Rova’s mutable big band, An Alligator in Your Wallet, features works by Japanese pianist Satoko Fujii, Rova’s own Steve Adams, and Tokyo’s avant-garde trumpeter Natsuki Tamura.
Originally staged as part of Rovaté 2002, this avant big-band music has been featured under varying names at festivals in Lausanne, Switzerland (Onze Plus); Tampere, Finland (Tampere Jazz Happening); Strasbourg, France (Jazz D’Or). And the music has also been presented in Tokyo. Instrumentation: 4 saxophonists, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass, piano, drums, electronics (optional), violin (optional)
In all concerts, the band includes Rova on saxophones, with Ms. Fujii on piano and Mr. Tamura on trumpet. In Japan and Europe, the drummer was the extraordinary Tokyo-based drummer Akira Horikoshi. In San Francisco, the drummer was the effervescent Scott Amendola. We would propose to use one of these two drummers at all performances world-wide. All other performers should be locally based. (1 trumpet, 2 trombones, and bass; violin, electronics optional.) This allows for fresh interpretations of the work at each concert and allows us to learn something about the local music scene wherever we take the music. Fun for all!
In 2002, the original music was also recorded in studio for the Japanese label “EWE” … The San Francisco performance and the recording included the great New York bassist Ken Filiano and West Coast stars Carla Kihlstedt, Scott Amendola, Michael Vlatkovich, Tom Yoder, and Darren Johnston.
The liner notes for the CD (by critic Derk Richardson) follow:
Rova::Orkestrova
At least once a year, Rova becomes much more than the world’s premier avant-garde saxophone quartet. By commissioning new works under the auspices of their own Rova:Arts organization, and rallying a host of tremendously gifted and adventuresome co-conspirators (mostly from the fertile San Francisco Bay Area scene), Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams become the reed section of Orkestrova, which in turn becomes the high-powered vehicle for startling new pieces that have been specially devised to expand upon the fundamental Rova modus operandi of “comprovisation.”
The occasion for An Alligator in Your Wallet was Rovaté 2002, two nights of concerts that were part of an ongoing celebration of Rova’s 25 th anniversary. The event’s name derives from the quartet’s 1978 debut LP, Cinema Rovaté, and since 1999 it has provided the umbrella for ambitious collaborations with the likes of Sam Rivers, Gerry Hemmingway, Wadada Leo Smith, and John Schott. The featured guests at Rovaté 2002 were pianist/composer Satoko Fujii, who brought three new compositions with her from Tokyo, and Fujii’s husband, the fiery trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. They became the latest in a long line of internationally renowned artists to collaborate with Rova, including John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Nels Cline, Vinny Golia, Butch Morris, Lindsay Cooper, Barry Guy, George Lewis, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Robin Holcomb, Alvin Curran, Henry Threadgill, John Carter, Tim Berne, Fred Ho, and Muhal Richard Abrams, among others.
“It's about ‘joining forces’ more than it is about commissioning a piece of music,” Larry Ochs says of Rova’s strategy for working with others. “You scout for like-minded artists, and then you hope that your commissioning and collaborating will result in something more than the sum of its parts. You try to develop a relationship and then let the process take care of itself, hoping that the artist will adapt her wide set of interests to the situation, and expecting that both sides will learn and grow from the experience.”
Satoko Fujii had been aware of Rova’s music well before being invited to compose for the group. She saw the quartet perform twice in 1996, in London and New York City; discussions about the feasibility of a joint project began three years later when Rova staged concerts in Tokyo and Yokohama. Fujii’s catalog of brilliant recordings—including her 1996 debut duet with pianist Paul Bley, Something About Water (Libra), and small group dates with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Jim Black (Looking Out of the Window, Nippon Crown, 1998, and Kitsune-bi, Tzadik, 1999)—had put the pianist on Rova’s radar screen. “The trio CDs with Dresser and Black made it really clear that her sensibility was to the left or liberal side of jazz,” says Ochs, “where more influences and ideas are allowed in—bebop and beyond rather than bebop and before. They indicated someone with an open ear, someone who composed from her imagination rather than from some set of jazz rules. When we met, it was even clearer that she was a listener and someone who thought about the big picture and the history of improvised music.”
In fact, as she developed as a musician, Fujii had to find her way back to the improvisation that had come naturally to her as a very young child, but which had been trained out of her during 16 years of formal classical study in Japan. “I got tired of playing written music,” Fujii explains, “but I found out I could not improvise. Without any music paper in front of me, I couldn’t make even one note.” At the age of 20, she took the radical step of giving up the piano entirely; she experimented with making musical sounds spontaneously with her voice and hands, and she experienced a new sense of freedom. But when she returned to the piano, she still had trouble improvising. Inspired in part by Koji Taku, a classical pianist and composer who, at the age of 60, resigned from the Tokyo College of Art and Music to play jazz, Fujii left home and dedicated herself to “bebop and beyond,” supporting herself as a house pianist in a Tokyo cabaret.
During two separate academic stints in the U.S., Fujii studied arranging (with Herb Pomeroy) at the Berklee College of Music, and composition (with George Russell) and improvisation (with Paul Bley) at the New England Conservatory of Music. It was Bley, she says, who restored her confidence in her own musical instincts. “Through him I really understood that I could be myself,” Fujii explains. “It was a big thing for me. I could release.” The experience, as she describes it, parallels the kind of instantaneous enlightenment that requires no intellectual struggle with concepts. Instead of practicing to master chords and scales, she learned to run with musical notions that arose from within. “Once I got that idea,” she says, “I could trust myself.” Fujii’s daring work, at times fragile and intimate, in other moments explosive and dissonant, has taken a variety of shapes on the dozen or so recordings she has made since 1996, including orchestral projects, South Wind and Double Take; a brilliant duet CD with violinist Mark Feldman, April Shower; and the recent quartet album, Minerva.
The first three enigmatically titled pieces on this live recording embody Fujii’s notion of the “unexpected discoveries” that present themselves when musicians—especially those rooted in different cultures—meet in performance for the first time. A Lion in Your Bag initially juxtaposes solo statements against cacophonic orchestral explosions, with the ensemble parts gradually becoming more “conventional,” and Larry Ochs takes his tenor solos even further out, ricocheting off the avant-big band drumming of Scott Amendola (a member of Ochs’ Sax & Drumming Core). By the end, the piece is swinging with surprising authority.
A Zebra on Your Roof opens with a measured accretion of textures—some reedy and almost ethereal, some tart, some percussive—and features the Steve Adams’ alto sax ruminating in tandem with the bass of his longtime New York-based collaborator, Ken Filiano. The piece makes an inexorable ascent as Fujii, Amendola, and Tin Hat Trio violinist Carla Kihlstedt splash and smear color against Adams’ absorbing sonic curlicues, and the full orchestra eventually urging Adams to ever-greater heights of expression.
On An Alligator in Your Wallet, it’s Bruce Ackley’s soprano sax pushed to the fore by a jittery and playful combination of bass and drums, with the orchestra providing Greek chorus-like commentary. At one point, a figure that sounds rather like a car engine starting up is echoed by the ensemble, initiating a kind of indeterminate call and response. The brass players emerge for a friendly tussle before the closing minute of exciting and decisive big band riffs.
The two remaining pieces on An Alligator in Your Wallet were composed by Rova’s “newest” member (he joined 15 years ago), Steve Adams. While both occupy about 16 minutes of elapsed time, patiently unfolding to create a sense of spaciousness, each develops from a different compositional strategy. Survival (in Five Acts) starts from a minimalist melodic idea that gets transformed in the ensemble setting as the players signal one another with a series of Rova-centric hand cues.* The featured soloists—Tamura, Ochs, and Kihlstedt—are showcased against these spontaneously generated and often “small” and intimate exchanges, at least until the “Fierce Story” cue sparks the frenzy that eventually gives way to a mass cascade of the original melodic fragments and the improvised coda for Adams’ bass flute.
For the bluesy and propulsive Chuck, Adams split the group into three quartets and assigned each its own written material and rhythmic flow. Before the original melody returns at the end in altered form, we follow a wondrously convoluted path cleared ahead of us through a duet by bassist Filiano and drummer Amendola, solos by Fujii, Adams, and trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, and further duos featuring Ackley (soprano sax) with trumpeter Darren Johnston , and Raskin (baritone sax) with trombonist Tom Yoder.
All this musical activity, tapping such a broad range of musical sources and exploiting such an unpredictable variety of tactics, guarantees that these five pieces will yield as many startling revelations as discovering An Alligator in Your Wallet. And through Orkestrova, as with such individual side projects as Actual Size, What We Live, Maybe Monday, the Wind Trio of Alphaville, and more, Rova continues to nurture its generous spirit of artistic partnership and broaden the notion of what is musically possible.
---Derk Richardson
UnAMERICAN ACTIVITIES #26
ROVA: Orkestrova
by Ken Waxman
27 December 2004
Limited to Japanese distribution, ROVA: Orkestrova’s An Alligator in Your Wallet (EWE) is an important CD because it provides new evidence for what already should be regarded as truisms. One is that the usually self-contained Bay Area saxophone quartet ROVA can smoothly function as the sax section in any sized ensemble. The other is that pianist Satoko Fujii, who divides her time between Tokyo and New York, is a versatile enough composer to utilize the idiosyncrasies of these musicians in more experimental pieces than she usually writes for her own bands and combos.
A motley crew of the West Coast’s best improvisers, the twelve-piece Orkestrova includes trumpeter Darren Johnston, veteran Michael Vlatkovich and Tom Yoder on trombones, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, and Scott Amendola on drums and electronics. Added are Fujii, her husband and playing partner, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, Angelo-turned-Brooklynite bassist Ken Filiano, and ROVA itself. That’s Bruce Ackley on soprano and tenor saxophones, Larry Ochs on sopranino and tenor saxophones, Jon Raskin on baritone saxophone, and Steve Adams—who wrote the two pieces here not from Fujii’s pen—on alto saxophone and bass flute.
Interestingly enough, for a musician who is a member of the best-known, so-called avant-garde sax quartet, it’s Adams’ pieces that inch closest to pure swing. His “Chuck”, for instance, is a bluesy romp that at times sounds as if it’s being played by Count Basie’s horn section. The more than 16-minute composition is borne on call-and-response riffing from the reeds as well as Fujii’s outgoing arpeggio-rich soloing until it splinters into individual solos. Backed by walking bass and syncopated drumbeats, for instance, the composer frolics, slithers, and squeals when it’s his time in front of the mic.
After that, Ackley produces reed blasts that match up with Yoder’s full plunger mode output, their duet mirrored later at a wavering, slower tempo by resonant licks from Raskin paired with breezy grace notes from Johnston. Polyphonic horn expansion then gives way to a perfectly executed ‘bone display by Vlatkovich that’s simultaneously clean and funky. As the piece reaches its climax, bravura hocketing and humorous broken octaves from all the horns meld, than fade away.
“Survival (in Five Acts)”— Adams’ other contribution—is a touch more extended than the former tune. It showcases his sonorous bass flute that presages a symphonic melding of timbres cushioning sweet, vocalized smears and wavering broken chords from the horns. Ominous sounding in parts, the line is extended with metallic electronic-like oscillations, with the constriction burst by Ochs’ twittering altissimo tone, high-pitched string-stretching from Filiano, and irregular piano pulses. As Ochs continues to double- and triple-tongue, Kihlstedt’s jettes turn spiccato and pantonal lines sluice back and forth. Polyphonic sax timbres slow the tune down back to an echoing bass flute solo that reshapes the theme as the finale.
Fujii’s compositions are another matter. Experienced in creating for large groups—she leads both a Japanese and an American big band—she manages the incredible feat of crafting dual-purpose pieces. Their performance seems to showcase screaming free-for-alls that you’d expect from other energetic classics such as Ascension or Machine Gun, while calling on the disciplined harmonies of a drilled modern swing ensemble like Gerry Mulligan’s legendary Concert Jazz Band. Certainly the first track, “A Lion in Your Bag”, has all those attributes.
Characterized by a firm tempo, reminiscent of one of Anthony Braxton’s early marching band-style pieces, the title tune places jittery, flutter-tonguing from Ackley on top of a malleable bouncing vamp from the other horns. As the trombones lob rubato grace notes at one another, Amendola’s percussion texture resembles big top circus music. Whinnying, whistling trumpet lines precede reed riffs and foretell a high-pitched, brassy ending.
Most atonal of the lot is the almost ten-minute “A Zebra on Your Roof”, where percussive rolls and flams plus massed reed section vamps follow almost otherworldly electronic oscillation. As the horn parts augment in volume, other timbres turn subservient to sul ponticello sweeps from the fiddler. In opposition Adams—on alto—produces smeary, circular runs, while other hornmen assert themselves through determinedly vibrated lines. Pulsating piano chording that churns beneath all the other parts, mixed with faux-romantic violin tones, together suggest a chamber music concerto. That is until slammed percussion rhythms meld and mutate the shifting theme. Putting all classical references aside, the climax finds the brass heading towards Cat Anderson-like screeching tremolo territory.
Worth seeking out, the CD confirms the multi-faceted skills as players and orchestrators of both the ROVA quartet members and Fujii herself.