ORNETTE, LACY, & POINTS BEYOND...
— Set 1: ROVA Saxophone Quartet • compositions by Ornette associates Steve Lacy and John Carter, as well as a piece each by Rova member
Jon Raskin, and British composer John Butcher.
— Set 3: Joe Lasqo’s Tomorrow Is The Meta-Body (Lisle Ellis,
Darren Johnston, Joe Lasqo,
Donald Robinson) • réprise of bass/piano dialog from Ellis’ Ornette Coleman Songbook (Downbeat ✰✰✰✰✰), now expanded with trumpet, drums, & laptop. With visuals by Bill Thibault.
◉ Set 1: ROVA Saxophone Quartet • compositions by Ornette associates Steve Lacy and John Carter, as well as a piece each by Rova member
Jon Raskin, and British composer John Butcher.
Soprano sax specialist Steve Lacy played regularly and shared ideas with trumpeter Don Cherry, one of Ornette’s longest standing collaborators. Lacy rehearsed and played with Ornette, and even traveled with his double quartet to Cincinnati in 1961 to perform “Free Jazz”. The concert never happened, but that’s another story. Rova will perform a
Steve Adams arrangement of Lacy’s “Cliches”.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer John Carter grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and was an early associate of Ornette’s. They both migrated to LA, where Mr. Carter settled, performing his brand of open jazz, and working as an educator. His approach to improvisation shared a lot with Ornette, especially in the early days, but his compositional sense developed quite differently. In the early 1990s, Carter wrote the monumental “Colors” for Rova. We have recently reactivated this raging work for some upcoming retrospective performances.
Rova Saxophone Quartet explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation, creating exciting, genre-bending music that challenges and inspires.
Rova is one of the longest-standing groups in the music movement that has its roots in post-bop, free jazz, avant-rock, and 20th century new music, and draws inspiration from the visual arts and from the traditional and popular music styles of Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States.
In noting Rova's innovative role in 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..." Likewise Jazz: The Rough Guide notes, "Highly inventive, eclectic and willing to experiment, Rova [is] arguably the most exciting of the saxophone quartets to emerge in the format's late '70s boom."
Inspired by a broad spectrum of musical influences - from Charles Ives, Edgard Varese, Olivier Messiaen, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman to The Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Coltrane, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman - Rova began, in 1978, writing new material, touring, and recording, including early collaborations with such like-minded colleagues as guitarists Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith, and saxophonist John Zorn. Also in its early years, Rova shared the stage in collaborations with fellow San Francisco based trailblazers Kronos Quartet and Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. A 1983 tour of the USSR and accompanying PBS documentary highlighted the first five years of Rova's existence.
In 1985, the Rova Saxophone Quartet incorporated as the not-for-profit organization Rova:Arts. Founding member Andrew Voigt left Rova in August 1988 and was replaced by
Steve Adams. Otherwise, the personnel -
Larry Ochs,
Jon Raskin and
Bruce Ackley - has remained the same throughout these 30-plus years, giving the group a consistency and sensitivity that has enabled its ever-evolving and highly nuanced explorations into new musical territory.
◉ Set 2: Joe Lasqo’s Tomorrow Is The Meta-Body (Lisle Ellis,
Darren Johnston, Joe Lasqo,
Donald Robinson) • réprise of bass/piano dialog from Ellis’ Ornette Coleman Songbook (Downbeat ✰✰✰✰), now expanded with trumpet, drums, & laptop.
Presenting Ornette on acid in a brand-new multi-colored coat with “heretical” instrumentation, weaving in modernistic LED threads of laptop electronics, and the almost-never-heard-with-Ornette piano. Plus the ultimate Ornette instrumentation heresy — no sax or reeds! A very fresh new sound with a new color scheme for tomorrow.
— Pianist / laptopist Joe Lasqo studied classical music in India; computer / electronic music at MIT, Columbia, Berkeley/CNMAT; has been a long-time performing modern & avant jazz musician; & has lived, played and listened in several Asian and European countries (now in San Francisco). He's keen on the application of artificial intelligence techniques to improvisation and the meeting of traditional Asian musics with the 21st century. His recent album, Turquoise Sessions, is available on Edgetone Records; with AU QUOTIDIEN, a new album with German-Swedish saxist/flautist Biggi Vinkeloe, master drummer
Donald Robinson, and cello madman Teddy Rankin-Parker is in production for release.
Joe had a weekly residency for 3½ years in the piano series at Viracocha, & has appeared recently with
Bruce Ackley &
Steve Adams of ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Aaron Bennett's Electro-Magnetic Trans-Personal Orchestra, Phillip Greenlief's Orchesperry, his own Renga-kai (連歌会), Mukaiji-kai (霧海箎会), & Fushigi Kenkyūkai (不思議研究会) ensembles, synthesist Thomas Dimuzio, clarinetist/vocalist Beth Custer, pianist Thollem McDonas, percussionist Suki O'Kane, sound artists Joe Snape (UK) & Lucie Vítková (Czech Rep.), technodivas/electronic musicians Pamela Z & Viv Corringham (NYC/London) & many others.
— NYC bassist and computer musician, Lisle Ellis, began playing electric bass in his teens & worked professionally from an early age in numerous environments including studios, radio & tv shows, & strip clubs. When his teacher and mentor, Walter Robertson, suddenly died, Lisle abandoned his studies at a music conservatory in Vancouver in favor of the seminal, & now legendary, Creative Music Studio in New York. There, over a period of several years, he had intimate contact with the vital NYC music scene at a time of surging changes & extraordinary developments. Almost immediately after relocating to the U.S., Ellis's music began to attract attention and acclaim on a global level.
Lisle is a veteran of 40+ recordings (including Down Beat ✰✰✰✰✰ The Ornette Coleman Songbook), he’s worked with Paul Bley, Peter Brötzmann, Andrew Cyrille, Anthony Davis, Ben Goldberg, Frank Gratowski, Joëlle Léandre, Rudresh Mahanthappa (ರುದ್ರೇಶ್ ಮಹಂತಪ್ಪ), Miya Masaoka (正岡みや), Myra Melford, Bob Ostertag, William Parker, Paul Plimley, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Stefano Scodanibbio, Cecil Taylor, William Winant, Pamela Z, and John Zorn, among many others.
— Since settling in San Francisco, Canada-born trumpeter & composer
Darren Johnston has collaborated and recorded with an extremely diverse cross-section of artists. His interests rotate around composing instrumental music, writing songs, and performing all styles of jazz, experimental and purely improvised music, as well as traditional music of the Balkans, Greece, Macedonia, Turkey, & the Arab world. These interests have coalesced into his current primary ensemble,
Darren Johnston’s Broken Shadows. He’s performed and/or recorded with luminaries such as Electric Squeezebox Orchestra, Fred Frith, Meklit Hadero (መክሊት አየለ ሀዴሮ), ROVA Sax Quartet, Myra Melford, Ben Goldberg, Matt Wilson, Mark Dresser, Marshall Allen, Dave Rempis,
Larry Ochs, Marcus Shelby, and others.
As a composer, he has written for small jazz groups, big bands, string quartet, chamber ensembles and more. He’s written for dance companies such as Axis Dance, Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, Robert Moses’ Kin, Liss Fain, & others, as well as for short films. In his song-writing the last few years Darren has focused on using found text. In 2012 he composed a suite extracting text from a series of interviews he conducted with a diverse collection of immigrants living in the Bay Area called Songs Of Seven Miles.
— Described by Coda as a “percussive dervish”,
Donald Robinson is a technical master of the drums. He’s a stalwart of the of San Francisco Bay Area avant-garde jazz scene, playing and recording with many of the area’s past and current improvisational players, from saxophonists John Tchicai, Marco Eneidi and
Larry Ochs to koto player Miya Masaoka (正岡みや) and pianists Joe Lasqo & Matthew Goodheart, and with prominent visitors like Cecil Taylor, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis, trumpeter Raphé Malik, Canadian pianist Paul Plimley, & Swedish-German saxist/flautist Biggi Vinkeloe. Much of this work has featured the combination of Robinson & bassist Lisle Ellis as rhythm section: ‘the best bass-drums tag team on the scene’ (Jazz Times). His longest musical association, dating from the 1970′s, was with the late tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearmann.
— Bill Thibault (video) received a Ph.D. in Information & Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (thesis: “Application of Binary Space Partitioning Trees to Geometric Modeling and Ray-Tracing”) As a Ph.D. candidate he worked at Bell Labs (now Lucent Technologies) in Murray Hill, NJ. After graduating, he took positions on the faculty of the Dept. of Math & Computer Science at California State University, East Bay, and more recently, with Obscura Digital.
Somewhere along the way he also turned to the Multispectral Side and became the notorious VJLove, master of the doors of visual perception, and co-conspirator in many raids on reality, with partners in crime like Kattt Atchley, Kenneth Atchley, John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Barbara Golden, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Tim Perkis, and WIGBAND.
Cost: $10 in advance, $15 at the door