Jazz
4166 Records · 25 September 2026
The two longest tracks on “Lost in Geneva” are the first two: “The Subtext”, at 7:30, and “Congestion Pricing”, at 8:14, both ahead of the piece that gives the record its name, which comes third and runs 3:59. Eleven pieces and fifty-four minutes twenty-three for the second album by Kris Davis’s trio with Robert Hurst on bass and Johnathan Blake on drums, two years after the debut “Run the Gauntlet” (2024).
This record shares out the writing, and the first one did not. “Run the Gauntlet” came out on Pyroclastic, the label Davis founded and that Nate Wooley now runs; “Lost in Geneva” comes out on 4166 Records. Hurst contributes “The Bluesy Bird in Bob’s Backyard”, Blake brings “Clues”, which comes from his own 2012 debut, “The Eleventh Hour”, and Davis puts in an arrangement of “Nature Piece 5”, by Morton Feldman. “Mourning Dove”, at 2:47, is credited to all three: a group improvisation that grew out of an introduction to Hurst’s piece.
There is, though, a sequencing choice that works against the album. The two moments where the trio steps off its own ground are the two shortest tracks on it: the improvisation of “Mourning Dove” (2:47) and the Feldman of “Nature Piece 5” (3:01), in sixth and eighth place. All the long running time goes to the orthodox trio pieces, so what the record actually risks has no room to open out and what it already commands has room to spare. Four of the eleven titles are named after a bird or an insect: “Mourning Dove”, “The Bluesy Bird in Bob’s Backyard”, “The Deer Fly” and “Northern Flicker”.
Feldman’s “Nature Pieces for Piano” date from 1951 and were first performed on 18 January 1952 at Hunter College in New York, as part of a Jean Erdman choreography.
Rating: 8.2/10
Text by Aina Torrents