Favorite Street: Larry Ochs

CD: Ray Charles Sings Basie Swings. Released by Concord on October 3 rd, this is a true 21 st century recording. For details on the bionicity behind the music, you can go to Amazon.com or to any site selling the CD, but this is truly an instant classic. Charles sounds incredible!

DVD: Gloomy Sunday - Oh baby; pull out the handkerchiefs. You know I'm the guy recommending things like Bela Lugosi box sets, but here we have a perfectly acted and very moving Hungarian film taking place in Budapest and centered around a song. Namely "Gloomy Sunday," sung by (among others) Billie Holiday. The acting, in particular by the woman at the center of the film and by the actor representing all Germans, is superb. The whole story feels real, and maybe it was.

Website: Pandora - Interested in finding out about a musician or other musics related in some way to that artist. You could have a fun time at Pandora. Check it out.

Website: Paris Transatlantic. It's true: the CD review in this issue of the newsletter is from this webzine. But this isn't payola. Paris Transatlantic is actually a good place to learn about what's being released on CD not only in improvised music but also from "related" avant garde or non-commercial artists. And the articles are often worth checking out too.

The Read: Steve Lacy's Conversations. - Edited by Jason Weiss. Rova spent a lot of time around Lacy, so it's with great anticipation that I have just received this collection of interviews and "conversations" taking place from 1959- 2004. From the back cover: Conducted by writers, critics, musicians, visual artists, a philosopher and an architect, the interviews indicate the evolution of Lacy's career and thought." No; as you can tell I have yet to read it but I have full confidence that there will be plenty of pearls within this book. From Duke University Press.

Favorite Street – Larry Ochs

DVDs

Chen Kaige directs The Prophet

Ever since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the artier film directors from Asia have been turning out high-end fantasy / action films. This was made in 2005 and was very hard to find in the USA for awhile–I own a Hong Kong copy–but it appears to be easily available now. One of the lesser known of this genre, but with absolutely beautiful cinematography, The Promise is a deluxe version of a folk legend, with all the lack of logic you also find in European fairy tales and folk stories. The original very long version is the one to see.

Francesco Rosi directs Salvatore Guiliano …and now for something completely different. While watching this exquisite black and white remastering, I assumed I was discovering another Italian neo-realist film, but in fact this film dates from 1962, and according to some notes I read, was the major influence on Gillo Pontecorvo, director of the better known “Battle of Algiers.” (Both films have been remastered beautifully and released on Criterion.) So: “realist film…?”

The first 10 minutes and the last 20 minutes are virtually documentary in style. In between you get one high contrast and unforgettable black and white shot after another, and terrific editing. The “story” doesn’t matter, but in case you care: Giuliano at 23 became the head of the resistance in Sicilyafter World War 2 (so resisting Italian unification) and eventually was gunned down by an informer. But what you love about this film has nothing to do with the narrative details, but rather the visual details and the editing from scene to scene, as well as sense of place.

Book

R. Buckminster Fuller: Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking.

This re-investigation of a sixties icon had been something of a move of desperation for me. I was so bummed by our political leaders and the entire aura of fear and negativity that they have successfully generated, that I was looking for someone or something positive to read in the non-fiction realm. I remembered Fuller’s hyper-optimism and thought I’d see if it still read well. It reads much, much better for me now than it did in the early seventies. Synergetics is the third book I’ve dipped into, and I can’t say this is the best introduction to his world—very dense, literally lists of thoughts…but it’s the most complete picture of his ideas, and full of things to think about. It’s also been reprinted by the co-author on line, so you could dabble up there. At 724 pages though, eventually you’ll have to pull the trigger and buy a used copy. (There’s no sign of this book coming available anytime soon.) His ideas make too much sense for that to happen! http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/toc/toc.html)

DVD-ROM

The Magical World of Joseph Cornell

While on tour on the East Coast two weeks ago, Rova found itself with two entirely free hours in Washington DC. On a tip we made our way to the Smithsonian and caught a—a what? Yes, a “magical” exhibit of Joseph Cornell’s works. Also on display there was the above-mentioned DVD ROM which you can find online at http: //www.voyager-foundation.org. Here is their introduction to this DVD-ROM which I thought was pretty special and perhaps the next best thing to seeing some his works in person.

Note: This disk does NOT contain the entire exhibit, but what it does show you, it presents beautifully.

“Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In his boxes and collages, he assembled a mixture of bits of popular culture, classical art and literature, obscure scientific texts and theories, creating compelling formal and playful, interactive private worlds. Composed of earthly, often humble, cast-offs, Cornell's work is frequently transcendent, evocative of dreams and pointing to the heavens.

The Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell DVD-ROM offers unprecedented access to Cornell's work, providing multi-dimensional views of some of his best boxes. This intimate exploration gives a virtual hands-on experience of these objects as well as a unique insight into the artist's working materials and methods.”

Favorite Street – Larry Ochs

Ochs says: Things for you to check out in all that spare time you all have:

Mills College Music Department rarely gets the credit it deserves. The place has been a center for experimental music forever at this point, but the main thing about it through all these years is that the department is always importing great artists into the Bay Area, something that pumps energy into the cultural firmament at the same time that it draws interesting students to study, who then stay on and mature here, all in all adding greatly to the possibilities around the musical Bay. I could lay out all the names over the past 50 years but I’d rather just like to thank them once again, this time for bringing in Zeena Parkins for six months and Roscoe Mitchell for the next three years! And Rova:Arts will have both of them "informing" you of their own respective musical concerns at Improv:21 events later this season. Now if we could just get Mills to do a better job of publicizing the school's music concerts...

Il Lee is an artist from Brooklyn. All his drawings, and there are many, are created entirely with ink and that ink is put to paper using Bic pens. Dense, intense meditations. I saw a huge collection of his work in San Jose just before the show closed last month. But the books, while not as astonishing as the live viewing, are quite beautiful. www.youtube.com gets you the preview for the show that is gone from SJ.

The Grand Piano was a café/hang-out in San Francisco that hosted poetry readings in the late seventies; 10 writers who read there and also became part of a loose group that was tagged as "the language poets" have been and continue to compose a series of chap books called The Grand Piano, reminiscing about that era but also doing a lot of thinking about the art, the politics of then and now, and the cultural life of San Francisco and beyond. The Grand Piano describes itself as "an experiment in collective autobiography." It was begun over email by ten poets identified with Language poetry, who sought to reconnect their writing practices and to "recall and contextualize events from the period of the late 1970s." When completed, The Grand Piano will comprise ten parts, in each of which the ten authors appear in a different sequence, often responding to prompts and problems arising in the series. thegrandpiano.org

Dohee Lee is a performance artist and vocalist from Korea now residing in the Bay Area. Her vocals have impressed me to the degree that I have formed a new group including her, designing ways to work up compositions inspired by Asian art and traditional music. But you might want to check out her own performances when you can, whether she's working with me or not. I've seen her solo performances, and they are quite powerful. And she appears with Kronos at SF Jazz Festival in October.

Films on DVD:

The Intruder was William Shatner's first film, and it was directed by Roger Corman. Corman is known exclusively for his many "great" horror films, often made on very low budgets. But here he takes on racism in the South as Shatner portrays a young man bent on stirring up a small town to a lynching and wreaking... A little known, but very well done black and white film from the early sixties.

The Naked City is the police movie that spawned an entire genre. The TV show Law and Order does not exist without this movie, for example... Shot on the streets of NYC in the late forties, it is an absolute classic and the cinematography is terrific. Rent it only if you can find the release from Criterion; a great job of digital renovation. Also worth mentioning in a similar vein: Crime Wave (1954), a cinematographer's dreamscape; Weegee - like crime scenes are everywhere in this film, although the available print isn't nearly as well restored as that of The Naked City.

Away from Her just departed from Bay Area theaters but should be released soon on video. Julie Christie stars, and she is absolutely as brilliant as she ever was back in the sixties and early seventies. When you see this film try to remember that the director was only 28 when she made it. Clearly Sarah Polley, the director, is some kind of genius, but if you've seen her acting in other films, you already knew that. Don't be put off by the fact that Alzheimer's disease is at the center of the film. This is a great story and if you find yourself crying at the end of the film it won't be because of the course that the disease takes, but rather because of what this film reveals about human communication and the difficulties of doing the right thing. Brilliant.

CD to look out for:

Okkyung Lee is a cellist now residing in New York City. Also Korean-born, she is one of the most exciting performers to emerge recently. She also has a very excellent CD on Tzadik Records entitled Nihm: www.tzadik.com. She will be performing at Stanford in January.

Favorite Street: Larry Ochs

No news is good news

I just finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. “Just before” that I attempted to read all of Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill. The Blackwater book is the unauthorized history of one of the major benefactors of the private war in Iraq. It’s an unpleasant read in the sense that it tells you way more than you want to know about what your government is doing in your name, but everyone would do well to check out the first and last chapters, in case you’re still unsure about what’s continuing to go down there.

The Klein book is a masterpiece, a must read really, that – if people were framing the debate about Iraq and foreign relations in this way in general – would completely close out any arguments of our right/need/ mission abroad. But it’s a very, very difficult read.

The first chapter hits you over the head pretty hard, and each chapter following is blow to the psyche of any American (from the United States; if you’re a South American your reaction will be quite different), at just how extraordinarily much evil there is in our country’s very recent history. I would read maybe one or two chapters and then walk away for a week before I could take it on again What’s amazing and totally unexpected is that in the final chapter, Klein radiates hope for the future, and really gives hope that an end to all this madness might be not so far way. Check it out.

And from Russia with love

I AM CUBA is a great film that many of us discovered when Milestone Films discovered and restored the film in 1995. Milestone released the film in a new print for DVD late last year, and I would say that it’s even better on DVD. The film is a fictionalized, panoramic view of the Cuban revolution as seen through the eyes of Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Uruzevsky, both of whom visited Cuba, fell in love with the people, and filmed this amazing work in the early sixties. What makes it so great on DVD is that one can watch scenes with total concentrated intensity, and then as soon as your concentration begins to flag, turn off the box, returning to it with fresh eyes a little later. In other words, the film, for me, doesn’t really work when watched all at once. The pacing is just too slow, but each scene or vignette taken on its own is incredible, beautiful, poetic. And speaking about music, the early scene in a “club” there is extraordinary musically- (and visually-) speaking and worth renting/buying just for that. Definitely a film worth seeing more than once...

But what’s really invaluable about this new Milestone deluxe boxed set is that it includes an excellent and comprehensive documentary of the director. The film highlights of his other films contained in this doc are absolutely breath taking. As soon as I could I rented his film “The Red Tent” about a mission to the North Pole that goes awry. Shot pretty much entirely at the North Pole in rugged conditions, this was Kaltozov’s one “international” major film, and as such it stars Peter Finch, Sean Connery, Claudia Cardinale, and a slew of unknown (to me) but excellent Russian and Italian actors, with a killer soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. Kind of a spaghetti western vibe twice removed to the North Pole and sifted through the mind of a Russian. Great… And then there’s the film “The Cranes Are Flying,” another Kalatozov film just released on Criterion. Haven’t gotten to this one yet, but if the rest of the film is anything like the clips in the doc, well I can recommend it now just based on the clips.

Recommended listening:

The Advocate (Tzadik) Derek Bailey, the great improvising guitarist who died in 2006, and Tony Oxley, still going strong and performing often with Cecil Taylor, recorded together in 1973. Those tapes have been released now on Tzadik; remarkable. But perhaps the strongest piece on the CD is Oxley’s solo piece recorded in 2006 and dedicated to Bailey, including his electronics set-up. It’s absolutely riveting and of course uses “space” – the silence between the sound that was so much a part of Bailey’s playing aesthetic – to beautiful effect.

Carla Kihlstedt / Satoko Fujii – Minamo As you may have seen earlier in the newsletter, Carla Kihlstedt now has a commission to write a large work for Rova in 2010. If you’re reading this newsletter, it’s fairly certain you’ve heard Carla perform, but less certain that you’ve heard Satoko or this duo. In fact Rovaté 2002 (Rova:Arts annual collaborative event) featured a big band version of Orkestrova with all music composed by Satoko Fujii and Steve Adams. At that event we also heard this duo for the first time, and a good portion of this CD comes from those concerts, recorded at the time by KFJC; the rest of the CD is from a live concert in Wels where I invited them to see if they could make the magic happen a second time. Now you get to hear these beautiful violin, piano duets which deftly mix the feeling of the classical violin-sonata formation with the aesthetics of improvisation; sublime music deftly mastered by Myles Boisen.

Maybe Monday- Unsquare (Intakt)– Elsewhere in the newsletter is a mention of my new self-produced CD The Mirror World. But if you can’t handle a $65 collector’s edition and plan to wait for the “normal” release in May, let me recommend a brand new release I produced for Intakt with Maybe Monday. Miya Masaoka, Fred Frith and I started performing as a trio in 1998. In this configuration, Miya plays not only her koto but also an arsenal of electronics and digital sounds and effects that are triggered by the koto strings. For this recording we went into the studio with special guests Carla Kihlstedt (violin and efx), Gerry Hemingway (drums), Ikue Mori (electronics) and Zeena Parkins (el harp), and recorded 8 septet pieces in 3 hours, five of which made the cut for this CD. It’s a series of landscapes or tone poems that make up a beautiful arc, in my humble opinion, and comprise a fine example of free improvisation at its best.

Photography: Chris Marker

Chris Marker, the legendary film-maker now in his ‘80s has just published a new book of photography called Staring Back. Go find it. Both the brief texts and the photos in the context of those texts are quietly stunning.

Anthony Braxton observes an Adolph Saxe creation

I got tipped off during the summer by an excited comrade that Mosaic Records was collecting all of composer Anthony Braxton's records for Arista Records, made in the 1970's, into one CD Box-Set for release in October; folks: that's now! www.mosaicrecords.com. The news came at an interesting moment: I was poring over the DVD extras of Julie Taymor's most recent film work – Across the Universe. That's Taymor's film-musical dedicated to the music of the Beatles. And I was musing over the fact that the Beatles were, much to my surprise, a key influence, if not on my personal work, at least on my outlook on life; frankly that did surprise me. So on this take of Favorite Street, I'm going to direct you towards some media that can give you some insight into influences from the sixties and seventies upon my own and Rova's work, past and present, my own playing/thinking, and the creative process in general.

Here's what I'm recommending to all of you with all your free time:

1. CD: Wadada Leo Smith: Kabell Years 1971-1979
2. CD: The Complete Arista Recordings Of Anthony Braxton (8CDs).
3. CD: The Art Ensemble of Chicago: Baptizum // People in Sorrow // Les Stance et Sophie
4. CD: Steve Lacy: Scratching the Seventies
5. DVD: Julie Taymor's film: Across the Universe
6. CD: Cecil Taylor: Dark to Themselves and Conquistador
7. Online reading: Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller
8. finally: DVD: Musician, featuring Ken Vandermark

Braxton, Lacy, and Mitchell

Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and Roscoe Mitchell were probably the saxophone players I was most inspired by in the early seventies. I'm not saying I sound like any of them, but their individual attitudes (or perhaps my perception of their attitudes of "refusing to compromise" on their art, playing music they believed in) was something I couldn't get enough of. Some of the records now in this box set of Braxon's from Arista, I played many, many times: New York, Fall '74 and Creative Music Orchestra especially. And, of course, seeing all these cats play in the Bay Area or in Paris (in Lacy's case) early on was very important.

For me as a saxophonist, a "key solo" was Roscoe's on The Art Ensemble of Chicago's recording made live in Ann Arbor called Bap-tizum. I transcribed that one; and I also copped his mouthpiece, which I learned about from Andrew Voigt when he moved here in the late '70's and joined Rova. But what you learn as you get more into it is that the players who you are most attracted to are those whose voices are close to yours, as opposed to the other way around. That is: the whole point of making music is to discover your inner voice and to allow that inner person the leeway, the trust, to take you out. Music making, at its highest level, has the same goal/outcome as meditation: to discover the way out into the aether where you do no wrong and your energy is replenished even as you (in music's case) put out that very energy.

The beauty of making music is that as it takes the player to heaven it can also actively transport some of the listening audience along with you. (In fact there are times when people in the audience lift off further than the musicians, but in that case then we are more like the booster rocket for the audience-as-payload heading to Mars...) Thinking of Lacy too right now, whose composerly influence was primary, I recommend the CD compilation Scratching the Seventies.

I loved this period of Lacy's, quite likely because the '70s is when I discovered his music. But it is true that Lacy in the '70s combined artistic attention to detail with wildly uncontrolled experimentation in his music, or in his bands' interpretations of his music, and this led often to exhilarating results that happened less often in later decades.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago

The AEC was perhaps the key band for me in this period. While I always loved Braxton's music at that time, the Art Ensemble's palette included a folk element that to this day I am attracted to, and I have really enjoyed including recently – but in my own way - in music for bands like Kihnoua and Larry Ochs Sax + Drumming Core as well as in some Rova pieces like the one dedicated to Albert Ayler written for the septet of Rova plus Nels Cline Singers... So the Art Ensemble had the rigor of Mitchell's ideas combined, I think, with influences and musical elements from the other composers in the band. Their first sighting for me in 1973 in Berkeley (in an amazing double bill with a Charles Mingus band) was a major confirmation of ideas I was then focusing on, as well as confirming other ideas I hadn't even had yet but were waiting there for me in the concert hall that night—ideas I still grapple to control.

CDs of theirs that I still listen to occasionally, but that I listened to many, many times and can still heartily recommend include (but would not be limited to): People in Sorrow; Les Stance et Sophie. Taken together with Bap-tizum you get a very good picture of this band from these 3 recordings.

Wadada

And as long as we're on the subject of AACM influences, my first sighting of Wadada Leo Smith came not too long after the above mentioned musics, and you can actually hear yet another pioneer playing his 70's music on the fantastic Tzadik release from two years ago called Kabell Years 1971-1979. Kabell was Smith's own CD label, and his self-releasing of his music had to be one of the inspirations for my starting up Metalanguage Records in 1978.

Mr. Taylor

Then, a thank you to Henry Kaiser for recently suggesting I listen to the Cecil Taylor CD Dark to Themselves for the first time in decades. Yes Henry, this could make for an interesting sequel to Electric Ascension. Rova produces special projects each year, and many of them involve Orkestrova which is the 4 Rova sax players plus whatever expanded instrumentation we take on to fulfill a certain musical goal.

Cecil Taylor was someone I discovered and seriously checked out in 1969 while working at the student-run station WXPN at University of PA in Philadelphia. I did a blues show, but the jazz titles were all there in the same part of the LP shelves, and one night I pulled Cecil Taylor out. At first it was all about the energy. My favorite music was rock, but bands like (the early version of) Fleetwood Mac and the Stones were directing me to the original blues musicians. But the raw energy of rock led me to immediate interest in Taylor and Sun Ra (who played a lot in Philly then), once I got turned onto them. The Taylor LP I was particularly into in 1969 was Unit Structures.

It's funny for me to think that at the time, I heard no detail in this music; it was the energy I heard. Whereas at this point I can hear every detail, every note. Dark to Themselves came out later, but the ensemble play and the lines Taylor has the horns playing etc. are inspired and might be a lot of fun to reimagine for Orkestrova.

Julie Taymor: Across the Universe

The Beatles are huge for anyone who grew up in the sixties, and just about anyone who grew up after the sixties. It's funny to say that because, by the late sixties, I wasn't interested in them much anymore. I was a Rolling Stones fan. And I would not have expected even now that I would, in the year 2008, be open to the idea of revisiting their music. I'd pretty much lost my appreciation for them since the release of the film Yellow Submarine, which I enjoyed at the time, but after that I stayed away.

So I went to the Taymor film because I love her film-making, (...if you never saw Titus, based on Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus... a wondrous film experience is there waiting for you...), and there are certain film-makers I will check out every time in theaters because, while DVDs are convenient, I still prefer seeing a film on a big screen. (Films on IPods? I don't get that at all.) Taymor's film was really enjoyable in the theatre. But I wrote off my response mostly to the need I had that particular day to sit in a dark room and absorb.

Could have been any movie. However I did admit to myself that those Beatles could really write music. The lyrics were very touching in part, and the music writing was revealed in a very new way by this film. Or so I thought at the time.

Buying the DVD in this case was kind of a revelation. Being in a movie theater with the big screen in the dark will always be my favorite way to see film, but the DVD medium has many positive aspects to it. First of all, after you watch a film all the way through the first time, then after that it's absolutely fantastic to see it in small increments. The best movies are like books. Too much detail going by for one sitting, at least in serious concentration.

Across the Universe is not a really deep film in most ways. But one thing really comes across on DVD: Taymor has really captured the spirit of the '60s, especially the 60's on the East Coast. Now the storyline almost doesn't matter in this film; it is after all a musical. But the underlying tone of the film is a direct hit throughout and really very moving. The combination of the Beatle's naïve optimism and the true (and frightening) uncertainty of the times were captured incredibly well by the Beatle's lyrics and music, at least as framed by the film.

So I'm not sure which came first, the music or the frame, but in the end I was very moved, and if you lived through those days, I think you will be too. In any case there are minutes throughout out the film of breathtaking editing or montage that are worth sitting through all the rest of the film. But "the rest" is all music, and fantastically done for the most part.

The DVD extras are fantastic. Taymor does the commentary herself, and for once a director takes the job seriously and really gives you a lot of information about how she thinks and works. There are also some well-done docs on the choreography in the film, and in the end I learned a lot about making movies. Finally the out-takes of the music scenes are worth the cost of the DVD by themselves; perhaps my favorite was the out-takes segment of Eddie Izzard doing his Mr. Kite scene. He's improvising the vocalise as he goes along... "structured improvisation" (of a kind) at its best. Watching his raw takes, and then going back to the film to see the finished product: illuminating...

Buckminster Fuller

The only person from the sixties more wildly optimistic than the Beatles or Anthony Braxton was Buckminster Fuller. Fuller (1895 – 1983) was just the subject of a major retrospective at The Whitney Museum in NYC. But he wasn't an artist per se. He "was an architect, engineer, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome," and inspirer of many, including Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue; simply a brilliant creative mind. When I first moved to California, I lived for a few years in the wilderness of Mendocino County; we built a cabin, but there were geodesic domes on that same property, purchased through that very Whole Earth Catalogue. And the geodesic dome was Fuller's idea... His philosophy was at that time quite in contrast to how many of us felt, how many of us saw the USA and the world. He went from university to university at that time speaking to thousands of people at a time in 4-hour monologues about "Spaceship Earth." He felt at the most basic level that governments preached scarcity in order to divide, when in fact there was (and continues to be) more than enough for everyone to be comfortable on the planet. He tried to come up with innovative designs that would do more with less.

I've been thinking about Fuller a lot in the past 2 years, trying to draw from the spirit of Fuller's overall outlook in designing a process for the next Rova collaboration: Rovaté 2009 (May 22 and 23, 2009 to take place at Kanbar Hall at Jewish Community Center San Francisco). Rova will collaborate with some great musical improvisers as well as the media and digital-animation artist Lillevan, a true innovator from Berlin, Germany, who enjoys creating film works "spontaneously," much as Rova creates music. His film-making includes improvisation, using images and found footage he has compiled for the specific project. So, my mentioning Fuller also acts as a heads up for these May San Francisco performances. More on those shows in one of the next newsletters.

For now: you can go online to read Synergetics rwgrayprojects.com and take a long look around at all the writing in a book long out of print. Some of Fuller's books like Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth are being reprinted now. But I think this one, read in small doses, casts up a lot of food for thought.

Ken Vandermark

Finally, off the theme of "early inspirers," I can recommend a film that I just saw featuring the Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark: a one hour documentary called "Musician." It's one in a series of documentaries by Daniel Kraus called "The Work Series." Shot in a cinema verité style, it really will give you a realistic version of what it's like to be an improvising musician trying to get by at this time, focusing on touring in all its grime and glory as well as on working up the actual music.

Rovaté 2009 and Buckminster Fuller

Fissures Futures was conceived in 2005. We were hoping to find the funding for it in time for a 2007 or 2008 show; but here we are in 2009. While for me personally life has been good in this period, during this entire decade our federal government was committing all sorts of crimes against humanity, in all of our names. This is only my personal opinion, but I’d say things had been sliding since the advent of Reagan in 1980. Since 2000, the slide had turned into an avalanche of horrible deeds, lies, and cynical acts. So I wanted to produce a show that flew in the face of those acts – but not in an overtly political performance, because that’s not what we do.

Instead, simply, to produce an inspired work by people brought together from different countries – if only to point out that it was possible for a group to convene for the very first time and, in a week of collaboration, create something positive for the spirit; something that is more than any one of the collaborators could create on his/her own; a “synergistic” event in which the whole was not predicted by the individuals involved, and everything added up to more than the sum of its parts…a set of pieces that we could dedicate to Buckminster Fuller, who over 40 years ago was stating categorically that mankind had to find a way to work together to create a one world-system that benefitted everyone. He called this world-system “Spaceship Earth.”

I have invited five of the 10 participating musicians and the visual artist Lillevan to create six constructs, within which the ensemble will improvise spontaneous music and spontaneous films. Rova calls this “structured improvisation,” as opposed to “free improvisation, +” where anything goes (or “through-composed work” where the outcome is known on paper in advance of the performance). I’m thinking that Fuller would understand that we are taking the skills of the individuals and creating a synergistic whole: six music universes where the whole is not predicted by the individual parts.

Fuller once said: “My own picture of humanity today finds us just about to step out from amongst the pieces of our ‘just broken eggshell.’ Our innocent trial-and-error sustaining nutriment is exhausted. We are faced with an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are going to have to spread our wings of intellect and fly, or perish; that is, we must dare immediately to fly by the generalized principles governing Universe and not by the ground rules of yesterday’s superstitiously and erroneously conditioned reflexes. And as we attempt competent thinking we immediately begin to employ our innate drive for comprehensive understanding.”

Both the film-maker and the musicians were at one time or another limited by more conventional forms (..not always a bad thing…). But here we take our most advanced thinking and work collectively during the rehearsals to form something exciting and new, working within these constructs that are predictive of content but not pre-determining content; a living breathing structure - a tensegrity structure - within which the protons and neutrons, the smallest particles of the art, can form and reform with every performance. This is the key to improvisation. The invited artists are all veteran improvisers which means that they are experts of adaptability in performance, and that means that they are not afraid to give and take, to bend but not break. We take inspiration from Fuller’s acknowledgement of the importance of being excited by change rather than fearful of it.

Fissures, Futures acknowledges someone whose time came decades ago, but who has been forgotten in the decades since, and to point people back towards exploring his ideas, which should now resonate into our future, as the world grapples, finally, with problems (and opportunities!) that have been waiting for resolution since Fuller spoke about them in the fifties, sixties and seventies. Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on Planet Earth, and if so, how?”

In Fuller’s Own Words:

"… society tends to think statically and is always being surprised, often uncomfortably, sometimes fatally, by the omni-inexorable motion of Universe. Lacking dynamic apprehension, it is difficult for humanity to get out of its static fixations and to see great trends evolving."

"Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that “unity is plural and at minimum two” – the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. You and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero – that is, as eternity.”

Just to restate it: Improvised music is at its strongest when all the musicians involved are consciously making everyone else sound better, rather than taking “star turns,” solos over the rhythm section, or, in the worst-case-scenario playing without listening; “playing” without a care or concern for the other people around you; something our federal government did quite well for eight years and more. Ultimately the greatest statements are made by the best listeners, not the most limber players. The whole will then be greater than its parts. Rova Quartet lives this experience constantly as an ensemble, but also in our many collaborative works over the past 30 years, including, for example, the 12-piece band playing at festivals since 2005, performing our arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Ascension; we call it “Electric Ascension.” But that’s only our most recent high point. We hope that this event will join EA and others as a model for raising the bandstand and the energy and consciousness of the audience.

Fuller again: "There is no shape of the Universe. There is only omni-directional, nonconceptual ‘out’ and the specifically directioned, conceptual ‘in.’…The atmosphere's molecules over any place on Earth's surface are forever shifting position. The air over the Himalayas is enveloping California a week later. The stars now overhead are underfoot twelve hours later. The stars themselves are swiftly moving in respect to one another. Many of them have not been where you see them for millions of years; many burnt out long ago. The Sun's light takes eight minutes to reach us. We have relationships… but not space… ‘Synergy’ means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately…. It is dealing with the whole that makes it possible to discover the parts".

"The greatest of all the faculties is the ability of the imagination to formulate conceptually. Conceptuality is subjective; realization is objective. Conceptuality is metaphysical and weightless; reality is physical. The artist was right all the time. Nature is conceptual".

The other connection with Fuller here is that Rova’s music is always about the active participation of the listener. And most of the collaborations we produce are that way too. Like Fuller, we’re not trying to improve or comment on the current forms used in music but rather suggesting other possibilities altogether. We don’t work with conventional forms most of the time because we’re really not that interested in entertaining. Well, that’s a negative explanation. Fuller would have been more positive….We’re interested in conceptualizing along with the listeners, in exploring and creating a Universe of Sound (or sound and film in this case) within which the listener/viewers can revel, can be energized, and maybe even inspired to come up with the answers to their own problems. Fuller was certainly about this in his own way. We don’t always succeed, but it’s important, and fun, to try.

And, all of us need to keep trying.

We know that many of you have music-related questions. We invite you to ask us your questions, and we will feature the answers to your more provocative questions in our blog.

Please send your questions to rova@rova.org.