ROVA Saxophone Quartet - The Circumference of Reason (October 15, 2021 ESP - Disk')

Despite the obvious obstacles, this singular San Francisco Bay Area band is staying on mission, moving forward. Over its four-plus decades, the quartet has defined itself by applying an array of improvisational strategies to an ever-expanding body of new music.

The Circumference of Reason includes six tracks composed or, in the case of the piece "NC17," designed between 2011 and 2016. Then – in typical ROVA fashion – the pieces were worked over and performed by the quartet in rehearsals and concerts until perceived to be ready for recording. They include an arrangement of a Glenn Spearman piece as well as a piece by Steve Adams dedicated to Glenn; the playing on both inspired by that expressive saxophonist’s spirited personality and playing.

As well, this recording features two distinctly different versions of NC17, another in the series of ROVA’s structured-improvisations, all of which have been designed using an ever-expanding set of visual and aural cues that the quartet has invented, or borrowed and adapted. On its face, "NC17" is simply a specific set of conceptual options to cue in, in any order, and to then explore, populating the spontaneously chosen series of cued events with immersive music/sounds/energies etc. 

The group creates a palpable sonic architecture for each new performance of the piece. Even as we write this, we can say that the takes of "NC17" you will hear on this CD are unique; no one take of "NC17" can be exactly the same as any other take of "NC17."

“ROVA performances can reach the soaring lyrical intensity of bel canto, the rough-and-tumble tumult of a garage rock band, or the insistently patterned matrix of a minimalist chamber work.” So wrote Andrew Gilbert in 2018. The piece from which the CD’s title comes, "The Circumference of Reason," is a good example of a minimalist piece when penned by a ROVA composer, in this case Steve Adams.

1. The Extrapolation of the Inevitable

2. NC 17, Version 1

3. The Circumference of Reason

4. Xenophobia

5. NC 17, Version 2

6. The Enumeration

Bruce Ackley – soprano and tenor saxophones

Steve Adams – alto and sopranino saxophones

Larry Ochs – tenor sax

Jon Raskin – baritone sax

Recorded on 6/22/18, 9/23/18 and 7/1/19 at New Improved Recording by John Finkbeiner.

Mixed on 1/16/19, 1/23/19 and 8/2/19 at New Improved Recording by John Finkbeiner and Steve Adams.

Mastered by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Labs.

Produced by Steve Adams.

PREORDER

Larry Ochs & Donald Robinson - A Civil Right (2021 ESP - Disk')

This duo’s second and definitive recording will be released on ESP-Disk' - the legendary free jazz label where Albert Ayler released his breakthrough recording in 1964, the first jazz recording on ESP. A lot has changed since 1964, but a lot and perhaps too much remains virtually the same. So their "free jazz" music, while influenced by many musical discoveries and sociological developments that have become part of the firmament over the past 50+ years, still celebrates and revels in the spirit of Sixties free jazz.

Ochs is a founding member of the great ROVA Saxophone Quartet, one of the Bay Area’s avant-garde treasures since 1978. Robinson – “a percussive dervish,” according to Coda – was the drummer of choice for ROVA’s revivification of John Coltrane’s Ascension. The East Bay Express has said of the saxophonist’s sound: “Ochs’ full-bodied tenor is out of the John Coltrane/Albert Ayler ‘free’ tradition: forceful, passionate… talking-in-tongues,” while the Chicago Reader said about the drummer and his relationship with Ochs, “Robinson is neither flashy nor explosive, but his playing has heft and he covers lots of ground – he can maintain a feeling of order while playing meter-less rhythms or transform the pulse of jagged post-bop until it’s almost abstract. He’s a good match for Ochs, and over the decades the two of them have developed a fine-tuned rapport.”

Although Ochs and Robinson have collaborated in various groups for more than 20 years – including in the trio What We Live with bassist Lisle Ellis – their duo is a recent phenomenon, having developed over the past couple of years. Ochs says, “Our playing together has evolved to a really special place, I think. We’re definitely coming out of the tradition of horn-drum duos from John Coltrane & Rashied Ali to Wadada Leo Smith & Billy Higgins, but we’ve found our own space after a long stretch of shows together. Our set will include new, original material, with some high-energy playing and things that are more spatial, as well as some homages to more popular music. In a sparse setting like this, the music hits a listener right away – nothing is obscured, everything is clear.” 

1. Arise the Poet 12:33

2. Yesterday and Tomorrow 08:57

3. A Civil Right 05:36

4. The Others Dream 13:03

5. Regret 05:49

Larry Ochs, saxophones

Donald Robinson, drums

PREORDER

JONES JONES: Larry Ochs / Mark Dresser / Vladimir Tarasov - A Jones In Time Saves Nine (NO BUSINESS RECORDS November 2018)

Larry Ochs – tenor and sopranino saxophones

Mark Dresser - bass

Vladimir Tarasov - drums and percussion

1. A Fistful Of Jone

2. Twelve Angry Jones

3. The Jones Who Knew Too Much

4. Three Jones Outside Ebbing, Missouri

5. Night Of The Living Jones (digital only)

6. The Jones Who Never Was (digital only)

7. Gone With The Jones (digital only)

All compositions created collectively by Mark Dresser (Del Dresser Music/ASCAP), Larry Ochs (Trobar/ASCAP/BMG) and Vladimir Tarasov (LATGAA)

Tracks Twelve Angry Jones and Three Jones Outside Ebbing, Missouri recorded live by Art Granoff in Berkeley, California, at the home of Harry Bernstein and Caren Meghreblian on May 28th, 2016

Other tracks recorded live by Tim Pinch in San Diego, California, at The Loft on May 24th, 2016

Mastered by Arūnas Zujus at MAMAstudios

Larry Ochs & Gerald Cleaver - Songs of the Wild Cave (ROGUEART 2018)

In 2016, Gerald Cleaver and Larry Ochs are led, with the help of aficionados, to the depths of a cave frequented by men and women in the Paleolithic. Several engravings with mysterious meanings, various paintings saved from the years, signal their passage. This place resonates, not only in the acoustic sense, but in the (pre)historical and spiritual sense as well. As they descend, the air grows heavier, all the more thickened by a palpable past that it becomes poorer in oxygen. 

This place is to be respected and pledged allegiance to. Then comes the time to be adopted by it. They make a few sounds, tentatively at first. Then brief clapping duos. The cave speaks, answers them, they can feel it. A few hours away, in another cave, that they are getting ready to record, for the first time in the world, a free improvisation session in the heart of a prehistoric cave in the southwest of France does not cross their mind.

What Eurydice did they come looking for in this place? The answer, seemingly trite, could fit in a single word: interaction. Let us be clear, however: an unprecedented, unimaginable, and unimagined interaction. As the nerve center of free improvisation, interaction is not limited to the sole sound traces of the dialogue between musicians. Its action thrives on the place of production, the listeners in attendance (or absent, or virtual), takes into account the weather or the ambient sounds…

This place instills, at best inspires. Some more than others, depending on their depth. From this point of view, the Gerald Cleaver-Larry Ochs duo in this cave consists indeed in a dialogue between three entities. First through silence. True silence. Not the artificial, absolute silence, but an inhabited silence, absent-present (magnificently rendered by Vincent Mahey’s remarkable recording). Seven times did the musicians probe its qualities, always with a different result: engraving the silence in its folds, piercing attempts, appearance-disappearance… 

The space of the place also conditions the musicians’ (re)actions. On their sounds, the cave reflects. They answer. It objects or responds. They converge. Thus the situation necessarily leads the musicians to play differently because they hear themselves differently. The density of the past matters as well. Fantasizing the music played in this place charged with millennia of history, attempting to comprehend its multiple manifestations, fuels Gerald Cleaver’ and Larry Ochs’s imagination as a result. Guttural sounds, rhythms that seem shamanic, trance effects, ingenuity found anew in the discovery of sound, etc.: all of them ancestral gestures and attitudes driven by an inaccessible yet immanent past. If a given time, long past, has consequences on musical creation in the moment, the absence of another type of time, that which passes with the tick of the clock, is also in full effect.

It is a well-known experience: for man, to venture in the bowels of the earth entails experiencing time stretching, diluting even. There is therefore no point in projecting oneself towards a precise point in time. If the moment then increases in intensity, the passage of one’s life story in the flow of time loses its tragic. Much like this absence of “final cause”, the tensions generated in Gerald Cleaver’ and Larry Ochs’s improvisations therefore have value for and in themselves, and not with a view to resolving them.

With these two Orpheus, we do not descend to Hell, but ascend to Paradise. Produced outside of the world of the livings, the Eurydice they leave to us are the reflections of their quest: immemorial, timeless. 

Larry Ochs: tenor and sopranino saxophones 

Gerald Cleaver: drums, percussion

1. First Steps 9:05

2. Into The Air 5:16

3. Deeper 9:52

4. Down 5:46

5. Ringing It In 7:07

6. Rooted in Clay 8:59

7. Light From The Shadows 14:35

All pieces co-created by Gerald Cleaver (Gerald Cleaver Music / SESAC) and Larry Ochs (Trobar / ASCAP / admin. BMG)

Recorded by Vincent Mahey (assistant: Morgan Beaulieu) on October 1st 2016 in the southwest of France, in a wild cave in absolute silence and darkness.

Mixing: Vincent Mahey

Mastering: Raphaël Jonin

Liner notes: Ludovic Florin

Photograph: Alban Jacques

Cover design: Max Schoendorff

Cover realization: David Bourguignon

Executive producer: Michel Dorbon