The Fictive Five Launch Tour & New Album, "Anything Is Possible"

In September 2013, Larry 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 the other band members in Brooklyn, The Fictive Five did not perform again until December 2014, immediately followed by a really focused recording session. The music from that session released in October 2015 on Tzadik and premiered in Europe at Jazz em Agosto 2017 in Lisbon to wild acclaim, followed a month later by concerts in Chicago and at Ann Arbor’s festival of improvised music Edgefest 2017. The music can be listened to and purchased directly from Larry Ochs’ Bandcamp.

 

 

The new album, entitled “Anything Is Possible” and recorded in New Jersey at Orange Sound in late May 2018, will be released by Clean Feed Records on CD and digitally right in time for the European Tour — See below for all of the currently scheduled dates and we hope you can join us along the way.

 
➡ March 07 | Confort Moderne | Poitiers, France
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2ThJLC8

➡ March 09 | Club Manufaktur | Schorndorf, Germany
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2H4pF7O

➡ March 10 | Club W71 | Weikersheim, Germany
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/22S4wUc

➡ March 12 | Martinschlössl | Vienna, Austria
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2T3T4Gs

➡ March 13 | Kulturhof:keller | Villach, Austria
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2Nt2mpy

➡ March 14 | Teatro Torresino | Padova, Italy
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2H1QHwF

➡ March 15 | Jazzclub Ferrara | Ferrara, Italy
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2Ey0mt7

➡ March 16 | DanzArea | Mantua, Italy
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2tCYWHD

➡ March 17 | Area Sismica | Forlì, Italy
Event Link & Tickets: https://bit.ly/2GN8QyP

 

Ochs outline his kinetic approach to composition, saying, “I’m imagining I’m making a movie with a director I admire, so just sit back.” He then introduced a new piece called The Other Stream and it featured trumpeter Wooley making his horn scream, sputter, and even talk as Ochs joined in on sopranino. It ended much as it began – lovely melodies in an avant setting, with inspired and motivated musicians carrying the music forward with instant and appropriate creations. The crowd loved it, among the most artful and original of the festival. — Irwin Block, Jazz em Agosto Festival Review

One of the most striking features of the sound are the two basses, which lay a great sonic foundation for the music, not rhythmically, but in terms of the overall color of the pieces, acting in concert, or alternately, challenging each other or reinforcing the sound. Yet the entire band is stellar, five musicians who live in their most natural habitat of free flowing sounds, joining the short themes that pop up once in a while, then take off again on different paths but in the same direction. It's the way I like music, beautifully free, sensitive and deep. — Stef Gjissels, The Free Jazz Collective

Like a choreographer working without music, Ochs is playing the role of soundtrack composer without a film. While it’s common for an improvised piece to develop a particular character, what follows in The Fictive Five are well sculpted pieces that do indeed feel like narratives. Ochs is good at this; he’s frequently convened improv groups that work from compositions or skeletal structures that guide the impulses of the moment toward a common goal. — Craig Matsumoto, Memory Select

By Any Other Name (for William Kentridge)” has a modal “Spanish tinge” (Jelly Roll Morton’s term), something that will link this to figures from Morton through Miles and Coltrane, but, like all the music here, it’s consistently fresh. It breaks new ground while working through the deep roots of Ochs’ conception, invoking Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler to achieve a depth of expression reaching back to New Orleans primitives (according to Jerome Rothenberg, “primitive means complex”) like the Eureka Brass Band. — Stuart Broomer, NYC Jazz Record