversations up to the time when he got sick a few years back, which coincided with my own illness and, characteristically, though I did not want to burden him with my own problems, he was alarmed and deeply troubled when he found out I was in physical distress. I never wanted him to know about my own fears and dread at what was happening to me, as it just did not seem to be something he should be burdened with. Just the same, he was clearly afraid for me - at the same time that I was afraid for him.

We communicated as often as we could as he declined physically, to the point that when I contacted him I communicated with him primarily through his caregiver. Francis had been the first critic to champion my work, and basically got up from his sickbed to write about my last project, which breaks my heart; I think it was the last thing he wrote about before he retreated back into his illness. I know the feeling; when you feel a certain way it is easier to withdraw then to engage, and I didn't want to burden him with my own concerns and dread and my own forebodings about death and what really wears you down at such times, which is a strangely intellectualized obsession with what those last moments of life are going to be like.

Francis was kind and considerate at all times and a great friend. He introduced me to two musicians with whom my association most acutely forced me to develop a personal vision of playing and composing jazz. My tendency was, and still is, to work outside of a system which tries to market jazz in the direction of narrow musical "trends;" just as Francis' own writing always avoided the expected and resisted the kind of pressures to conform that have turned the world of the arts into a strange kind of moralistic and schematically careerist cartoon. He told me about Matt Shipp and helped me contact Matt, and he did the same with Roswell Rudd. Matt continues to be a major personal and aesthetic force in my life, and Ros was a humane genius who passed on to me his great love of the music and the human experience that shapes it.

And that was also what made Francis a great observer of and writer about all things musical and cultural. I have been trying to figure out what it was that set him apart from so many others in his field, and I think, as with any great artist (and he was an artist), it was a heightened sensitivity to human "experience" in the deepest and truest sense of the word. Like me he avoided conventional concepts of "meaning" and life, not because he didn't think they were the fodder for the work we do but because he rejected the conventional ways in which they are portrayed in American life and art. To him, like me, experience was not something that is pounded into us by daily events but was rather something that we absorbed by just BEING, as we lived through events and tragedy and trouble and as we remained open to the small shocks and surprises of life; and as we felt the need to not necessarily "interpret" them through the lens of quantifiable reality but instead by feeling them in a way that was nearly impossible to quantify in simple language and base images.

It sounds more complicated than it is, but one of the things I learned from Francis was that creating things was a matter of first challenging yourself to do something you at first did not exactly know how to do, and then hoping the rest of the world would catch on to what you had done. "Experience" in this process was not just a single thing but an accumulation of small epiphanies, of pleasure and disappointment, hope and fear. It is almost unexplainable in plain terms, but we know it when we hear it - or read it. And that sensitivity to experience in the truest sense is what made Francis great and what makes music - really all art - work when it is right.

I felt gratified that he felt that way about a lot of what I did; his approval was key to my own sense of self, and he was never afraid to tell me when he could not see what I was trying to do. But at those times when I felt - and still feel - that I am wasting my time and that of everyone else by working and then working some more, I am comforted by the sense that Francis thought the time and the effort and the life itself was worthwhile.