The track titles on The Living Collection read like one sentence that has been cut into nine pieces and scattered: "It wants," "Its furious place," "Of appearance," "And ramping-up now," and finally, after eleven minutes of slow-motion collapse and recovery, "Quite a spectacular dusk." The commas and full stops are part of the titles. It is a small formal joke, but it tells you how Lesley Mok thinks. The drummer and composer, based in Brooklyn since leaving Berklee College of Music in 2017, does not write pieces so much as clauses in a longer argument about how a group of people can occupy the same room without agreeing on everything.
The record came out on American Dreams in May 2023, though it was cut over two days at Oktaven Studio in August 2021, with Weston Olencki co-producing and adding electronics. The band is a ten-piece: David Leon and Yuma Uesaka on reeds, Adam O'Farrill on trumpet, Kalun Leung on trombone, Cory Smythe on piano, Joanna Mattrey on viola, Aliya Ultan on cello, Florian Herzog on bass, Mok at the kit. The temptation with a lineup like this is to write big tutti climaxes. Mok mostly refuses. The strings and horns are treated as unstable weather systems that occasionally lock into unison and then peel apart again, and the drumming is less a timekeeper than a commentator, interrupting, thinning out, letting silence sit. The compositions lean on the poetry of Jorie Graham for their sense of ecological entanglement: individuals in constant, shifting relationship, never quite resolved into a whole.
Mok grew up in the Bay Area, started on classical piano and switched to drums after seeing the instrument's physicality up close at a concert. At Berklee they studied with Ralph Peterson and Bob Gullotti and passed through Danilo Pérez's Global Jazz Institute, which explains the rhythmic discipline under the apparent looseness. Their stated influences are telling: the AACM's experimental tradition, Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming, drumline aesthetics, and the melodic outsiders Arthur Russell and Ryuichi Sakamoto. You can hear all of it in the way The Living Collection swings without ever settling into swing.
Recognition came quickly. Mok took the 2024 Deutscher Jazzpreis for international debut album of the year and the 2024 ASCAP Fred Ho Award, following a 2021 Van Lier fellowship from the Asian American Arts Alliance. They have written for the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet and Roulette Intermedium, and as a sideperson they turn up in Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet and Anna Webber's Shimmer Wince, alongside work with Tomeka Reid, Ingrid Laubrock and Mary Halvorson.
The follow-up, transient, released in July 2026, goes the other direction entirely: seven solo pieces built in Ableton, processed drums drifting through gauzy electronics, with Jason Nazary adding production to one track. It is quieter and more private, and it clarifies what the big band was doing all along. Mok is interested in the gap between the interior and the exterior, between an idea and the noise it makes when it meets other people. The Living Collection is that gap, scored for ten.
