The three-night residency of the Michaël Attias Quintet in the 2008 edition of the Coimbra’s Jazz ao Centro festival was documented on a live album, Twines of Colesion, to be released in early 2010; and now we have this one, recorded in one afternoon at the same Club in Coimbra where the concerts took place, this time behind closed doors. The session featured the core trio without Tony Malaby’s saxophones and Russ Lossing’s piano (not quite: Lossing is present on one track of “Renku in Coimbra”). A “wondrous parenthesis in time”, says Attias about the opportunity, and that’s quite true: this is beautiful music with a strong improvisatory feeling and lots of space for each musician to show their respective and special skills, either individually or in collective interaction. And “collective” is the key word to describe what is in this record: hearing the music you’ll understand why Attias chose the name for what has been since 2003 his primary working band – a renku is collaborative form of traditional Japanese poetry, in which the participating poets build a long poem out of each other’s words. Over the last six years, this trio has achieved a group sound that draws from a wealth of experience of working together in numerous projects, as well as under the leadership of such mucians as Paul Motian, Andrew Hill, and Anthony Braxton. On this, their second album, Renku plays the music of Lee Konitz, Jimmy Lyons, Hébert and Attias.