"In 2018, I had the good fortune to organize a session with two absolute heroes of music: Anthony Davis, and Kjell Nordeson. I'd been playing with Kjell in various groups for a few years, and had been studying with Anthony at UC San Diego; the three of us had played as a trio a handful of times.

For the session, we played some of Anthony's older works, including some which referenced The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. With that idea of literature and music in mind, I brought some minimal pieces taking literary inspiration, Vertical Motion - referencing the story by Can Xue, and Labyrinths - in obvious reference to Jorge Luis Borges. We also improvised freely, some of those improvisations became the Fictions tracks.

"Lady of the Mirrors" is a classic Anthony Davis piece, most notably appearing on the solo piano record of the same name. Here, it allows different forms of interaction between voices and space. "Vertical Motion" and "Labyrinths" were both written with Anthony and Kjell's improvisational prowess and ability to develop material in mind: pretty bare sequences and themes that allow everyone to take an idea and really stretch.

The recording sat on the shelf half-forgotten for some years before I went through and picked the tracks that showed the improvisational interplay of the group in its best light.

It was truly an honor to make the music on this record."-Kyle Motl

"The release of Vertical Motion in the run-up to the Metropolitan Opera's staging of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is a timely - and way overdue - reminder that Anthony Davis is a brilliant pianist. Unfortunately, the decades-long road Davis took to become the premier American opera composer of our times has been at the expense of his output as a performer. As much as anyone, Davis represented an emergent generation 40 years ago, one that had digested the revolutionary impulses of the 1960s and the restructuralism of the 1970s, and were defining the last decades of 20th Century through music based on new relationships between notated and improvised materials. However, the enormous amount of time required to create a string of masterpieces like Amistad and The Central Park Five effectively truncated, for starters, a budding legacy of solo recordings like Past Lives, Lady of the Mirrors, and Middle Passage. Frankly, his few recordings of the past dozen years - Cerulean Landscape, his 2010 duets with Jason Robinson, and his performance of "Wayang No. 5" with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on the 2014 collection Notes from the Underground - are simply not enough. We need more of Anthony Davis the pianist and we need him now.

However, this studio set with bassist Kyle Motl and drummer Kjell Nordeson does not necessarily signal that Davis is rocketing back. It was recorded in 2018 at the University of California San Diego, where Davis teaches and Nordeson earned his PhD months later that year. And, it is not a Davis album, per se. It is a collective effort; a welcomed reprise of "Lady of the Mirrors" is the pianist's only contribution, the rest of the program comprised of two assertive Motl compositions and a robust improvisation. The level of interplay and the risk-taking evident throughout the album suggests that this was more than the occasional hang; with all three artists striking flints at every turn, Vertical Motion is one of those albums that capture a group vaulting to the next level. They had - and still have, presumably - the stuff of a going concern, which makes the half-decade lag between recording and issuance even more baffling.

Back in the day, the rap on Davis by the likes of Stanley Crouch was that his playing was too cerebral and mannered - not nearly enough swagger, muscle and blood and guts. That was debatable then, but not now. Davis unleashes great swells of sound with nearly concussive intensity at several points on the album, placing the quicksilver single-note runs and the keen sense of opening space for his collaborators through chiseled phrases that distinguished his playing 40 years ago in a fresh light. The difference between then and now may be that Davis then was on the epochal mission encapsulated by his phrase, "the ascendence of the composer." With his flag planted on the summit of American opera and concert music, the unfettered energy of his playing on Vertical Motion suggests that Davis now feels free - at least in his spare hours - to play without regard to anything but the moment at hand. The results are invigorating."-Bill Shoemaker, Point of Departure