Trappings of Sleep
Release Date: October 30, 2026
Label: Red Hook Records
Trappings of Sleep, the debut trio recording from saxophonist Caroline Davis, guitarist Grey Mcmurray, and drummer Qasim Naqvi. Across nine pieces of alto saxophone, electric guitar, electronics and drums, the group treats improvisation and composition as two deeply connected processes.
The trio's rapport predates this record by several years. Davis, Mcmurray and Naqvi first played together at a casual bar show in Brooklyn, having already crossed paths through New York's improvised music community. The connection was immediate, and for the next few years the three continued to develop that shared language whenever schedules allowed.
Trappings of Sleep grew out of a 2025 performance at Saint Peter's Church's long-running Jazz Vespers series, where the trio played beside Billy Strayhorn's piano and worked through Alice Coltrane's Journey to Satchidananda. The reverberant space shaped the trio’s approach, opening up new musical possibilities. After Naqvi shared a recording of the performance with producer Sun Chung, it led to an invitation to develop the collaboration into a studio album, with each member contributing original compositions. Writing on their own before convening to rehearse, the trio aimed to keep their compositions loose enough that their instinctive, in-the-moment approach could still shine through.
The album's title traces back to a memory of Mcmurray's: half-asleep in an oversized hotel conference room, listening to a lecture on the mechanics of sleep delivered by a speaker he couldn't quite see. The mundane instructions, repeated and inverted, took on a stranger, more open-ended quality, a feeling that carries through the record's nine tracks, from the searching opener "Three" through the drifting "Mono Lake" and the title track's slow-turning phrases, to the charged interplay of closer "Joust."
"What drew me to this project was the way Caroline, Qasim, and Grey create a space where nothing feels predetermined," said Chung, the album’s producer. "I wanted to take that energy and place a compositional framework around it without compromising the freedom and openness at the heart of their playing." That tension between structure and spontaneity runs through the whole record: pieces with clear compositional shape still leave room for the trio's improvisational instincts to take over, so a written passage can dissolve into open interplay and reassemble again without ever feeling planned.
Liner notes for the album were penned by writer Tyran Grillo, who frames Trappings of Sleep as a kind of interior journey. "These pieces treat dreaming as space travel," Grillo writes, describing the trio's search for "habitable zones inside the relational field of their instruments." It's a fitting lens for a record built on close listening and shared instinct, one where structure and openness are never at odds.