New Album: Avant-Garde Jazz Icon Billie Davies Defies Geographic Limits, Bridging Human Soul and AI on New Album "Time to Cut Loose"

Time to Cut Loose

Cobra Basement announces the release of a groundbreaking entry in the "Music for the Future" series by Billie Davies, fusing 2020 New Orleans studio sessions with cutting-edge 2026 digital orchestration.
Time to Cut Loose: A New Avant-Garde Direction
"Honoring the legacy of radical improvisation while pushing its boundaries, this project fuses raw American avant-garde grit with intellectual European free-jazz experimentation."

The Traditional Blueprint
Creating a Free Improvisation and Avant-garde Jazz project is a massive, four-month undertaking. The journey from conceptualizing an album to its release, marketing, and publishing requires an extraordinary investment of time, patience, capital, and organization to deliver a cohesive album.
Billie's vetting process for musicians has always been simple but rigorous. “I search for players who possess a rare combination of technical mastery and deep improvisational savvy. I discover them through existing recordings, live performances, and auditions."
Between 2011 and 2016—spanning the production of all about Love, 12 VOLT, Hand In Hand In The Hand Of The Moon, and On Hollywood Boulevard—this selection process led into two to four months of intense rehearsals. “Together, the band would hone improvisations built around my lead sheets and/or written directives. I often challenged them with a specific avant-garde prompt: “Can you read these notes but not play them?" Only after establishing this deep sonic connection would we enter the studio to lay down the tracks."

The South Florida Avant-garde Void
The blueprint had to change for Billie Davies' latest project, “Time to Cut Loose."
After relocating from the rich musical ecosystem of New Orleans to West Palm Beach, Florida, she began her usual search for local collaborators. Two years later, the search had yielded nothing. “I could not find the caliber of musicians I was used to—the highly technical, deeply creative avant-garde “beasts" essential for this style of music.
At 70 years old, I had to ask myself tough questions. Had I grown out of touch? Or does this specific geographic region simply lack an avant-garde community? Perhaps the beach culture in South Florida just doesn't attract the radical creativity that thrives in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles or New Orleans, but I love the beach, I grew up on the beaches of Europe and I have lived on or close to the beaches of the US for 40 years. I had to make it work here in the south at the Atlantic Ocean, in my favorite sub-tropical climate, here where I love to be with the palm trees and the blue ocean waters."

Visual Identity: “What the Sea Does Not Say"
While the South Florida coastline didn't yield the avant-garde musicians she sought, the ocean itself provided the perfect visual and philosophical anchor for the album. The cover art features a thought-provoking painting by Billie's sister, the Belgian artist Kathleen Goegebeur, entitled “What the Sea Does Not Say."
The painting is accompanied by Goegebeur's poignant reflection, which mirrors the vulnerability and transformation behind the album's creation: “The sea says nothing, and yet I hear her. In her vastness, my significance fades; I become small, vulnerable, and transient. And somewhere within that lies a quiet solace—as if she whispers:

 'You need be nothing more than this moment.'" —Kathleen Goegebeur

This visual concept beautifully ties together the geographic shift to West Palm Beach, the isolation of a missing local band, and the eventual artistic surrender required to embrace AI as a collaborative lifeline.

Sonic Architecture: The “Music for the Future" Series

As a direct continuation of the “Music for the Future" series, this project pushes the boundaries of modern instrumentation. Reviewers and musicians alike will find a challenging, deeply textured sonic landscape driven by complex interactions between strings and rhythm. Billie Davies meticulously directed the AI instrumentation to deliver distinct, track-specific personalities for both the guitars and basses:

Time to Cut Loose

Guitar: Acoustic avant-garde jazz guitar framework utilizing sporadic, intricate atonal leads paired with complex dissonant chords and abstract textural improv.
Bass: Bright, resonant upright bass channeling a dark noir jazz aesthetic. It shifts from a sparse, plucky pizzicato walk to tense, free improvisation.

I Am
Bass: Bright modern jazz upright bass characterized by sparse, sharp pizzicato walks in the high register, evolving continuously into tense, atonal free improvisation.

Why Does it Make Me Cry

Guitar: Electric avant-garde jazz guitar performance, featuring sporadic, intricate atonal leads, complex dissonant chords, and abstract textural improvisation.
Bass: Avant-garde jazz fretless electric bass that is inherently atonal, dissonant, and abstract, utilizing intricate, sporadic textural improv.

Three Days in 1968

Guitar: Acoustic avant-garde jazz lead guitar defined by intricate atonal leads, dissonant complex textures, and uncompromising abstract improvisation.
Bass: Wobbly fretless electric bass playing in the high register. It delivers an atonal, dissonant, and highly experimental textural improvisation with intricate, sporadic phrasing.

Bridging Human Expression and AI

Determined to complete the music, Billie turned her attention to artificial intelligence in 2026. Looking for tools capable of serving serious, professional musicians, she focused on platforms like Suno and Moises. Recognizing that you cannot truly understand a digital tool's limitations or strengths without fully committing, she chose Moises for this project.

The foundation of “Time to Cut Loose" remains entirely human and deeply personal. The drums, piano, and vocals were tracked in 2020 at Dangerous Art Studios in New Orleans, engineered by her husband, Mike Davies. The session captured her on drums and piano, with powerful vocal performances by Raphaelle O'Neil.

Billie adapted her traditional audition process to the digital realm to complete these multi-layered arrangements. By inputting the specific stylistic directives outlined above into Moises AI, she shaped the exact nuance, tension, and phrasing of the virtual players. “I auditioned multiple AI-generated bass and guitar passes until I found the exact tone and improvisational energy required to complement our original New Orleans tape."

Career Accolades & Recognition
Billie Davies has long been established as a visionary force pushing the frontiers of free improvisation and contemporary soundscapes:

Iconic Female Jazz Drummer – Named on Jazz Fuel (2022) alongside elite contemporary percussionists

Best Drummer Nominee – New Orleans Best of the Beat Awards presented by OffBeat Magazine (2019)

Best Contemporary Jazz Artist Nominee – New Orleans Best of the Beat Awards (2017)
Jazz Artist of the Year – Awarded at the 23rd Annual Los Angeles Music Awards (2013)

GRAMMY Award submission

 

How Can Album Notes Compete for a GRAMMY Nomination?

https://www.allaboutjazz.com/news/how-can-album-notes-compete-for-a-grammy-nomination/

The Story Behind Funky Sonatas

Funky Sonatas contains only five tracks, but the musical distance between their origins is enormous: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Astor Piazzolla, Ennio Morricone, Gato Barbieri and Lalo Schifrin.

The Album and video doesn't attempt to manufacture a convenient genre connecting them.
Instead, it asks why these composers can inhabit the same album.

Its answer appears near the beginning: the sonata can “breathe, syncopate, and groove without losing its backbone.” Classical listeners can recognize the architecture while jazz and global-music listeners encounter rhythm, improvisation, and another kind of musical freedom.

Rachmaninoff meets clave

The booklet's discussion of “Rachmaninoff en Ritmo” doesn't begin with a conventional biography of Rachmaninoff.
Instead, it creates a scene.
Two grand pianos face one another “like fencers.”

Piazzolla: following María

The second track leads backward to Buenos Aires.
“Tema de María” draws inspiration from Astor Piazzolla's María de Buenos Aires, the 1968 tango operita in which tango, theater, classical music and jazz already inhabited the same unusual world.

What do you do with Morricone?

“Cinema Paradiso” creates another problem.
What can musicians possibly add to a melody that millions of listeners already know?
The booklet's answer is unusually restrained.
Don't try to improve it.

Gato Barbieri—and somebody who was there

The chapter devoted to Gato Barbieri is different again.
There is history: Argentina, jazz, Last Tango in Paris, the unmistakable tenor sound.
But then the notes reveal a human connection.

And finally, Lalo Schifrin

The final chapter may be the booklet's most personal.
Lalo Schifrin's 1966 instrumental “Bossa Antique” becomes the starting point for “Bossa Breeze,” after Sino writes lyrics to music composed six decades earlier.