experimental jazz | Listening In

Anthony Davis
b. February 20, 1951

Anthony Davis

American pianist, composer and educator Anthony Davis was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1951. Davis was exposed to jazz at an early age because his father enjoyed music and knew several jazz musicians. Davis composed his first piece for piano at the age of six.

Davis studied music at Wesleyan and Yale universities and went on to teach music and African American studies at various universities. He has been a professor of music at the University of California San Diego since 1998.

Davis received acclaim as a free-jazz pianist with various ensembles and has played with other experimental jazz musicians like Anthony Braxton and Leo Smith. He founded the octet Episteme in 1981.

As a composer, Davis is probably best known for his operas. He has composed five operas to date — the first was X: The Life and Times of Malcom X (1986). His most recent opera The Central Park Five was premiered by the Long Beach Opera in 2019 and won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2020. The piece is a musical treatment of a real-life case from 1989 where five Black and Latino teens were wrongfully convicted of the horrific assault and rape of a white woman.

The Pulitzer jury cited The Central Park Five as “a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful.”

Davis is an internationally recognized composer of operatic, symphonic, choral, and chamber works. He incorporates several styles including jazz, rhythm ‘n’ blues, gospel, non-Western, African, European classical, Indonesian gamelan, and experimental music. Davis has also written film scores and written incidental music for Tony Kushner‘s play Angels In America.