Center for New Music
55 Taylor St SF
Click for Venue page

Rova:Arts Presents Matches, Night 2: Ochs-Robinson Duo // Bruce Ackley – Tania Chen Duo

Ochs-Robinson Duo

Performing together in various ensembles since 1991, Ochs and Robinson performed for the first time as a duo in 2011 in their hometown San Francisco Bay Area. At each of the first two concerts, an enthusiastic recording engineer offered them free access to his studio in the following months. As a result, the duo recorded a CD’s worth of music over that summer, and that is now mastered. That material comprises much of the music they performed on tour in 2013, their first year playing together (as a duo) outside San Francisco.

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.”

Bruce Ackley with Tania Chen, piano, keyboards, electronics + objects

Tania Chen is a pianist, experimental musician, free improviser and sound artist, working with pianos, keyboards, found objects, toys and vintage and lo-fi electronics.
She studied piano with John Tilbury during her Master’s degree in Performance studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has performed the music of John Cage, Earle Brown, Schoenberg, Webern, Satie, Scriabin, Andrew Poppy, Michael Parsons and Chris Newman in the UK, Europe, USA and Japan. She is equally known for her passion for free improvisation, performing alongside and collaborating with musicians that include Steve Beresford, John Edwards, Lol Coxhill, Alan Tomlinson, Roger Turner, John Butcher, Rhodri Davies and Terry Day. Earlier this year, Tania has been touring John Cage’s Indeterminacy with Steve Beresford and the comedian, writer and performer Stewart Lee. Most recently, she has been nominated for the Royal Philharmonic Society RPS Award.

Bruce Ackley began playing saxophone in 1970 and formed his first improvising trio that year in Detroit, relocating to the Bay Area in 1971. Throughout the 1970s he was involved with the emerging improvisation scene in San Francisco. During this period Ackley began playing with Ochs and Raskin, leading to the formation of Rova in the fall of 1977. Since then he has performed and recorded with John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, and Henry Kaiser in Twins; with trombone-electronics wizard J.A. Deane and drummer Joseph Sabella in Planet X; and with koto player Miya Masaoka, bassist Stefano Scodanibbio, and the brilliant cellist Rohan de Saram. In 1996 Ackley formed Actual Size to perform his original compositions, recording The Hearing with Joey Baron and Greg Cohen. He is currently working almost exclusively with Rova, focusing more on writing material for the quartet, and considering future projects with other musicians.

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play:

Videos featuring musicians playing at this event