Quintet for a Day

Quintet for a Day

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Built from the San Francisco area's thriving jazz community, What We Live is a collaborative trio that indulges a mix of free improvisation and structured avant-garde jazz. Bassist Lisle Ellis, saxophonist Lawrence Ochs (of Rova saxophone quartet fame), and Donald Robinson have seen two prior sessions released, the first tailored around their lean agility, and the second, What We Live Fo(u)r, using that leanness as the core for a variety of guests to expand the group into a quartet. With Quintet for a Day, they've expanded further, including free-jazz trumpet scion Wadada Leo Smith and Dave Douglas, one of the busiest and most creative trumpeters to have stepped forward in the 1990s. The quintet sculpts completely improvised music in discrete chunks lasting between one minute and a quarter hour. Smith and Douglas seem to guide the trio in busy antiphony, which is fascinating to hear. But Ochs, Robinson, and Ellis make a stunning inner circle to pop ideas off of, encasing the slippery harmonic formulations in a mixture of reedy texture and woodsy rhythm. What's striking at every listen here is how quickly the group pulls together their improvisations, building sturdy sonic units that have uncanny propulsion. --Andrew Bartlett

From Jazziz
Consciously bucking clichés, the Bay Area's premier improv trio, What We Live, deals equally with groove and abstraction on its latest pair of albums. The threesome digs deep into strangely organized grooves led by bassist Lisle Ellis' distinctive sense of time and his evocative riffing. "Were," "Will Be," and "As Is" use open meters or off-kilter time signatures to create irregular beats. The bass and drums (Donald Robinson) meld into unusual patterns - march rolls or non-diatonic motifs as rhythmic anchors - then break off and recapitulate in unpredictable but consistent intervals.

"The Undersized Shadow" (from Quintet) mines a precise arco groove that requires no percussion for rhythmic definition. Tenor sax (Larry Ochs) and guest trumpets (Wadada Leo Smith, Dave Douglas) provide subtle and intensely focused accompaniment on the track. The following cut, "The Big Hunt," seems to punctuate the mood introduced on "Shadow," by bringing the full group into the mix and by using silence as a springboard for a more frantic level of rhythmic and melodic propulsion.

What We Live's more abstract pieces sound variously like pensive or animated roundtables between sages at a mountaintop retreat. You can hear the quivering sax and arco bass on the Never Was title track as the artists huddled around a fire in earnest parley about the state of being (or non-being). "Here Today" and "Gone Tomorrow" (from Quintet) extend this concept with great dynamic surges and well-placed silences that bolster the horns' richocheting melodies. "Ever After" (from Never Was) exudes wisdom via its patient, methodical development. The players take considerable time responding to, and often completing, each other's oblique phrases, and in this way, essentially allow the music to come through them, rather than forcing it, which is arguably the most judicious way to approach the art of improvisation.

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Jazz Music: Quintet for a Day

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