About the Music

The composer shares the following note about her In Good Hands (2025) for solo piano:

In Good Hands is a four-movement suite which is accessible for the intermediate pianist while also providing challenges – primarily of rhythmic complexity and lyricism – found through the diverse range of musical influences present in the work. Each movement provides distinct learning opportunities and can stand alone in study or performance. The duration of the entire piece is about 7 minutes.

Each movement captures a distinct emotional and musical facet of the personal, creative, and pedagogical journey of the past few years of my life as a musician and teacher. The first movement, Where Tension Rests, is a meditation on the beauty to be found within dissonance. Improvisation for a Muse places a sighing, expansive melody in conversation with a triplet pattern in jazz-inspired harmonies. Always builds tension around a constant, pulsing, syncopated calypso rhythm. The final movement, Trinidad Crazy, was inspired by the 2004 album of the same name by Trinidadian calypso icon Crazy (Edwin Ayoung) and pays tribute to the musical traditions of that country.

The suite was written for and is dedicated to one of my adult piano students, Russel Brunton. His friendship, encouragement, and inspiration have guided me to a greater understanding of my artistic voice as a performer, a teacher, and most recently, as a composer. This piece honors our shared journey of musical exploration, learning, and growing.

Piano score: 9 pages, spiral bound.

Hard Copy Edition

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About the Composer

Kim Davenport is a piano soloist and collaborative artist whose work is driven by a passion for sharing the works of underrepresented composers. Her primary focus over the past several years has been to perform and record solo and chamber works of Black composers. This work has resulted in multiple solo recitals, her 2022 album featuring Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s complete Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, Op.59, and her forthcoming 2025 studio albums with British bass clarinetist Sarah Watts and Canadian bass clarinetist Mélanie Bourassa.

In 2024, Kim had the honor of premiering the Piano Concerto, Op.14 by Kevin Oldham, a brilliant pianist/composer whose life was cut tragically short by AIDS in 1993, in a new transcription for piano and concert band with the Tacoma Concert Band, led by conductor Gerard Morris.

Kim is active in the vibrant musical community of Tacoma, Washington, where she maintains a private piano studio, teaches at both the University of Washington Tacoma and the University of Puget Sound, and performs regularly around the city. She is especially interested in drawing connections between her life as a performer and her academic research and writing interests. She is a published scholar of local history, with a focus on Tacoma’s musical past. Her textbook for use in non-major music classes, “Learning to Listen,” was published in 2023.

She was active for nearly 20 years in the critically acclaimed Duo Alea, the bass clarinet/piano duo she formed with her father, Michael Davenport. The Duo’s performances and recordings brought local and world premieres of several important works for bass clarinet & piano. The Duo were also active in music publishing, forming the independent firm Alea Publishing & Recording in 1997 to produce their own recordings and establish a growing catalog of sheet music for the bass clarinet. In 2020, following her father’s passing, Kim reinvigorated the Alea catalog with a focus on underrepresented composers, and established the Dolphy Prize for new works for bass clarinet by black composers.

Kim holds undergraduate degrees in music and piano performance from the University of Washington, and a Master of Music in piano performance from Northwestern University.