Since I moved to the Bay Area in 1995, Rova performances have consistently been the best that I have heard here. This saxophone quartet offers everything that I want to hear in music: passion, intensity, design, surprises, extended techniques, propulsive grooves, explosive gestures, formal provocation, and tons of visceral sound mass. As part of its 20th anniversary year celebrations, the quartet presented Rovaté, An Improvisers' Festival, April 3rd and 4th, 1998, in the ODC Theater, a performance space in San Francisco's Mission District. Each concert featured two guest ensembles and concluded with sets by Rova.Rova Roars in Rovaté
Submitted to 20th-Century Music, May 1998, and published with edits July 98.Perhaps the most provocative piece in the Festival was an unsuccessful experiment, Cleaning the Mirror, for the Diglossia Ensemble. Composer John Schott adapted this piece from a recording-in-progress, Shuffle Play. As the program describes it, "the 49 tracks for Shuffle Play, totaling 76 minutes . . . range from 10 seconds of bass clarinet to eight minutes of large ensemble." The work is a meditation on aspects of sound recordings:
All of these compositions are indebted in one for more another to a few recordings from the earliest decade of recording recorded sound, 1880-1890. These strange and haunting recordings, which include a version of Yankee Doodle, a minstrel song, and a Native American chant recorded in 1890, seem to look forward and backward simultaneously: they both capture a world and kill it.
The 11-member ensemble (a string quartet plus three clarinetists, a saxophonist, and two percussionists) was full of creative musicians familiar to anyone who has sampled the Bay Area new music improvisation scene. Unfortunately, the creative decisions being made within the composition and ensemble seemed more likely to cancel each other out rather than reinforce one another. The piece did have some lovely moments, such as a violin duet near the end, and an explosive haunting and screeching solo by Dan Plonsey in the middle of the piece. Perhaps it was the individuality of this solo standing out from the collective that made it so dramatically effective. My thoughts returned often to the premise of the piece, the dichotomy between preserving and killing something by fixing it in a steady state. Of course what was interesting is the possibility of positions between the extremes. I've been listening to recordings of Indian raga performances recently (part of my responsibilities teaching World Music at a couple of local colleges). When a player makes a move in that improvisation system, it is backed up by hundreds of years of performance tradition. This is a form of preservation that does not kill what it preserves. Meanwhile, I was left listening to musical utterances that were being created here and now, backed up by -- at most -- 40 years of tradition, with very little tendency toward codification. Each sound stands so naked, without any historical support, that it seems unable to survive. The sounds, proposed as music for a moment, are trapped in their own ephemeral nature, not capable of being killed, since they were stillborn. But some of the sounds do linger in my memory, at least in a vague way. The piece and its failures were well worth experiencing.
Two improvisations by What We Live (Lisle Ellis, bass, Larry Ochs, saxophones, Donald Robinson, drums, with guest Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet) followed. These free improvisations edged much more closely to what would be called jazz by the average listener. The groove that set in at around 10:00 p.m. was particularly appreciated. (I'm so glad to hear people getting away from the "No Grooves Allowed" mentality of free improvisation.) The bass player frequently took over primary rhythmic responsibilities with various engaging ostinato figures, freeing the drummer to be quite coloristic and lovely in his activities.
While all this was interesting, I was waiting for something in particular, and when Rova opened the third and final part of Friday's program, I got what I was craving on the very first beat: a slab of total saxophony, a fortissimo chord, a sonic tsunami. This glorious moment was the opening of Eons, a composition by John Schott. The piece was punctuated by monolithic chords, which functioned as pillars structuring the piece. Between the pillars, the catalog of Rova's different techniques was explored. This included techniques such as extremely short notes stopped with the tongue, or notes played with a very soft entrance with a rapidly shoved crescendo, sounding very much like a tape played backwards, and some high screaming sounds. Each technique was featured in its own section, and toward the end, there was a satisfying polyphony of techniques. This was a perfect piece for a celebration of Rova-ness. Water under the Bridge by Fred Frith was surprisingly conventional, echoing that French Conservatory saxophone quartet stuff. The piece started with a unison tonal line that eventually broadened into harmony. Pretty straightforward. The final piece of the evening, and to me the best thing of the entire Festival, was The M'ad-Din, in memory of Cerno Bokar Salif Taal, by Wadada Leo Smith. This was an astonishing composition. It seemed to have strong spiritual content, and I rarely feel that in music. It featured many long drawn out chords (clusters really) that exploited every technique of tuning and timbral variation, indeed every nuance, that Rova can realize. Even though these long chords would seem to imply an experience of a slow-paced piece, it seemed to move quickly, as there was so much information in each chord to be absorbed. The piece began with the players starting out on their highest instruments, forming a quartet in which the alto saxophone was the lowest voice, with soprano and sopranino saxophones on top. Throughout the half an hour or so of this composition, the players switched instruments several times, creating many different combinations. The choice of effects and the combinations of different saxophones demonstrated Smith's absolute command and knowledge of the resources that Rova provides. Trying to write about this music is very difficult. Music exists precisely because there are places where language doesn't go, and this piece totally occupied those territories. I hope Rova records this soon.
Saturday's program began with Actual Size (Bruce Ackley, saxophones, George Cremaschi, bass, Garth Powell, drums, with guest Jon Raskin, saxophones). I missed the very opening of their set, but I did catch four enjoyable pieces of a set of five. Percussionist Garth Powell took a fascinating solo in this set. He began with a conventional groove on the trap set and eventually was playing spastic bursts of rhythm on what appeared to be a stainless-steel pan from a cafeteria steam table. The transition was an amazingly smooth one. For some reason unknown to me, at the beginning of the solo I began discretely conducting a pattern of 4/4 to myself -- sort of keeping the tala. This allowed me to appreciate the amazing re-transition back into a groove -- the original meter seemed to be there in the background all long. The concluding piece, Actual Size, was a surprisingly standard tune with a standard head-solo-solo-solo-head structure. When I heard such a traditional form, I immediately got cranky and complained to myself, "surely they could come up with a more interesting form." But then I think of my complaint on Friday evening, the lack of any tradition or historical reference for much this music. Sometimes there's just no pleasing me.
Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio (Dave Douglas, trumpet, Jim Black, drums, Brad Shepik, guitar) was extremely well received by the audience. This New York-based trio was making its West Coast debut. Dave Douglas's incessantly lyric trumpet playing was creative, but was often too cute for my taste. There was no gradation between extended techniques and conventional techniques. For example, when he rattled his mute in the bell of his trumpet, it was not integrated into the musical fabric at all. There was a total structural opposition between weird sound and conventional notes, with no interesting gray area in between. This made unconventional sound-making seem more like a pose than a personal expression, "creative" in the wacky sense. In contrast, the Smith piece seemed not to make a distinction or obliterated any distinction between unusual technique and straightforward tone. Garth Powell demonstrated a similar capability for inclusive continuity in his solo as well. Jim Black, the percussionist in the Tiny Bell Trio, was quite creative, in the sense of generating something new. He produced an unusual sound -- the snares were quite loose on the snare drum, and most of the drum heads were on the loose side, and he tended to strike the drum heads perhaps dead-center or in less resonant spots, yielding more "thud" than tone. He also used an extraordinarily flat-sounding cymbal as one of his choices. His playing was quite interesting, seeming almost awkward and impeded in natural flow; this created unusual feels in his solos, as when there would be a sense of simultaneous different feels such as the implication of a rock beat with a potentially swinging beat but -- wait -- isn't that implying a Latin feel? Whatever it was, the audience responded enthusiastically.
Rova closed the second evening with four compositions. Which Gong Game, by Barry Guy, was visibly a game, as the audience could see cards with cryptic symbols being used within the quartet to signal musical changes. This piece has recently been recorded on Rova's latest CD release, Bingo. For me the most engaging piece of this set was Ring Shout Ramble (first movement), by George Lewis. This piece featured incessantly repeated, irregularly-spaced chords and groups of 3, 4, or 5 repeated-note gestures. This reminded me of some of my own music, so I entertained myself with thinking that aspects of my own style had somehow influenced the composer. Fantasies about my influence aside, I loved the material and it provoked exciting solos from the group. The two pieces that concluded the festival, Diatribe, Part 3, by Steve Adams, and The Drift by Larry Ochs, were organized around ostinati. Having some solid rhythmic grooves to hang onto was very welcome after two days of challenging listening.
Reading over the first draft of this review, I noticed that I never mentioned many of the great solos that were heard in the course of Festival. I see my own biases as composer leaking through, as I chose to organize the review mostly around compositions. But that is where I find Rova to be most interesting--their use of compositions as provocations. In his book, Music, Imagination, and Culture, Nicholas Cook writes that the truly great performance of a notated piece of art music (in the European/American tradition) obliterates the score, as the performance, the sounds being immediately produced, relate more to the present moment and each other than they relate to some piece of paper with marks on it. This always seems to be the case with Rova. Any sound they throw out into the world makes me think, "This is here and this is now; this is what is present." Such great performances are always a challenge to write about. As a critic, one can't just say, "Ya just had to be there." (Since that is what I wish to say, perhaps I'm saying it indirectly.) Describing a great improvised solo seems to be such an impossibility. "He played high, and then he played low, with scales and arpeggios in between." What can a reader get out of that? The greatness lies in its context, the relationship of the solo to the surrounding material. The surrounding material can be a composition or spontaneous compositions of other solos and background contributions from creative musicians. As much as I enjoy Rova CDs, recordings don't capture the two aspects of the thrill of hearing Rova live. The first being the physiology of the sound, the thrill of being in the same space with these intense vibrations saturating the entire volume of the room. This was particularly palpable in the ODC space, which seats about 150, and has natural brick walls and a hardwood floor. The second and more mysterious aspect is the issue raised in the opening work, Cleaning the Mirror, that of the relationship of recorded sound to living sound. The vitality of Rova's musical presence intensifies the contrast.
Dave Meckler
©1998