The Mathias Rissi Trio – comprised of Rissi on alto, Guerino Mazzola on piano and Heinz Geisser on drums – has expanded into a 12-piece orchestra for the performance of these three compositions. Scored by Rissi, who has always held large orchestra ambitions, the band follows along traditional lines and plays a type of compositionally directed free jazz that ebbs and flows along motifs of the avant-garde and contemporary classical music. Unlike most of the units playing in the same manner, however, Rissi is not so much interested in dissonance and atonality as he is in a notion of large-scale contrapuntal investigation and harmonic convergences along modal lines. Here his written lines for brass break down along tonal lines where the striated harmonics of trombones and trumpets move into overtonal symbiosis with baritone saxophones and then altos with piano, bass and drums, creating a web of rhythm, texture, and (often fickle) sonances to blend against.
Check out the elongated melody lines for the brass in HAVASUPAI, where piano and bassline come down on top of the melody and paint it into a different motif, leitmotiv, and finally cascade in shimmering counterpoint to mirror it against the saxophone section. On YAVAPAI, tempos fluctuate against and through melodic considerations and intervallic order becomes a means by which harmonic interpolation becomes possible. This is some hot big band music; check it out.
Thom Jurek, AllMusic

Rissi`s Q4 ORCHESTRA represents creativity in its finest form where all members are given a chance to express themselves and the written parts are kept to a minimum. The music must have been challenging to the players, and in its equally challenging to the listener. If you are into freedom of expression done in a truly professional manner, this album is for you.
Frank Rubolino, CADENCE

This project of orchestral improvisational music is one of the most ambitious ones that has been initiated in this direction in recent years.
The concept, according to Rissi, is to create an individual, as far as possible open connection between composition and improvisation.
This is colorful music, skilfully played and yet not sterile, from the first to the last bar and tone. There are hints of planned polyphony, conventional, imaginative jazzy movements, interlaced, concentrated collective outbursts and plenty of room for individual solo performances. All of this with a great sense for sound aesthetics with its own signature.
HAN, Jazz Live 1997