ROVA SAXOPHONE QUARTET

 

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JAZZMEILE IMPULSKONZERT
ROVA SAXOPHONE QUARTET (USA)

 

Bruce Ackley    Tenor- und Sopransax
Larry Ochs       Sopranino- und Tenorsax
Jon Raskin        Bariton-, Alto- und Sopraninosax
Steve Adams     Alto- und Sopraninosax

www.rova.org

Vorverkauf:
VVK: 09,10 EUR (erm.) / 10,30 EUR (incl. Gebühren)
AK: 10,00 EUR (erm.) / 12,00 EUR

Tickets erhalten Sie in der Jena-Touristinformation, Markt 16, 07743 Jena.
Das Kartentelefon: 03641 / 49 80 60
Per E-mail: tickets@jena.de
Optional per Internet: www.jena.de/tickets

Im Februar 1978 hatte das ROVA seinen ersten Auftritt beim Free Music Festival am Mills College in Oakland und begann schnell eine intensive weltweite Konzerttätigkeit. Im Gegensatz zum etwa gleichzeitig gegründeten afro-amerikanischen World Saxophone Quartet kombinierte ROVA immer Improvisation mit Strukturen in der modernen Komposition. «Ich finde ROVA aktueller und spannender. Im Format mit vier Saxophonen schöpfen sie die Überschneidungen zwischen Free Jazz, moderne Klassik, experimenteller Musik und auch noch ein paar happigen Brocken anderer Stilrichtungen aus … Aber zum Glück braucht man kein Doktorat in Musiktheorie, um zu schätzen, was diese Jungs tun.» (S.V. Aaron, allaboutjazz.com 2011).

Ab den 1970er Jahren kreierte jedes Gruppenmitglied auf seine Weise Kompositionen und grafische oder verbale Konzepte – ebenso inspiriert von Charles Ives, Edgar Varèse, Olivier Messiaen und John Cage wie von John Coltrane, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy und Ornette Coleman. Die Erforschung der Synthese von Komposition und kollektiver «freier» Improvisation und ihre vielgestaltige und dynamische Umsetzung haben ROVA zu einem internationalen Trendsetter gemacht. Das fast ausschliesslich selbstverfasste Repertoire erreicht heute ein grosses Volumen und wurde über die Jahre mit einer Reihe von Plattenaufnahmen dokumentiert.

Früh suchte ROVA auch die Zusammenarbeit mit ähnlich orientierten Musikern wie den Gitarristen Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith und Nels Cline, dem Perkussionisten Andrea Centazzo, dem Saxophonisten/Komponisten John Zorn, dem russischen Ganelin Trio und dem Kronos Streichquartett. Auch kollektive intermediale Projekte entstanden, z.B. mit der Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Nach 35 Jahren sind mit Ausnahme von Steve Adams, der 1985 den austretenden Andrew Voight ersetzte, noch alle Gründer dabei.

Pressestimmen:

Rova ist nicht nur das am härtesten arbeitende, sondern auch das beste Saxophon-Quartett.
Downbeat Magazine

Der Politur dieser gefeierten, in sich geschlossenen Einheit wird durch ihre Kühnheit nur entsprochen.
The New Yorker

Aus dem Boom der 70er ist Rova wohl das spannendste aller Saxophon-Quartette.
Jazz: The Rough Guide

Links:
http://www.rova.org/
http://www.rova.org/projects/videos.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61ecgnijtUY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk7kPjL_U0g
http://www.myspace.com/rovasaxophonequartet
http://www.lastfm.de/music/ROVA+Saxophone+Quartet

 

JW 099 – Liner Notes-keine deutschen Liner Notes bei dieser Produktion

The first time I heard a Rova album – 1980's This, This, This, This (Moers Music) – I was, I remember well, intimidated, as much by the timbral homogeneity of the saxophone quartet as by the uncompromising complexity of the music. I used to feel the same way about Brahms's String Sextets until I grew up a bit and learned to listen properly: what as a pimply teen infatuated with the dramatic übermensch excess of Wagner I used to find thick and muddy turned out to be rich and deep. So it is with Rova. (And that bit about timbral homogeneity is a load of bunk, too: saying a soprano sax sounds like a baritone is as daft as saying a violin sounds like a cello.) Without markedly different instruments in the line-up playing off each other – it's always hard to resist the temptation to personify instruments and turn pieces of music into works of theatre – we're left with no option but to focus on the music itself, the notes, and Messrs Ackley, Adams, Ochs and Raskin are nothing if not "note men", to quote one of their heroes, Morton Feldman. Even after 34 years' playing together (23 for Adams, who joined in 1988 after founder member Andrew Voigt left), a longevity rivalled only by the Schlippenbach Trio and Borbetomagus, they show relatively little interest in the flutters, clicks and pops of the "new" saxophone vocabulary of the past 15 years. The three pieces on offer here make abundantly clear that there's enough remaining to be done with the old twelve tones to keep them busy for another three decades.

Steve Adams's The Blocks was originally intended as an opening warm-up for Rova concerts, but soon evolved into a complex, Elliott Carter-like double duo of superimposed metres and tempi. The friction between its tight, cellular notated material and the improvised duos is what really makes the piece – and with it, the album – take off, and it's this fertile middle ground between composition and improvisation that Rova have been cultivating for over three decades. It's what Larry Ochs refers to as "structured improvisation", which, as he explains, "always takes the longest to put together, longer than 100% notated or free improvisation." Of course: when everything's written down, all you have to do is play the score (if you can), and when nothing's written down it's even less time-consuming. But Rova have never taken the easy option, and though much of their music includes conventional notation, they have a whole additional arsenal of techniques at their disposal. Jon Raskin's To The Right Of The Blue Wall is to a great extent made up of what he calls process cues – including "masking", "taking over a sound", "changing spaces between sound events" and other complex systems of conducted "hand games" – and sound cues, which could involve coordinated changes in timbre and dynamics but also, as is the case here, the use of Kandinsky-inspired graphic notation – and photographs. Not surprisingly perhaps for someone based in California, they're photographs of grapes and grape stems. Fruit never sounded this good.

Back in my militant avant-garde anti-Brahms daze at university, I remember storming in high dudgeon out of a lecture by Robin Holloway when he described Britten, Shostakovich and Copland as "natural serialists". This was not, I later realised, a withering put-down of my then twelve-tone heroes, but rather a statement of simple truth: that Benjamin, Dmitri and Aaron were just as obsessed with meticulous inside-out upside-down exploration of nuggets of musical material as Arnold, Alban and Anton. Holloway (who eventually turned me on to Brahms by pointing out his influence on Schoenberg), would, I think, quite happily add Adams, Raskin and Ochs to his list of natural serialists. Ochs's monumental Certain Space begins with a two-and-a-half minute introduction, whose inner voice nine-note cantus firmus could be said to contain, in embryo, the pitch material for the entire work – check out the frequency of semitones, tones and major and minor thirds – and whose internal repetitions also form the kernel of trills and repeated notes. There'd be enough raw material here to keep a card-carrying serialist busy for a whole symphony, but Ochs plays hooky from (Second Viennese) school and leaps out of the window into the undergrowth, dedicating each of the work's principal sections to, respectively, Giacinto Scelsi, Cecil Taylor and Morton Feldman, composers for whom improvisation – or perhaps in Feldman's case we'd be better off calling it intuition – was of greater importance than overarching theoretical conceit.  "Each section is essentially a concerto for one player while the other three set up the context over which they play," explains Ochs. "I call the soloists 'free agents' because they are free to play above the background, within the background or not play at all." Tall oaks from little acorns grow, for sure, but notwithstanding the care and attention of the gardener, weather plays a vital role, and the background (or backgrounds, often carefully notated chord sequences or pitch constellations, meticulously rehearsed in advance and cued in performance by Ochs) is like the weather: whether you organise the events of your day around it or choose to ignore it altogether, it has an inevitable and subtle influence on your behaviour and mood. And as Ochs puts it, "it's the background that reflects on the dedicatee perhaps more than the solos."

But both the background and the solos reflect the dazzling virtuosity and consummate musicianship of these guys. And no amount of verbal explanation in a set of liner notes (which Larry Ochs hopes you won't read until after you've heard the disc, a sentiment I endorse wholeheartedly) can prepare you for the thrill and challenge of A Short History, which, despite its title, demands, deserves and richly rewards long and loving attentive listening.

Dan Warburton