Miles Davis once proudly noted that Wayne Shorter became a composer in his years with the trumpeter. Shorter provided most of the repertoire for the Davis band from 1964 to 1968 and offered a new sense of harmonic and thematic openness that could seem undefined, to the point of evanescence, but was ultimately visionary and powerfully transfixing. (Davis valued these compositions so much that he named three of his albums after Wayne Shorter titles: ESP, Nefertiti and Water Babies.) The band Quest has played its own brand of modal music since 1981, the year of its first recording. Dave Liebman, the band’s horn player, had played in the Miles Davis group in 1972. He had also worked in a band led by Elvin Jones’ who, of course, had been the drummer with John Coltrane, a member of an earlier Davis quintet and one of Liebman’s major musical influences. It’s no surprise, then, that the music of Quest is informed by the spirits of the Coltrane and Davis bands. The surprise is that Quest offers this music in new, less abstract ways.

PERSONNEL:

DAVE LIEBMAN, soprano-, tenorsax
RICHIE BEIRACH, piano
RON McCLURE,  bass
BILLY HART, drums

Recorded February 2011 at Tedesco Studios, New Jersey.

Tracks:

01. Pinocchio
02. Prince of Darkness
03. Footprints
04. M.D.
05. Hand Jive
06. Vonetta
07. Nefertitti
08. Circular Dreaming
09. Paraphernalia