Kris Davis: The Solastalgia Suite
9th January 2026
Grammy-winning pianist/composer Kris Davis confronts the existential crisis of climate change on a striking new piece for piano and string quartet.The Solastalgia Suite, out January 9, 2026 via Pyroclastic Records, joins Davis with Poland’s world-renowned Lutosławski Quartet
“Davis’ music is precisely and unmistakably the sound of today.” — Downbeat Magazine
When Thomas Wolfe famously warned, “You can’t go home again,” the author saw nostalgia as a transformative sensation that placed our past out of reach. The global-scale damage that climate change has wrought in the decades since Wolfe wrote his novel has evoked a new, more profound emotion. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” to define, “a form of homesickness while we are still at home.”
Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer Kris Davis viscerally captures those feelings of yearning, dread and desperate hope on her breathtaking new work, The Solastalgia Suite. Her first piece for piano and string quartet, the album features Davis with Poland’s world-renowned Lutosławski Quartet. Alternately elegiac, bracing, defiant and warily optimistic, the eight-movement suite stirs the complex emotions described by Albrecht: “Our environment is transforming around us,” he writes, “and we grieve for the landscapes and ecologies we knew.”
Set for release on January 9, 2026 from Pyroclastic Records, The Solastalgia Suite further expands the broad scope and incisive exploration of Davis’ compositional vision. The music was commissioned by the Jazztopad Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, and premiered there and at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Named for the 20th century Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, the Lutosławski Quartet was founded in 2007 and has collaborated with jazz artists like Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, Kenny Wheeler, Uri Caine and Benoît Delbecq; and with classical musicians including Garrick Ohlsson, Piotr Anderszewski, Kevin Kenner and Bruno Canino.
The music of The Solastalgia Suite grew directly out of the fears that Davis has harbored in light of the increasingly dire environmental crisis. “I see the changes when I go back home to Canada,” says the Vancouver native. “The environments are different, the climate's different – the whole connection with nature is different, from climate change and from our relationship to technology. I was looking for a word to describe this feeling of loss and mourning for my home and came across Glenn Albrecht’s term solastalgia, which described the feeling perfectly.”
There’s no sense of surrender in Davis’ music, which opens with the strident “Interlude,” a title that suggests that we enter the album in medias res – but not, with any luck, too late. From the seed of one mournful violin grows the moving, elegant web of “An Invitation to Disappear,” while “Towards No Earthly Pole,” with its scraping strings and percussive prepared piano, suggests an existence at the extreme fringe of survival. The bold string outbursts of “The Known End” frame a concerto-like showcase for Davis’ bristling piano; “Ghost Reefs,” haunted by the loss of bleached coral reefs, was directly inspired by the composer’s study with Henry Threadgill. The violent, erratic “Pressure & Yield” pictures the cracks and fissures of an Earth in upheaval, while “Life on Venus” floats eerily as through an alien environment. “Degrees of Separation” concludes the suite on an appropriately unsettled note of unpredictable and constant change.
Coming across Albrecht’s coinage gave a name to the overwhelming feelings that Davis had been contending with. She has since struck up a correspondence with the philosopher, and linked her work with fellow artists investigating similar concerns: the images and films of the French-Swiss conceptual artist Julian Charrière have provided vibrant and thought-provoking visual backdrops for performances of the suite, while the composition of the piece drew influence from Olivier Messiaen, in particular his “Quartet for the End of Time.” The French composer has been a guiding force for Davis, who sampled his voice on both releases by her venturesome ensemble Diatom Ribbons.
Photo of Davis and Lutoslawski Quartet by Wiktoria Smedra.
Kris Davis Kris Davis is a Grammy award-winning pianist and composer described by the New York Times as a beacon for “deciding where to hear jazz [in New York] on a given night.” Davis has released 26 recordings as a leader or co-leader and collaborated with artists such as Terri Lyne Carrington, Dave Holland, John Zorn, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Tyshawn Sorey and esperanza spalding. She was named a 2021 Doris Duke Artist alongside Wayne Shorter and Danilo Perez, Pianist of the Year by DownBeat magazine in 2025, 2022 and 2020, and Pianist and Composer of the Year by the Jazz Journalists Association in 2021. In 2019, Davis’ Diatom Ribbons was named jazz album of the year by both the New York Times and the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll. Davis is the Associate Program Director of Creative Development at the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, the founder of Pyroclastic Records and co-founder of the International Creators and Collaborators Workshop. Davis is a Steinway Artist.
Pyroclastic Records Pianist-composer Kris Davis founded Pyroclastic Records in 2016. By supporting artists in the dissemination of their work, Pyroclastic empowers emerging and established artists to continue challenging conventional genre-labeling within their fields. Pyroclastic also seeks to galvanize and grow a creative community, providing opportunities, supporting diversity and expanding the audience for noncommercial art. Its albums often feature artwork by prominent visual artists—Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Charriére, Dike Blair, Raymond Pettibon and Gabriel de la Mora among recent examples.
Thank to Ann Braithwaite for sharing with us
