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Rova Saxophone Quartet
The Rova Saxophone Quartet was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in October 1977 by Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt and Bruce Ackley. The ensemble performed its first concert at the 3rd Annual Free Music Festival at Mills College in Oakland, California, in February 1978. Inspired by a broad spectrum of musical influences-from Charles Ives, Edgard Varese, Olivier Messiaen and John Cage to John Coltrane, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and Ornette Coleman-Rova began writing new material, touring, recording (its first album Cinema Rovaté was released on Ochs' Metalanguage label) and collaborating with such like-minded colleagues as guitarist Henry Kaiser and Italian percussionist Andrea Centazzo. Early in its history, Rova performed both at the Vancouver New Music Society (1978) and the Moers International Festival of New Jazz in Germany (1979).
Over the next few years Rova performed widely throughout North America and Europe, and in 1983 it became the first new music group from the U.S. to tour the Soviet Union. Saxophone Diplomacy, a documentary video of the tour, was aired on PBS throughout the U.S. 1983 also saw the release of the landmark recording Favorite Street - Rova Plays Lacy. In 1986, Rova (which had incorporated as a not- for-profit organization the previous year) hosted the Ganelin Trio, the first Soviet jazz group to appear in the U.S. The trio performed with Rova in the first of the Pre- Echoes series of collaborative events, which would later include concerts with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Terry Riley and others. The Pre-Echoes series ended in 1990 with the installation piece Occupancy, a collaboration with architect Howard Martin. Founding member Andrew Voigt left Rova in August 1988 and was replaced by Steve Adams, formerly with the Boston-based Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet. Rova returned to the USSR in November, 1989 and released a CD of music recorded on the tour, This Time We Are Both.
Highlights of Rova's prolific career in the '90s include appearances at the Yokohama Jazz Promenade in Japan; the Vancouver Jazz Festival; the San Francisco Jazz Festival and the Festival Internationale Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (Quebec, Canada); the Documenta IX International Art Exhibition in Kassel, Germany; a piece created for performance in the Ludwig Wittgenstein Museum, Vienna, Austria; concerts with Alvin Curran in Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, Portugal and the U.S.; appearances in Chicago, Milwaukee and Toronto for the New Music Across America Festival; a twentieth anniversary celebration presented by SFJAZZ; creation of the piece Resistance for sax quartet and four DAT machines for ORF, the Austrian National Radio; and the triumphant 30th anniversary presentation of John Coltrane's Ascension in San Francisco. Quartet members were also commissioned to write music for Rova by both Meet the Composer and Chamber Music America.
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Rova Saxophone Quartet at Bop Stop
by John Chacona
Rova Saxophone Quartet Bop Stop at the Music Settlement Cleveland, OHOctober 4, 2022 One of the inescapable trends in music over the last decade has been the convergence of two traditions in improvised music, one that was created in the African diaspora and another that evolved in European art music. Classifications are odious and they're increasingly meaningless. Are Wadada Leo Smith's string quartets jazz or classical works? How about pianist Cory Smythe's piano experiments? And ...
read moreRova Saxophone Quartet: Steve Lacy’s Saxophone Special Revisited
by Mark Corroto
If you own a copy of the original Saxophone Special (Emanem, 1975), flip the LP over to view a photocopy of Steve Lacy's original notebook (with spiral binding) score of the compositions Staples," Swishes," and Snaps." This is all music he performed at Wigmore Hall in London in December 1974 in a saxophone quartet that included Trevor Watts, Evan Parker, and Steve Potts. He also incorporated what he described as a noise section" with guitarist Derek Bailey and the electronic ...
read moreRova Channeling Coltrane: Electric Ascension
by John Sharpe
John Coltrane's Ascension (Impulse, 1965) stands as a seminal moment in the development of modern jazz, presenting structured large group improvisation which renounced both the form and content of almost all previous models. It was never performed live, and this was one of the facts which initially captured the attention of the now venerable ROVA Saxophone Quartet, who have explored the work on multiple occasions. First was John Coltrane's Ascension (Black Saint, 1997) a fairly faithful homage which mirrored the ...
read moreRova Saxophone Quartet: Resistance
by Kurt Gottschalk
Two premiere saxophone quartets came out of the final quarter of the last century, and both continue to carry on (each having lost one original member along the way). Rova and the World Saxophone Quartet (WSQ) are notable for having overcome the limitations posed by groupings of like instruments, each finding their way to distinct voices and full sounds. Where they differ is in tradition. WSQ are unabashedly a jazz group, recording an album of Duke Ellington material ...
read moreROVA Saxophone Quartet: As Was
by AAJ Staff
Ironically, the highest forms of freedom require the greatest discipline. And so it is with the ROVA saxophone quartet, rejuvenated in their earliest form on this '81 reissue. As Was documents the earliest form of this quartet, before Steve Adams replaced Andrew Voight. And it's heady stuff: fleet, adventurous, roving, and emotionally dense. Periods of arranged chordal progression slyly disintegrate into four independent voices of interplay, interweaving themes and fine-sculpted tones. The structure of the freer passages may be less ...
read moreRova Saxophone Quartet - Planetary (2011)
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Something Else!
By S. Victor Aaron Imagine a conversation with three other people where topic...a theme if you will...is selected and all four of you are to converse on that topic at certain points in time. And then at other times, a random topic is chosen, but everyone has to be conversing on topic together. And the topics can change on the fly, several times, before returning the the original, complex theme" topic. I'm trying my darnedest to describe the knotty song ...
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