The Squid's Ear Magazine


Rova Saxophone Quartet: In Transverse Time (Les Disques Victo)

Celebrating 40 years as a performing ensemble, the West Coast saxophone quartet ROVA of Bruce Ackley on soprano saxophone, Steve Adams on alto & sopranino saxophones, Jon Raskin on baritone saxophone, and Larry Ochs on tenor saxophone, reworked compositions from all members transversing their past 34 years, in an absolutely impressive and diverse album.
 

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Personnel:



Bruce Ackley-soprano saxophone

Steve Adams-alto saxophone, sopranino saxophone

Jon Raskin-baritone saxophone

Larry Ochs-tenor saxophone


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UPC: 777405013125

Label: Les Disques Victo
Catalog ID: VICCD131
Squidco Product Code: 25652

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2018
Country: Canada
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels
Recorded at Mills College Art Museum, on September 25th, 2017, by Philip Perkins, and at Guerilla recording on October 6th and November 3rd, 2017, by Myles Boison.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"ROVA is flying high at 40 years old: virtuosity, friendship, resistance, constantly renewed relevance; its members have developed a phenomenal sense of togetherness in their playing!"-Francois Couture



"[...] The Rova Saxophone Quartet formed in the late 1970s amid a boom of experimentation in music, collaborating with avant-garde icons such as Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith. Through a rich catalog of 30-plus recordings, Rova's output includes original jazz and chamber compositions, and a variety of collaborations including Terry Riley's 1987 piece, Chanting the Light of Foresight.

Saxophone quartets can be an acquired taste, especially if their members are content playing supper-time jazz. However, Rova's commitment to pushing forward, and challenging themselves and their audiences accounts for much of their perseverance. That, and talent. Their latest recording, In Transverse Time (Les Disques Victo), finds the quartet in meticulous harmony, with each player taking a measured approach to their solos. The Quartet's members play multiple horns, but each settles into one primary instrument: Jon Raskin's deep baritone holds steady while Bruce Ackley's horn shimmers in tandem with the inventive brilliance of soprano virtuoso Steve Lacy. Ochs' soulful tenor is unmistakable, and Steve Adams' alto is fresh and bouncy. The whole recording is a musical journey through a wilderness of whistling reeds, but the 24 minute finale, "Hidden in Ochre," lands listeners back at home after a wonderful whirlwind of sound.

"All those pieces were composed by members of the band in the past three-four years," Ochs says. "We'll play the entire CD [in Atlanta] and ... add older pieces we have not been performing for many years to fill out the show. Rova hit its 40th anniversary ... so it made sense to look back and grab some pieces that are still alive and inspiring cool improvisations. We have a gazillion pieces at this point, but a lot of them, as great as they were, are played out," he adds. "We've wrested everything we could from them, so to speak. We think these we're adding still have some life but also complement the music we have in the book now, and are a different 'color' than the pieces on the new CD. In fact, when I listen to the new CD, I find it surprisingly unique in our CD catalog. So grabbing some pieces from the past that lead us, and the listeners, other places was easy to do."

[...]

After four decades of ascending, Rova's music has risen beyond the next level into interstellar space."-Omar Khalid, Creative Loafing


Get additional information at Creative Loafing

Artist Biographies

"Bruce Ackley was born in Rochester, New York in 1948. Following in his father's footsteps, he began singing in choral groups at age 10. (His father performed in a vocal sextet as a young man in the 1930s.) Bruce sang throughout his school years and finally took up the saxophone in 1970. He formed his first improvising trio that year with friends from his art school days at Wayne State in Detroit, where he studied painting and drawing. In 1971 he relocated to the Bay Area. Largely self-taught, Bruce studied saxophone briefly with Lee Hester and Noel Jewkes, and clarinet with Beth Custer and Ben Goldberg. Throughout the 1970s he was involved with the emerging free improvisation scene in San Francisco, and formed Sound Clinic with Lewis Jordan and George Sams in 1975. He began playing with Larry Ochs in 1973 and Jon Raskin in 1975, which led to the formation of Rova in the fall of 1977.

Since that time Ackley has mainly devoted his musical life to his work with Rova, with some notable side projects. In 1977 he performed and recorded with the quartet Twins, featuring John Zorn on reeds, and Eugene Chadbourne and Henry Kaiser on guitars. During the 1980s he played regularly with trombone-electronics wizard, J.A. Deane and drummer Joseph Sabella. They formed Planet X in 1992, which performed extensively in the Bay Area and made a recording at that time. Bruce has also performed with the Italian bass virtuoso, Stefano Scodanibbio. In 1996 they performed together with koto-electronics player Miya Masaoko, and the brilliant cellist, Rohan de Seram, formerly of the Arditti String Quartet. That year Ackley formed a trio to perform his more jazz-oriented original compositions, Actual Size, with George Cremaschi on bass and Garth Powell on drums. This led to the recording The Hearing by the Bruce Ackley Trio, featuring Joey Baron on Drums and Greg Cohen on bass, and released on the John Zorn-curated Japanese label Avant. During the late 1990s Bruce formed Frankenstein, a jazz repertory band that played the music of many of the forward-looking artists of the early '60s, particularly Grachan Moncur III, Andrew Hill, Eric Dolphy, and Jackie McLean-providing him an opportunity to dig into material that significantly impacted Ackley during formative years."

-Rova:Arts (http://www.rova.org/about-us/bruce-ackley.html)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Steve Adams has appeared on more than fifty recordings, and has six recordings as leader or co- leader on the 9 Winds and Clean Feed labels, the latest of them being Surface Tension by the Steve Adams Trio.

Steve has performed the premieres of numerous classical compositions, including Prisoner of Love by Robert Aldridge for soprano saxophone and piano, Thomas Oboe Lee's Saxxologie... A Sextet for saxophone sextet and Louie MCMLV for saxophone quartet, and Passing Time by Jon Nelson for tenor saxo¬phone and computer-generated tape. He performed Edmund Campion's Corail for saxophone and computer generated electronics with the Berkeley Symphony and at the Ojai Music Festival. Steve has performed Darius Milhaud's Scaramouche and Pauline Oliveros' Outline for Double Bass, Flute, and Percussion at Mills College. He was a member of the 25th Anniversary performance of Terry Riley's In C, which was released on New Albion.

Steve has written more than fifty compositions for saxophone quartet, as well as many others for varied instrumentations. His piece Cage (for John Cage) was performed at the 1993 Bang on a Can festival, and his piece The Gene Pool was commissioned by Meet the Composer and performed at their festival "The Works" in Minneapolis in 2002. His composition Owed t'Don was recorded by the violin/marimba duo Marimolin on their CD Phantasmata . In recent years, Steve has begun creating graphic scores, now numbering more than 40. Steve has also written for theater, having composed scores for seven productions at the California Shakespeare Festival. He received a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2000 and a Meet the Composer grant in 1993, and teaches at Mills College. Steve is a graduate of the School of Contemporary Music in Brookline, MA and studied composition with Alan Crossman, Christopher Yavelov and Thomas Oboe Lee, saxophone with David Birkin and Indian music with Peter Row and Steve Gorn. "

-Rova:Arts (http://www.rova.org/about-us/steve-adams.html)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Highlights of Rova founding member Jon Raskin's early career include his '70s participation in new music ensembles directed by John Adams (San Francisco Conservatory of Music) and Dr. Barney Childs (University of Redlands). Before Rova, Raskin served as music director of the Tumbleweed Dance Company (1974-77), was a founding member of the Blue Dolphin Alternative Music Space and participated in the creation of the Farm- an art project that included a city farm, a community garden, Ecology Center, Dance and Theater companies and organized the creation of a city park. Highlights as a member of Rova include composing a collaborative work for SF Taiko Dojo/Rova, working with Howard Martin on the installation work Occupancy, composing music for Mr. Bungle/ Rova, organizing the 30 year Anniversary Concert of John Coltrane's Ascension, performing the music of Miles Davis at the Fillmore with Yo Miles!, the Glass Head project with Inkboat and the ongoing Electric Ascension project.

Raskin has received numerous grants and commissions to work on a variety of creative projects: NEA composer grant for Poison Hotel, a theater production by Soon 3 (1988); Reader's Digest/Meet the Composer (1992 & 2000); Berkeley Symphony commission (1995) and Headland Center for the Arts Residency 2009.

Besides over 30 recordings with Rova, Raskin's recording experience include Anthony Braxton, Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989 For Warne Marsh (1989) and The Bass & the Bird Pond with Tim Berne (1996), Wavelength Infinity- A Sun Ra Tribute, Between Spaces with Phillip Gelb, Dana Reason & Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley's In C 25th Anniversary, and solo work on the Art Ship Series. His current CDs include Let's go Juke Box Suite (Not Two) with the Rova Saxophone Quartet , JR Quartet (Rastascan) with Liz Allbee, George Cremaschi and Gino Robair, Music + One (Rastascan) an improvisation compendium for improvisers to play along with and Kaolithic Music, Jaw Harp Music recorded in a 587 Gallon Vase (Evander Music) He is working on several new recordings, one with a JR Quartet for release in 2009, a Rova project of graphic scores composed by Steve Adams and Jon Raskin, a compilation from the 2 + 2 series that Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin presented at the 21 Grand Performance Gallery in Oakland and a poetry and music project with Carla Harryman called Open Box.

Other groups are The Jon Raskin Quartet featuring Liz Albee on trumpet John Shiurba on bass and Gino Robair, a duo with Kanoko Nishi on Koto and a trio with Matthew Goodheart and Vladimir Tarasov."

-Rova:Arts (http://www.rova.org/about-us/jon-raskin.html)
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Larry Ochs (b. May 3, 1949, New York City) is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Ochs studied trumpet briefly but concentrated on tenor and sopranino saxophones. He worked as a record producer and founded his own label, Metalanguage Records, in 1978, in addition to operating the Twelve Stars studio in California. He co-founded the Rova Saxophone Quartet, and also worked in Glenn Spearman's Double Trio. A frequent recipient of commissions, he composed the music for the play Goya's L.A. by Leslie Scalapino in 1994 and for Letters Not About Love, which was named best documentary film at SXSW in 1998. He has also played in a new music trio called Room and the What We Live ensemble. He has recorded several albums as a leader. He formed the group Kihnoua in 2007 with vocalist Dohee Lee and Scott Amendola on drums and electronics, which released Unauthorized Caprices in 2010. He is married to the poet Lyn Hejinian."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ochs_(musician))
3/25/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Oxygen 7:43

2. The Dark Forest Suite Introduction 1:29

3. The Dark Forest Suite Song 1 2:37

4. The Dark Forest Suite Song 2 3:05

5. The Dark Forest Suite Song 3 2:13

6. The Dark Forest Suite Song 4 2:36

7. Coda 1:21

8. A Leap of Faith in Transverse Time 5:52

9. The Time Being 5:36

10. Hidden in Ochre 24:16

Related Categories of Interest:


Victo
Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
Recordings by or featuring Reed & Wind Players
Quartet Recordings
West Coast/Pacific US Jazz
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