Philadelphia Weekly

"Philadelphia's my greatest influence," says David Lynch in a DVD commentary for Eraserhead. Though he shot the film in Los Angeles, Lynch meant for the strange decaying landscapes of Eraserhead to evoke the City of Brotherly Love circa the mid- to late '60s: a hellhole defying description. "There were factories, industrial buildings, neighborhoods dark and forlorn, tucked in somewhere, sort of like you can't get there from here," he recalls.

Speaking to PW's J. Edward Keyes in 2001, Lynch again tried to pinpoint the city's "feeling of mystery in the dark," and his words mirrored some of the signature strokes of his oeuvre: "There was a sense of dread pretty much everywhere I went ... I felt industry. I felt smoke and fire and fear. I felt insanity."

Lynch is neither the first nor the last to discover how art, perhaps as much as sociology or political science, can capture murky, unknowable aspects of urban life. And while it may be bleak, art like this sometimes conveys an ironic sense of wonder. The takeaway from the PW Lynch profile was Keyes' assertion "that any place ... can be weird and twisted and violent and fear-ridden and beautiful and magical and inspiring--all at the same time."

It's that truth that resonates in the music of Matt Davis, a 29-year-old jazz guitarist and composer who's halfway through a yearlong project he calls City of Philadelphia 2008.

Davis is not a Lynchian purveyor of the bizarre--no mutant babies, squirming dinner meals or mud-encrusted dead cats find their way onto his aural canvas.

But Davis' portrait of Philadelphia, like Lynch's, is nothing if not cinematic. Every month he writes a new suite of music inspired by a particular population in the city. So far he's focused on the elderly (City of Age), drug abusers (City of Addiction), immigrants (City of Arrivals), kids (City of Youth), religious believers (City of Transcendence) and veterans (City of Service).

At Tritone on the fourth Thursday of every month Davis performs a new installment of City ofPhiladelphia 2008 with his band Aerial Photograph. This week he turns his attention to the homeless (City of Want).

As most musicians can tell you, it's hard work maintaining a band of any kind. But try cramming a group with strings, reeds, brass and a rhythm section into a small bar in Center City, writing new music on deadline and getting it played with inspiration and polish every time out.

Not enough? Go record a short CD every month as well, and be sure to have 30 handmade, limited-edition copies in time for the gig (and downloads for sale at mattdavisguitar.com). Oh, and you'll need to conduct interviews with ordinary Philadelphians and weave sound clips into the fabric of the music. So bring your laptop to the show.

Davis lightly dismisses the notion that City of Philadelphia 2008 is an insane amount of work.

"Sometimes it's really taxing, very much so," he concedes. "But you know, in any other profession a person would put in double the amount of work I'm doing. I think of people who get up every day, go to their office in the morning and leave at 5 o'clock--if any musician did that, they'd be killing. They'd be incredible at their instrument, playing all the time. But no musician does that."

Photo by Michael Persico

As he constructs his Philadelphia mosaic, Davis is also telling his own story, getting to the marrow of the town he's inhabited for more than 10 years. It's a feat of artistic focus and creative energy, but there's more to the project than heavy lifting for its own sake. By making the best of tough conditions and finding his own inimitable voice, Davis is elevating the Philadelphia music scene by hook or crook, showcasing some of its best instrumental talent. He's also broadening the vocabulary and conceptual scope of 21st-century jazz.

Davis has moved about eight times in the last couple of years: Fifth and Master, 43rd and Osage, on and on. "I lived in three different places in Fishtown, and there was one area in the middle of Kensington and Port Richmond where I didn't feel safe," he recalls. "I saw too many things I didn't want to see, so I had to move."

The youngest of four brothers and three sisters (and the only musician among them), he grew up in Lebanon, N.J., until age 11, when the family relocated to his grandmother's farm in Stockton. He's been in Philadelphia since 1997, when he came to study music at Temple.

If City of Philadelphia 2008 seems like the whim of someone with time on his hands, it's not. Davis is a senior lecturer in jazz guitar performance at the University of the Arts. He plays restaurant gigs and private functions every week and works in small-group settings with Philly masters Odean Pope and Bobby Zankel. He collaborates with trumpeter Bart Miltenberger and bassist Mike Taylor in the Chance Trio. He makes a brilliant showing on Five Simple Worlds ... and Ways of Getting There, a forthcoming album by alto saxophonist Dan Peterson.

But Aerial Photograph is Davis' cornerstone, an uncanny blend of intricate arranging, crystalline lyricism and open improvisation, the ideal vehicle for music that aspires to something almost literary.