Larry Ochs - 2015 - The Fictive Five

 

Tzadik – TZ 4012  373.82MB FLAC

The first sound on Larry Ochs’ The Fictive Five is not an introduction so much as an opening image: tenor saxophone and trumpet arrive in a broad, sustained blaze while drums and two double basses begin altering the ground beneath them. The sound is immediately large, but it is not a conventional free-jazz assault. Individual details remain unusually clear. Bowed strings roughen the air, plucked notes appear like dark objects, Harris Eisenstadt’s drums redirect the ensemble without forcing it into a beat, and Nate Wooley’s trumpet changes from clean projection to grainy growl. The music generates the sensation of a landscape coming into focus while it is already moving.
Released by Tzadik in October 2015, The Fictive Five consists of three extended compositions and one brief intervening piece. “Similitude,” “By Any Other Name” and “Translucent” last between seventeen and twenty-five minutes; “A Marked Refraction” occupies just over four. Ochs designed the long works as “compositions for improvisers,” using coded charts, conventional notation and visual cues developed through decades with the Rova Saxophone Quartet. These are neither predetermined chamber pieces nor unstructured group improvisations. The written material establishes situations, tensions and possible directions, then leaves the musicians responsible for discovering how the music travels between them.
Ochs assembled an exceptional quintet for that purpose. He plays tenor and sopranino saxophones, joined by Wooley on trumpet, Pascal Niggenkemper on double bass and prepared bass, Ken Filiano on double bass and effects, and Eisenstadt on drums. The absence of piano, guitar or another chordal instrument is decisive. Harmony is implied through the interaction of five linear and textural voices rather than declared in blocks. The paired basses supply enormous depth, but they do not form a normal rhythm section. Filiano and Niggenkemper may reinforce one another, divide the register, exchange bowed and plucked attacks or produce sounds whose instrumental source is temporarily unclear.
The group first appeared during Ochs’ 2013 residency at The Stone in New York. The musicians were sufficiently excited by those performances to preserve the project, although Ochs’ Bay Area home and everyone’s schedules prevented them from reconvening until December 2014. The album was recorded immediately after that reunion at East Side Sound. This history helps explain the session’s mixture of familiarity and discovery. The players understand the compositions and trust one another, but the music has not been polished through years of repetition. It retains the tension of five people encountering possibilities that still feel new.
“Similitude,” dedicated to Wim Wenders, begins with nearly nine minutes of sustained horn intensity. Wooley’s trumpet is especially striking, projecting clear tones that acquire rough edges, vocal inflections and compressed bursts of noise. Ochs answers on tenor with a sound that is broad without becoming ponderous. The horns do not operate as soloist and accompanist; they create a shifting combined mass. Below them, Eisenstadt avoids treating volume as permission to batter the music indiscriminately. His playing is forceful but analytical, locating the exact accent that will change the direction of a phrase.
The piece eventually withdraws from its initial brightness, as if an imaginary camera were pulling back from the immediate action. This is central to Ochs’ conception of the album. Three compositions are dedicated to makers of images: Wenders, South African artist and animator William Kentridge, and filmmaker Kelly Reichardt. The pieces were not written to accompany specific films. Ochs instead imagined music capable of generating what he calls a movie in the listener’s mind. The dedications recognize different approaches to time, landscape and visual narrative without instructing the audience what to picture.
The Wenders association makes particular sense in “Similitude.” Its scale feels expansive and horizontal. Musical events suggest figures moving through large spaces, yet the piece maintains an emotional human presence within that openness. The two basses create changing horizons rather than a fixed foundation. Bowed tones stretch into the distance while pizzicato figures imply motion nearer the foreground. The music can sound fierce at close range and almost contemplative when heard as a complete arc. Its title proposes likeness rather than identity: one gesture resembles another, but every return occurs in altered light.
“A Marked Refraction” acts as more than an interlude. After the opener’s twenty-four-minute span, its compactness changes the listener’s sense of scale. Sounds appear as quick markings rather than parts of a vast landscape. The musicians seem to examine how a gesture changes when it passes through another player’s timbre: a bass scrape refracted through percussion, a clipped horn phrase redirected by silence. Its position also prevents the album’s three long works from becoming a continuous sequence of monuments. Ochs understands that duration acquires meaning through contrast. Four concentrated minutes can feel as open as twenty when the surrounding proportions are carefully controlled.
“By Any Other Name,” dedicated to Kentridge, begins in a dark register. Bowed basses groan beneath solemn horn statements, creating a space that feels subterranean without becoming static. Kentridge’s animated films frequently allow traces of erasure and revision to remain visible, and Ochs’ composition suggests a related process in sound. Ideas are stated, altered and partially rubbed away. The listener can still sense what existed before, even after a different instrumental combination occupies the foreground.
The middle of the piece is built from changing subsets. Duets and trios emerge from the quintet, creating a round-robin succession of perspectives: trumpet and drums, bowed bass against plucked bass, saxophone surrounded by sparse string noises. These passages do not resemble a conventional series of solos. Nobody steps forward to display an isolated identity while the others maintain accompaniment. Instead, the composition changes its population. Each temporary group reveals different properties within the same material, as though the larger scene were being examined from several positions.
Filiano and Niggenkemper are crucial to that effect. Filiano can produce a resonant, traditional bass body, but his use of effects expands the instrument beyond its acoustic outline. Niggenkemper’s preparations introduce clicks, rattles, scraped harmonics and metallic attacks. Together they sometimes sound like an enlarged composite instrument with too many strings and several conflicting resonating chambers. At other moments, their differences are sharply exposed. One provides pulse while the other creates friction; one descends into weight while the other removes any clear sense of pitch.
After its more fragmented exchanges, “By Any Other Name” regathers the ensemble into a fiery passage and returns toward the dark atmosphere from which it began. The symmetry is satisfying but not mechanical. The ending does not reproduce the opening; it reveals how far the original material has traveled. Ochs’ structures work because the musicians are not required to protect them. The composed frame can absorb interruption, contradiction and detour. Form becomes visible through change rather than obedience.
“Translucent,” dedicated to Kelly Reichardt, has the album’s most distinctive relationship with silence. It starts with short, tense saxophone phrases and equally concentrated drum responses, leaving white space around each exchange. Ochs’ use of the sopranino adds a narrower, more penetrating color than his tenor, but he resists filling the entire register with activity. Eisenstadt replies in forceful fragments, treating each drum sound as an independent shape. The effect is high-strung without being crowded.
As the basses and trumpet enter, the piece develops a quicker but still breathable flow. The title is exact: translucent material passes light while altering its clarity. Individual lines remain perceivable through the ensemble, yet none emerges completely untouched by the others. Wooley can make the trumpet sound brilliant, fragile or nearly airless, while the basses continually change the apparent density surrounding it. The final portion softens into an extended descent. Instead of ending with accumulated force, the music patiently comes in for a landing, making the album’s conclusion feel earned rather than imposed.
The recording and mix preserve the quintet’s physical dimensions. Marc Urselli recorded the session at East Side Sound in New York, while Myles Boisen mixed it at Headless Buddha Lab in Oakland. The basses possess weight without merging into an undifferentiated low-frequency cloud. Eisenstadt’s kit is present and detailed, and the horns retain breath, saliva, metal and room tone. That clarity is important because so much of the composition resides in changing instrumental relationships. If the sound were excessively reverberant or aggressively compressed, the music’s internal geography would disappear.
The album demands sustained attention. Its three long pieces do not provide conventional themes to memorize, and some transitions can initially feel episodic. The double-bass emphasis gives the record an unusually dark center of gravity, which may seem heavy across nearly seventy minutes. Listeners seeking constant explosive release will encounter long passages of restraint, while those attracted to chamber delicacy must accept sudden eruptions of raw horn sound. Yet these tensions are not symptoms of indecision. They are the conditions under which the album’s imagined narratives become possible.
The Fictive Five succeeds because Ochs’ structures neither suppress the players nor leave them responsible for inventing significance from nothing. The compositions provide invisible architecture; Wooley, Filiano, Niggenkemper and Eisenstadt continually redesign its interior. The resulting music possesses the unpredictability of improvisation and the large-scale memory of composition. Events that initially seem spontaneous acquire meaning when they return, fracture or cast shadows twenty minutes later. This is music to inhabit rather than decode: four landscapes with no prescribed images, waiting for the listener to close their eyes and begin seeing.

Lazro, Zingaro, Leandre, Lovens - 2002 - Madly You

 

Potlatch – P 102  271.78MB FLAC

Madly You begins without ceremony. Bowed violin and double bass immediately produce a web of high harmonics, dry friction and unstable resonance, while Paul Lovens places small percussion sounds around them with extraordinary care. Nothing resembles a count-in, theme or declaration of leadership. The four musicians seem to arrive inside a conversation that was already underway. When Daunik Lazro’s baritone saxophone enters, it does not simply add a lower melodic voice. It introduces breath, weight and animal-like vibration into a string environment whose pitches have already begun to lose their ordinary outlines.
Recorded live at the Forum de Blanc-Mesnil during the Banlieues Bleues festival on March 22, 2001, and issued by Potlatch in 2002, the CD contains two collective improvisations. “Madly You” lasts 40:47; “Lyou Mad,” its title playfully rearranging the same words, lasts 19:33. There are no short pieces, alternate takes or composed themes to provide orientation. The record presents one hour of real-time quartet invention, preserving not only its eruptions and discoveries but also the moments when the musicians test an idea, withdraw it or wait to discover who will move next.
The instrumentation is beautifully balanced despite containing no conventional harmonic instrument. Lazro plays alto and baritone saxophones, Carlos Alves “Zingaro” violin, Joëlle Léandre double bass and voice, and Lovens drums, percussion and musical saw. Every instrument can behave melodically, rhythmically or texturally. The baritone can provide a bass foundation but is equally capable of thin, whistling harmonics; the double bass can sustain pitch or become a wooden percussion body; the violin can sing or scratch; Lovens’ percussion can mark time or erase any clear sense that time is being divided regularly.
This refusal of assigned roles is the heart of the performance. Many free-improvised recordings advertise equality while still revolving around a dominant horn player. Madly You contains no such center. Lazro may emerge with a long baritone statement, but the strings can redirect its emotional meaning. Léandre may seize attention with a vocal cry, only for Lovens to answer with a tiny metallic sound that changes the scale of the entire event. Zingaro can produce enough intensity to resemble a second saxophone, then reduce his presence to a nearly inaudible filament.
Lazro’s baritone is especially compelling because he rejects the instrument’s familiar identities. He does not depend upon a swaggering low-register riff, nor does he treat the horn as an oversized vehicle for muscular free-jazz shouting. His sound can suggest a large animal in pain, a bank of oscillators, escaping air or a voice heard through thick walls. At points he moves rapidly through barely accented lines, making the baritone seem unexpectedly light. Elsewhere he allows a note to leak into the room as a hiss, creating tension through reduced volume rather than force.
The opening improvisation develops through changing alliances. Lazro’s deeper tones lock momentarily with Léandre’s bass, forming a dark composite voice whose components are difficult to separate. When he moves to alto, the relationship shifts upward: saxophone and Zingaro’s violin release a cage full of cries, whistles and sharp glissandi. These pairings never become permanent duos. Lovens listens for the instant when one relationship has become predictable, then inserts a cymbal scrape, drum stroke or loose metallic clatter that changes the conversation without dominating it.
Lovens’ kit sounds less like a single instrument than a collection of independent objects. His history in European improvised music taught him how to create momentum without maintaining a beat, but the playing here goes beyond tasteful nonmetric commentary. He can strike with considerable force when the music demands it. Just as importantly, he knows how to place one dry impact against a sustained string sound so that both become more vivid. Unattached cymbals and small percussion pieces produce noises that might initially be mistaken for electronic processing, though the performance is entirely acoustic.
The musical saw pushes that confusion further. In the second improvisation, its minute cracks, sliding pitches and disembodied whoops resemble computer-generated sound. The instrument’s vaudeville history adds a subtle absurdity: an old acoustic novelty produces some of the record’s most futuristic tones. This is characteristic of Madly You. The quartet does not seek newness through equipment. It discovers unfamiliar sounds by using ordinary acoustic materials with extreme attention and imagination.
Léandre’s double bass gives the music both gravity and provocation. She is capable of producing a full, resonant tone, but conventional beauty is only one item in a much larger vocabulary. Bow hair drags against strings, harmonics flare, pizzicato notes snap into the ensemble and the instrument’s body becomes a resonating chamber for physical attack. Her long history with Lazro is audible in their immediate understanding. They know how to reinforce one another’s low frequencies without turning the performance into a heavy monochrome mass.
Her voice makes the interaction more theatrical. Guttural cries, rolling syllables, groans and operatic projections enter without functioning as lyrics. These sounds can be funny, defiant or genuinely unsettling, and their meaning changes according to the responses around them. Zingaro may answer a vocal curve with a violin glissando; Lovens may puncture a grand gesture with a perfectly timed strike. The other musicians do not treat Léandre’s vocalizations as an expressive spectacle requiring passive support. They challenge, complicate and occasionally parody them.
Zingaro is the quartet’s most continuously mobile colorist. His violin can move between recognizable bowed tone and raw noise so gradually that the transition becomes impossible to locate. In the first piece, his interaction with Léandre creates an unusually broad string field. Because violin and bass occupy opposite ends of the family’s normal register, they can surround Lazro and Lovens, but both players continually escape those limits. Léandre reaches toward thin harmonics while Zingaro digs into coarse lower-string attacks. Their ranges overlap in the middle, where identities become uncertain.
The forty-minute title performance contains passages of considerable density, but it does not follow the standard free-improvisation arc of quiet opening, gradual crescendo, climax and exhausted conclusion. Intensity rises and disperses several times. A fierce collective passage may lead not to silence but to an intimate exchange between two players. A near-march briefly forms, giving the listener a glimpse of familiar rhythmic organization before the quartet takes it apart. Elsewhere, the four engage in collective skittering, each producing small quick sounds until individual gestures merge into a single restless surface.
This changing scale keeps the performance alive. The music can feel enormous when baritone, bowed bass and drums gather their weight, then suddenly shrink to the dimensions of a cymbal edge or a strand of horsehair crossing a violin string. The live recording preserves those contrasts with impressive clarity. Jean-Marc Foussat’s recording, mixing and editing allow the quiet details to remain audible without reducing the force of the loud passages. Audience presence is secondary; the room is heard primarily through the instruments’ resonance.
“Lyou Mad” does not operate as a leftover or abbreviated second set. Its shorter duration produces a different concentration. Lazro’s baritone is more immediately foregrounded, while Léandre and Zingaro move between stormy string textures and chamber-like exchanges. The players can sound more playful here because the first improvisation has already established the full range of their collective language. There is less need to demonstrate the space; they can begin rearranging its contents.
The musical saw contributes to that playful instability, but the piece never becomes whimsical. A gentle pulse may appear, with Léandre briefly suggesting walking bass against Lovens’ rhythmic figures, only to be deepened and disrupted. The quartet recognizes familiar musical behaviors without treating them as forbidden. Swing, march, chamber counterpoint and vocal theater can all appear for a few seconds. Freedom means being able to use those materials without becoming obligated to continue them.
An hour of continuous collective improvisation inevitably asks a great deal of the listener. The title piece contains stretches in which direction is intentionally uncertain, and anyone searching for recurring themes may experience parts of it as undifferentiated activity. The predominance of bowed strings, baritone multiphonics and metallic percussion also gives portions of the album a rough, gray tonal surface. Léandre’s vocal interjections can feel overly theatrical if heard outside the ensemble conversation.
Yet the record’s apparent disorder is supported by exceptional listening. These are musicians who understand that improvisation is not simply the unrestricted production of personal ideas. Every gesture proposes a relationship. The others may accept it, refuse it, exaggerate it or reveal a detail hidden inside it. Nobody needs to maintain authority, and nobody disappears into tasteful accompaniment. Even the silences feel collectively negotiated.
Madly You captures European free improvisation at its most communicative: neither subdued sound investigation nor indiscriminate eruption, but an acoustic social space capable of holding humor, violence, patience and surprise. Its two long performances continuously reverse expected roles and turn old instruments into sources of sounds without obvious ancestry. The altered second title, “Lyou Mad,” provides an apt summary of the quartet’s method. The same elements return in another order, and the rearrangement changes everything.