Harris Eisenstadt, Drums / Ken Filiano, Bass
 / Pascal Niggenkemper, Bass / Nate Wooley, Trumpet Larry Ochs, Compositions, Tenor and Sopranino Saxophones

A founding member of the Rova Sax Quartet, Larry Ochs has worked with many of the greatest musicians in Creative Music—Steve Lacy, Fred Frith, Wadada Leo Smith, Terry Riley, Marilyn Crispell, John Zorn, Nels Cline, Anthony Braxton and countless others. His newest ensemble is an update on the classic New York Contemporary Five and features Larry’s Shepp-tinged tenor sax along with some of the best young players out of New York’s Downtown scene. Ochs is particularly excited by both the ensemble sound and the music, a set of pieces inspired by the works of visual artist William Kentridge and film-makers Wim Wenders and Kelly Reichardt, which he considers to be among his strongest and most successful blendings of composition and improvisation. Fabulous and soulful, The Fictive Five is a tremendous achievement by this West Coast master of surprise!

Saxophonist Larry Ochs flew in from San Francisco to give the European premiere of his band The Fictive Five (Aug. 4, 2017, at Jazz em Agosto, Lisbon). The band features a mostly New Yorker lineup of Nate Wooley (trumpet), Harris Eisenstadt (drums), with the twin bass “orchestra” of Ken Filiano and Pascal Niggenkemper (the latter a Franco-German who has lived in New York for several years). This bass team switched roles at an alarming rate, swapping between bowing, strumming, attaching objects and creating real-time loops. Ochs opened on sopranino, as Niggenkemper clanged a large, resonant metal bowl that he’d inserted between his strings. Wooley emitted a deep, muted growl, maintained via circular breathing, making a fanfare together with Ochs, who had switched to tenor.

There’s an old-school free-jazz sound at this music’s core, but the graphic scores prompted a fixed pattern to the freedom spurts. Ochs says that he had landscapes in his mind’s eye while playing these pieces, seeing his bandmates as visual realizers. By the end of their set, the Fictive Five reached a thrilling crescendo, calling up Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra as stylistic sympathizers. – Downbeat, September 2017


The Fictive Five conjures wildly imaginative stories in sound; a collective music by a quintet of veteran improvising musicians, all framed by the structures composed by Larry Ochs… In September 2013, Ochs was in residence at The Stone. On two nights that week he premiered this quintet to enthusiastic acclaim. But most importantly, all five musicians were really excited by what happened at The Stone. The music was on fire; the compositions sparked their imaginations and left plenty of room for continued exploration.

Because Ochs lives in San Francisco Bay Area, and busy schedules made it difficult to connect, The Fictive Five did not perform again until December 2014, immediately followed by a really focused recording session. The music from that session released October 2015 on Tzadik, the label curated by John Zorn. A new recording, Anything Is Possible, released on Clean Feed in March 2019, Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.