As a bassist, Kenny Davis has played and recorded with some jazz giants such as vocalist Cassandra Wilson, pianist Geri Allen, and flugelhornist Art Farmer. He performed on Wilson’s 1993 Grammy Award-winning Blue Note album, Blue Light Til Dawn. On Allen’s 2010 Motema album, Geri Allen & Timeline Live, John Fordham of The Guardian praised Davis’ “warm bass variations” on a medley of George Gershwin’s Embraceable You and Lover Man (Jimmy Davis/Roger ‘Ram’ Ramirez/James Sherman). Davis appeared on three Arabesque Farmer albums: The Company I Keep, with Tom Harrell (1994), The Meaning of Art (1995), and Farmer’s last album, Silk Road (1997).
In 2010, when Davis released his self-produced album as a leader, Kenny Davis, John Kelman of AllAboutJazz wrote of his “robust tone and deep, flexible sense of time rooted in bass icons like Paul Chambers and Ron Carter.” Singling out Davis’ “effervescently swinging bass solo” on Stevie Wonder’s “Too High”, Kelman added that his arrangement “manages to turn Wonder’s already knotty tune into even greater intricacy, all the while swinging at a fast clip that challenges pianist Geri Allen and saxophonist Javon Jackson to keep up.”
At 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 12, Davis will lead a quartet at the Metuchen Public Library, part of Metuchen Jazz’s Cornerstone Jazz Series, a production of the Metuchen Arts Council, Metuchen Library, and Friends of Metuchen Arts. Playing with him will be trumpeter Eddie Allen, keyboardist Luciano Minetti, and drummer Jerrett Walser.
The Metuchen Public Library is located at 480 Middlesex Ave., in Metuchen. Admission is free, but seating is limited to the first 70 people. Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and Arts Trust Fund.