By this time, the lines of demarcation around groove-oriented jam bands have been pretty firmly etched. Living Daylights-a Seattle-based sax/bass/drums trio-does nothing to erase the line between outright dismissal and adoring, head-bopping endorsement, but that's probably fine with them. They've found a comfortable place somewhere between the intensity of Morphine and the spacey dance-trance of Zony Mash.
The news here is that for it's third outing the band has attracted Bill Frisell onboard for four songs-a coup that's likely to win the trio a much broader audience, particularly because it puts the guitarist into a funkier setting than any of his own recent projects. On the strong opener, "Pike or Pine," Frisell is all over the place, fleshing out the bridge with broad slashes of sound, chiming brightly under saxophonist Jessica Lurie's solo, and then unwinding a slippery improvisation of his own. He takes another star turn on "I Dare U," enlivening the song's simple riff with a spiraling statement played with a sweet, ringing tone.
While it's nice to have Frisell around, Living Daylights doesn't need his arsenal of sonic effects to create diversity within a groove. In Arne Livingston especially, the band has the ability to inject a substantail amount of diversity into music that moves your feet. Both as a bassist and a composer, Livingston keeps things interesting. He's responsible for both the unpredictable metric shifts of "Repeatable Swing" and the locked-down groove of "I Dare U," and also contibutes "Get Bone-A-Fide."
Elsewhere, the trio stays close to what might be called it's signature sound-Eastern European-influenced melodies from Lurie's saxes against Dale Fanning's latin-influenced rhythms, which might be good enough for most jam bands, but is just a starting point for Living Daylights. -James Hale
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