Trio 3 - Time Being

REVIEWS:
Three vastly experienced heroes of American free-jazz recorded in New York last year. Oliver Lake is a founding member of the celebrated World Saxophone Quartet, bassist Reggie Workman a former John Coltrane partner, and Andrew Cyrille one of the few drummers able to sustain a long-term relationship with piano hurricane Cecil Taylor. It's an open, African-American free-jazz album, using a refined shared language for such activities that dates back to the 1960s. But if Lake's alto and sopranino saxes are hurtling into deep space, and Workman and Cyrille maintain a flexible pulse by the most convoluted means, the music is none the less full of engaging vamps, hooks and anthem-like melodies, and is recorded with such clarity that the most fleeting detail gains weight.
There's an unexpected playfulness to Lope, a folk-dance urgency turning into stop-time improv and then fast blowing against Workman's dark strummings on Given, and dazzling contrapuntal improv from all three on Special People.
John Fordham, The Guardian, London, 16 June 2006

The respective musicians who comprise this band have been the recipients of world-wide praise for several decades. Therefore, the artists’ repute cannot be undermined. Leave it to the pros so to speak, as this studio set communicates that notion in flying colors.
The trio morphs fractured, stop/start motifs with staggered pulses and soaring crescendos. Everyone is a distinct soloist here, but it’s unadulterated group-based effort, indeed. With Oliver Lake’s gutsy, fluid and dynamically oriented choruses, the rhythm section pursues changeable patterns. Moreover, the trio’s torrid deconstruction processes, underscored by medium-tempo free-bop vamps and rapid-fire ostinatos add to the multidimensional aspects of its chemistry. On “”Equilateral,” bassist Reggie Workman’s arco passages provide an austere contrast to Lake’s vocal-like sax phrasings, as the band subsequently hauls matters into overdrive. Then with the piece titled “Special People,” Lake and Workman engage in flowing harmonic contrasts, while drummer Andrew Cyrille mimics his band-mates’ lines with a push/pull mode of attack. In sum, this is a superfine effort, highlighting the artists’s rather industrious methodology, firmed up by their extraordinarily intuitive improvisational maneuvers.
Glenn Astarita, eJazzNew, USA, July 2006