2009: ROVA Saxophone Quartet

Bruce Ackley, Larry Ochs, Jon Raskin, Steve Adams

Utilizing recently discovered ideas, the Rova Saxophone Quartet will create a new, set-length performance piece especially for Summit, The Contours of the Glass Head, to further explore the intersection of improvisation and composition, using improvisational games and strategies.

A couple of years ago Rova members launched into a new period of exploration during the design phase of Glass Head (originally presented in the Rova:Arts produced Rovaté 2006 concert). This work was characterized by a collective search for new improvisational strategies, resulting in new ways to engage the individual voices of the quartet members. The improvisations were interrelated through unifying concepts both in terms of material and methods of interaction. Many of the ideas developed during this research were never used for the project, and those that were part of the Glass Head piece are readily recyclable for other applications. We discovered a wealth of ideas that we will bring together to create a new performance work, quite different from the prior composition, and at the same time sharing its conceptual base.

The set-long work will showcase the breadth of the quartet's musical range, including extended solos, collective improvisations, development of complex harmonic landscapes, and layered compositional and improvisational strategies.

Rova Saxophone Quartet, the acclaimed all-saxophone ensemble, has fundamentally extended the horizons of music since forming in 1977. Positioning themselves at music’s most dynamic nexus, Rova has become an important leader in the movement of genre-bending music that has its roots in post-bop free jazz, avant-rock, and 20th century new music as well as traditional and popular styles of Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States. With its potent mix of stellar musicianship and compositional creativity, Rova explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation. The result is adventurous works that are ardent and riveting, exhilarating and free-spirited. While much of Rova's music is composed by its members, the group has also collaborated with and commissioned new works by a wide range of creative artists.

Since its founding, Rova has released over two dozen recordings of original music. In noting Rova's role in innovatively developing the all-saxophone ensemble as “a regular and conceptually wide-ranging unit,” the Penguin Guide to Jazz calls its music “a teeming cosmos of saxophone sounds” created by “deliberately eschewing conventional notions about swing [and] prodding at the boundaries of sound and space…”

Artist (photo by Photographer)