Quintet for a Day

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

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