1. Sport (Ackley, Ochs, Raskin, Voigt) 3:05
2, The Crowd (Ackley, Ochs, Raskin, Voigt) 19:12
3. Room (Ochs) 10:40
4. Knife In the Times 1-8 (Ochs) 29:25
5. Terrains (Raskin) 16:19
Bruce Ackley: soprano saxophone
Andrew Voight: alto saxophone and Eb clarinet
Larry Ochs: tenor and sopranino saxophones
Jon Raskin: baritone and alto saxophones
1986 - Hat Hut (Switzerland) 2032 (LP)
1992 - hat ART (Switzerland) 6098 (CD)
Studio Charles Cros. Maison de la Culture d'Amiens, France, June 20-23, 1985
During the decade of the 1960s, a rebellious, revolutionary period affecting all
aspects of American society, jazz–ever an adaptable, assimilative, creative
form throughout its 70-odd year history–splintered and sent out experimental
offshoots whose implications eventually redefined the music’s most basic premises.
It wasn’t until the ‘70s, however, that these radical developments were
consolidated into the evolutionary fabric of jazz, slicing through stylistic constraints
and expanding the music’s parameters into open fields of sound manipulation
and cultural intermingling based on the previous decade’s innovations in rhythmic
and melodic freedom (Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor), structural expansion the
(Chicagoans: Mitchell, Braxton, Abrams, et al), electric polyphony (Miles
Davis), ethnicity, Western (European) classical elements, and on and on.
By expanding into previously uncharted areas, the music demanded new types of ensembles,
which could suggest–though not necessarily imitate–styles of the past
while making virtually unique, particular statements about their own time,
place, and condition. Novel instrumental combinations were one manifestation of
this demand, and the resultant exploration of color, texture, density, and timbre
stretched the music’s boundaries even further. In this period of such pronounced
individuality and experimentation, few ensembles have sustained and grown with the
strength and resiliency of the Rova Saxophone Quartet.
Formed in 1977, Rova initially drew their inspiration, energetic demeanor, and concern
for structure (both intuitive and pre-arranged) from the solo and saxophone ensembles
primarily developed by Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell. However, these influences
were subsumed early on, as the quartet’s individuals took on a group identity
of remarkably single-minded purpose. Their playing together almost exclusively since
1977 has enabled them to grow together in ways few groups experience–in sheer
musical terms, their sense of line, phrasing, rhythm, dynamics, and expressive gesture
are exceptionally unified. Further, though, is an almost objective group empathy
which is not deviated from in their music’s frequent solo statements, as is
typically the case in jazz, where the individual has long been given preference
over the ensemble. Listening to a Count Basie performance from the ‘30s, say,
one is made electrically aware of Lester Young or Buck Clayton’s exceedingly
personal statements within the musical whole; Charlie Parker in a small group
is an entity unto himself.
However. Rova’s music from the very beginning has been ennobled by its attempt
to redefine the individual (soloist) within society (the ensemble) just as they’ve
tried to blur the distinction between composition (premeditated) and improvisation
(spontaneous). They have proved so successful at this that–as the music on
these two records documents so persuasively–it’s virtually impossible
to tell what’s written and what’s not, what has been left to the individual’s
whim and what is a group decision. To some degree, this is because the solos take
on a dramatic necessity, often stressing contrary attitudes (motion vs. static background,
serenity vs. chaos, individual statements vs. group interactivity) but at all times
supported by the democratic actions of the others.
By attaching a dramatic/literary component to their work, Rova thus injects their
idiosyncratic forms with a feeling of inevitably–hard won, no doubt, given
the care with which they approach their music, understanding that precision and
realization take time in order organize the material and establish the individual
and group concerns within the parameters outlined. It’s no coincidence that
their very first LP, Cinema Rovaté (1978), was subtitled "Stories and
Studies in Sound," as the narrative and the exploratory natures have
been carried through to their current work–most readily apparent here on Knife
in the Times, where the music’s thoroughly dramatic shifts reflect a
rigorous desire for variety and quality. They obtain textures and utilize dynamics
with far more aplomb and conviction than most larger ensembles, all the while stressing
human concerns (note especially Larry 0chs’ moving tenor episode–narrative
without being histrionic–and Bruce Ackley’s haunting soprano) over mechanical
structure. Ochs, the composer, explains, "I’d wanted to do a piece that
uses repeated cycles of rhythms, but wondered why (others working with similar material–Glass,
Reich, etc.) didn’t break up their patterns and have them be a surprise instead
of what you’d expect. That’s what was at the beginning of the idea, anyway–plus
the fact that in ‘84 we’d just gotten hack from our USSR trip, and I was
fed up with the political situation here."
It’s the combination of such musical and extramusical concerns–real and
implied–as influenced by literary and sociopolitical attitudes, that enriches
Rova’s music. As early as 1980, Ochs was quoted as saying, "Rova’s
music is intentionally dense. We’re throwing layers of information, of music,
at the listener, and if they are able to enjoy this music–to hear it and make
sense our of it–then maybe we are helping them to deal with all the layers
of information that are being thrown at them in daily life. If people are sensitized
rather than desensitized–television, drugs, alcohol, daily newspapers are all
desensitizing instruments–they won’t be willing to put up with all the
bullshit, and change will occur. This is how I see our music as political."
Such a stance demands a delicate balance of intellect and emotion, which the Rova’s
have confronted not so much through the creation of a repertoire as the development
of a syntax, which allows them to investigate various aspects of musical
("language") forms and recombine them into a dramatic unity without the
stifling regularity overly familiar structures propose. The breadth of these syntactical
components helps avoid predictability; witness their series of pieces titled Trobar
Clus (a spontaneous form of poetry sung by troubadours of southern France
from 1095-1295). The Crowd was, according to Ochs, at one time titled Trobar
Clus #1O, before it underwent extensive reworking. This reflects the group’s
emphasis on structural process–the natural, organic evolution of the
material from a series of events into a dramatic, communicative whole.
Examples of Rova’s remarkable blend–again dependent upon the group’s
unanimity of purpose–are everywhere apparent on these discs. Hear how the rhythms
balloon and deflate, seeming to defy gravity, throughout Terrains, which
(to mix the metaphor) reads like a topical map (for a literary correlative try John
Ashbery’s poem Rivers And Mountains) with a variety of landscapes–some
hilly, some smooth, some labyrinthine winding roads, some flat strips built for
speed. Or the inspiring manner in which the four joust on Sport before coming
together for the common good. Or the prelude to Room, which could conceivably
sound melodramatic without the austere tang of four saxophones’ timbre and
attack.
Still, to try to describe Rova’s music would be foolhardy, akin to synopsizing
Shakespeare’s sonnets or Gertrude Stein’s stories. The flavor, and more
importantly, the communication, lies in the experiencing.
–Art Lange,
May 1986
If this morning’s wake-up note is a C# (and I notice this helplessly)
how will
the musics I hear today relate to that?
or a very long
improvisation by Cecil Taylor
Time & Sound, a marriage made in certain simple rooms. One of the strangenesses
of the word "time": that it is singular. With Rova, the fixed and the
moving.
Music sometimes takes quite some lengths just to declare a sound.
One is hardly ever completely listening (which requires a devotion to time
of the wild leap), therefore what follows such reduced attention generates little
but quick opinion, and you can feel the mass of all you missed draining away. Music
must be the room you are in, for the duration.
Some sounds are not apparent in a music but have to be searched for (listened out)
like that thing you didn’t notice right away turned up in the corner of the
room behind the silent radio. I couldn’t hear it at first. Then it was all
I could hear.
Endless material could be written into and out of this music. Though to apply any
purely explicatory language to it is almost a crime, for that operation tends the
sounds back to an overly dusted self-standard. To sound is to resist rested definition,
to leave oneself outward into a trend where the fissures and masses spring a feeling
free of its telling.
A still generative statement by Cecil Taylor, copied into my 1963 notebook: "You
are the recipient of all the cultural things around you that you wish to be–things
like dance, theater, literature, the people you see, so you are a departure."
Immersion in the states of a thing, it takes.
And the counted same you will never have.
The will to include enough differences is already a move toward the outside.
Ornette Coleman points to zones of his Free Jazz session where "the freedom
even becomes impersonal."
In a time when it gels increasingly hard to pay complete attention to any music,
Rova creates a situation beyond my memories of hearing. And it is a full
act, an animate field shorn of none of its…
Maybe memory is the problem?
Suppose you rehearse the Bartok Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, say, at such
length it lifts completely from the paper, you can hum its every distinction in
mind as wholly as the chord changes to I Got Rhythm, until its structure is shaping
the least parts of your dailiness, beyond the rigidities of
recall. You play the concert as planned and then it is over. A depression sets in.
Why can you not go on? And suppose most of your playing experience has been in an
improvised music, jazz. Your next thought urges continuance. Everything predicts
it. How can this intensely structured score just stop at
the last page?
A prime of jazz can thus be seen as a will toward mutability of any musical material
in time. No composition need freeze in a single state. The possibilities seem limitless.
Any horizons transitional.
Whereas, in the badly-termed ‘classical’ sector. as Glenn Gould’s
performances are called "interpretations" and are criticized for eroding
sanctified facets of "perfect" scores, though he has looked deeply enough
into this music to realize that there is little point in adding another recording
of a Mozart sonata, say, unless one plays it in a radically different way, changes
it.
And Morton Feldman has written a string quartet four hours in length. He obviously
does not want his music to settle for the truncated life of what Cecil Taylor has
called "viable bended plants that can be put in anybody’s garden,"
and goes on to speak memorably of "the life of the piece" as an increasingly
primary concern.
"Kinds" of music (those sanitizing labels) no longer seem to drag along
their own built-in and abstract barriers, and there is now a freed-up crossing,
a taking from wherever, in motion, integral, recombinant. And acting up into the
next state.
These are significant changes in realization. Rova’s music enters here. And
won’t let you off the hook of the vast momentary, a sound too extensive for
any single frame.
There should be another word.
"Improvise," in American English, having the connotation of last minute
jury rigging or "making something up" when you’re not prepared, a
fudging due to the scramblings of a half-ass nature.
But improvisation is surely a practice, perhaps more in the religious than
the musical "woodshedding" direction, A daily attention to what’s
possible beyond any habituated barriers.
To improvise: to know in, and only while undergoing, the process of doing.
To perceive only in the motion of an act, in the movements of practicing that act.
Improvisation is motion. And I think here of the bassist Buell Neidlinger’s
remark, as we were listening to Ed Blackwell on Ornette Coleman’s Poise,
"He really saw the motions!"
Thus, as in the definition, "not foreseen" because only experienced in
the movement and passing along with it.
The French writer Maurice Blanchot has set a fine distinction which might be applied
here, whatever the materials: "One can only write if one arrives at the instant
towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing."
Improvisation is the heart of the voice, the seed of the art. The spontaneous aspect
of creating whatever kind of own time forms in real time may even be at the heart
of supposedly more studied composition or revision. Little shoots of the same momentum,
etc.
Though, improvisation sometimes feels like a matter of finding the lit pin in the
most dark, or moving vast fragile masses, bales of sound, or ducking (or absorbing)
that projectile coming around again.
Or another feeling: the amazing ability to wait while still in motion, as if you
are the train that creates all that solid scenery passing…
One could work out a speculation on what is foreseen in improvisation. A
term between improvise and impulse in the dictionary.
The best statement I’ve seen on the relation of composition to improvisation
is soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy’s "What I write is to take you to the
edge safely so that you can go on out there and find this other stuff. But really
it is this other stuff interests me."
Thinking on the matter of spontaneous interaction I’m reminded of an eerie
evening in the longago at Carnegie Hall, a hit-or-miss package show Sonny Rollins
was to open. Before the crowd had quieted and with the houselights still up. Sonny
walked out in front of the curtain, apparently to play an unaccompanied solo. Just
then a woman in the front section began screaming full-throat in shocking snap-brain
madness. She was obviously in some closing chamber of mind-pain, and the audience
froze. Seemingly without pause for thought Sonny began to play with her, dueling
with whatever demons responsible, imitating her screams and turning them around,
reflecting and shining them anew. It was astonishing. And there was much of the
well-known wit in his sound, but at no remove. He was right in there with this helpless
human, which perhaps says a lot about the humours, as well as about music, and Sonny’s
part in these acts and more. Then the whitecoats dragged her away and Sonny stomped
off Cherokee at an unbearable speed, ranging his notes and swinging the bell
of his horn from some alien center of stillness.
At the entry to The Crowd, with those huge horns, I thought I was in Bhutan,
comes a sort of undertonic flux possibly the movement of a large truck outside the
studio, then calls up some spaces, bands of continuous shifting sounds can
really define the whole of your room, breaks into pauses, suggest further figures,
negatives breed positives, keeps heading in with a vast spectral sound, big dark
wings or blinds of sonics, where musics become a reality beyond "tune"
"beat" etc., then figures divided by solid but silent shapes, equals in
time of beautiful collision figures, a group speaking which strongly tells
you, speaking in reeds, speaking in primes, an eerie rate of tongues, then an almost
gamelan sorting of percussive build, reducing to more isolate voices, an intertasting
of essential solitudes, until just Ochs’ tenor throat, and a final treble linkage,
choral. out
This record of Rova works
to dissolve formal barriers
if you can use ears prehensile.
It’s an erosion-of-habit music
a chance to encounter forms
beyond your listening history.
Rova’s music is vast, intense, sometimes complex but always graspable in terms
of their search for the most basic and generative elements, ever lurking in and
out.
Hear those tirelessly turning seeds, fist sized, mutating in the zonal exchange
of Terrains, and throughout Knife in the Times. It’s as if the
"tonal home" here were always the first thing spoken by a person.
I would always want to meet the music as in a dream one encounters the intimate
stranger from whom there can never be the slightest turning away Rapt. In Rova the
conditions are met.
–Clark Coolidge
October 1985