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 stations throughout the U.S. Rova returned to the USSR again in November 1989 and released a CD of music recorded on the tour, This Time We Are Both (New Albion Records). In between those visits, 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 at its first Pre-Echoes series of collaborative events which would later include concerts with Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Terry Riley and others.
Founding member Andrew Voigt left Rova in August 1988 and was replaced by Steve Adams, formerly with the Boston-based Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet. 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); 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; the triumphant 30th anniversary presentation of John Coltrane's Ascension in San Francisco. Many projects have necessitated the expansion of the quartet into a mutable large ensemble, Orkestrova, to perform special pieces composed by Rova and others. And, quartet members too have been commissioned to write music for Rova both by Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and Chamber Music America.
In 1999, Rova’s nonprofit support organization, Rova:Arts, began presenting 2 annual events in the San Francisco Bay Area.Temporarily on hold, New Music on the Mountain presented 3 or 4 acts outdoors at Mt. Tamalpais every September through 2005. And, our continuing series, Rovaté, presents special collaborations between Rova and guests. Collaborating artists have included Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, Gerry Hemingway, Satoko Fujii and Nels Cline. Rova:Arts has also commissioned up and coming local composers to write original music esecially for Rova.
In June 2002, Rova was the featured guest/group at Meet the Composer's national event held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, entitled THE WORKS—a two-day festival of live music and discourse. This honor was presented to Rova, as the group most often awarded funding to commission new works, by this national organization based in New York City. Meet the Composer has funded commissions for twenty compositions for Rova since 1989, all of which have been performed internationally and most have been released on Rova CDs. This funding has encouraged the proliferation of new and exciting compositions for saxophone quartet, greatly enhanced the community of improvising musicians and provided important opportunities for composers often foreclosed from receiving award money for their works.
Several recent projects have allowed Rova to partner with the local and international community of improvisers by inviting guest artists to participate, thereby adding a heightened element of surprise for both the audience and performers. Two avenues for augmenting the quartet have been the Art of the Improvisers series—evenings of ad hoc free improvisations with invited guests (usually with some conceptual focus); and special programs featuring Orkestrova, the Rova expanded ensemble of various configurations employed to perform compositions by Rova and also by guest composers.
Art of the Improvisers shows were inspired by breakthrough guitarist Derek Bailey’s Company Week (a London-based week long, annual improv series that began in the early 1970s), and operate on the same premise: get the right players in the room and the spontaneous improvisations that result will be inventive, thoughtful and provocative. A 2004 show focused on a diverse group of Los Angeles players, some of whom are rarely heard in the Bay Area.
Orkestrova has been busy with a range of activities. The “Alligator in Your Wallet Project”, featuring Japanese pianist/composer Satoko Fujii, has taken Rova to Japan and Europe on tours, and into the recording studio to make the 2003 recording An Alligator in Your Wallet, which features big band compositions by Satoko and Rova’s Steve Adams. Presented in San Francisco in 2005, Larry Ochs’ The Mirror World, was an evening-length performance by two different Orkestrova ensembles playing pieces inspired by the extraordinary filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The Sextet version of Mirror World was taken to Venice later in the year and performed with two Italian percussionists. In 2004, at the 10 th annual Other Minds Festival, Jon Raskin premiered his The Here and Now, a composition that brought Rova together with a dream ensemble of musicians from 6 different Asian musical traditions, and was conducted by Bay Area innovator, Gino Robair.
Perhaps the most stirring Orkestrova ensemble has been the Electric Ascension band. The first performance of this reworking of John Coltrane’s Ascension was produced during Rova’s 25 th anniversary concert series in early 2003 (which also included a remounting of Steve Lacy’s Saxophone Special). Subsequent concerts have taken place in LA, at the Larry Ochs-curated Unlimited XIX Festival ( Wels, Austria, November 2005) and in Vancouver, Canada and Lisbon, Portugal in 2006. Future Electric Ascension concerts will happen in Rome, Paris and Philadelphia in 2007. This project has broadened the quartet’s scope to include a master work by one of our most inspirational heroes, and allowed us to apply ideas harvested from our 3 decades of music making in its presentation. Personnel for the 12 piece ensemble is by necessity flexible and draws on our relationships with many visionary improvisers, including guitaritst Nels Cline; electronics wizard, Ikue Mori; turntablist, Otomo Yoshihide; and long time Rova collaborator, Fred Frith, on bass.
The visual arts have always been an important inspiration for Rova works, and projects in the past couple of years—composing using non-traditional notation, and the Glass Head collaboration— have coupled our music with visual imagery. Jon and Steve have created several scores that use graphic notation to indicate to the players what may happen in a particular piece. Each has a personal approach to graphic design and its application to performance and improvisation. During a 2005 Improv:21 event (an ongoing series of lecture-demonstrations curated by Larry Ochs and produced by Rova:Arts) Rova performed and discussed many of these compositions, and fielded questions related to the way in which new dimensions of improvisation, and therefore sound, are available through this approach to composing. Rovaté 2007 will feature Rova and guest artists performing graphically notated compositions by the quartet, and projected visual scores will be a part of the performance.
Glass Head , premiered in San Francisco in 2006, is a thorough collaboration and daring foray into multimedia performance. Originally conceived as a collaboration between the butoh-inspired dance troupe, inkBoat, and Rova, this hour-long work also includes film, live video and still image projection created by media designer Eric Koziol, as well as set and lighting design, all under the direction of Ernie Lafky. The piece, a year in the making, was commissioned by The Creative Work Fund.
With increased use of the Internet to access music, the recording industry is in flux, but Rova has plans. We have several recent CD releases, including Alligator in Your Wallet (with Satoko Fujii and friends), Orkestrova:Electric Ascension, and a quartet only release, Totally Spinning; and we are headed into the studio in late 2006 to record Jon Raskin’s “Juke Box” pieces, a series of works that draw on a mixed bag of musical elements from musics from around the world. We’re also in the process of reviewing live recordings and unreleased studio sessions that will soon be available to download from the Internet. Watch the Rova web site for news as this develops.
Nearing our 30 th year as a group, Rova is still excited about investigating both new and familiar worlds of art-making and performance, and we look forward to you joining us for the ride.