In this Newsletter:

ROVA NEWS :: JANUARY—FEBRUARY :: 2010

Looking Ahead - Rova:Arts in 2010

Rova and Rova:Arts are poised for an exciting and active 2010. The new Rova.org website has launched, offering access to more music and information on Rova and its community of artists. In February we expect the release of the Celestial Septet CD on New World. The Quartet is preparing for local shows, including the premiere of Carla Kihlstedt’s Pandaemonium at Other Minds Festival 15. Rova will be off for a quick tour in the Midwest and East Coast in March, and then return for more Bay Area shows in April and June. Possibilities for fall touring are being explored. Stay tuned.

New Rova.org site launched!

With the launch of the new rova.org website we are embarking on a major project to bring more online visibility to Rova and the contemporary improvisation scene—with updated content, and offering access to Rova’s growing archive of audio and video recordings. Soon we plan to make available streaming audio and video versions of concerts from the past 3 decades, and also offer special high quality recordings exclusively to paid members of Rova:Arts through member-only downloads. Our long term dream is for Rova.org to serve as a portal for improvised musicians and their work, realizing more opportunities for building community and creative work. Come visit the new site! www.rova.org

Upcoming Rova Shows

February 6^th, 8:15 PM
Rova
Noe Valley Concert Series
San Francisco

Returning to our San Francisco homebase at the Noe Valley Music Series, Rova will premiere new works highlighting its signature blend of improvisation and composition. New pieces will be presented from individual quartet members, as well as new developments in the ongoing group project, The Glass Head—an innovative composition combining improv strategies with open-ended composed elements. This special evening offers a rare opportunity to hear Rova on its own, performing in a friendly and vibrant acoustic environment.

Pandaemonium - Rova at Other Minds 15

Excerpt from Pandaemonium, Humphrey Jennings imaginative
history of the Industrial Revolution

Pandaemonium is a newly commissioned work for Rova by composer, violinist and band leader, Carla Kihlstedt, which will be premiered by the Quartet at Other Minds Festival 15 in early March. The work is partially informed and influenced by the intriguing book by Humphrey Jennings, a collection of “images” culled from Industrial Revolution, and Pandaemonium promises to be an important contribution to the saxophone quartet cannon. In the coming weeks we will post videos of Carla and Rova discussing and rehearsing the piece on our website. In addition to Rova, musician Matthias Bossi, and actor and Mime Troupe legend, Joan Mankin, will provide dramatic readings from Jennings book.

Carla Kihlstedt
photo: Rya Kihlstedt

Carla Kihlstedt:   Pandæmonium (2010)
ROVA Saxophone Quartet; Matthias Bossi & Joan Mankin, readers
WORLD PREMIERE, commissioned by Rova Arts

Upcoming Rova member shows

Friday, January 22^nd, 8:00 PM
2 + 2 and Variations
Matthew Goodheart - piano
Phillip Greenlief - saxophones
Jon Raskin - saxophones
Gino Robair - percussion, electronics
Maya Magda – piano

Community Music Center
544 Capp Street
San Francisco
(415) 647-6015
http://www.sfcmc.org

2 + 2 graphic scores and improvisations
Saxophonists Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin will be joined by pianists Matthew Goodheart and Berlin residence Magda Mayas. The Community Music Center has two pianos for Matthew and Magda (who specializes on inside the piano techniques).

6 hands on 2 pianos
Gino Robair will join Magda and Matthew on pianos in a special 6 hand combination. Mathew Goodheart will also present a working version of his new computer controlled cymbal instrument.

Quintet improvisations

Magda Mayas is a pianist and curator currently based in Berlin, Germany. Mayas studied jazz and improvisation with Misha Mengelberg and Georg Graewe, and she has developed techniques for inside-the-piano performance. http://www.creativesourcesrec.com

Matthew Goodheart is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, and as a composer, improviser, and pianist, Matthew Goodheart explores a variety of contemporary music forms—from free improvisation to strictly notated chamber music. His broad foundation, technical innovations, and compositional sensitivity have allowed him to develop a solid reputation as both a solo performer and collaborative artist. http://www.matthewgoodheart.com

Monday, January 25^th, 10:00 PM
The Jo(h)ns + Aurora Josephson
Ivy Room
Albany

» John Shiurba - electric guitar
» John Hanes - drums
» Jon Raskin - saxophones
» Aurora Josephon - vocals

9:00 PM Set
Nordeson / Perkis / Shelton / Smith

» Kjell Nordeson - percussion
» Tim Perkis - electronics
» Aram Shelton - saxophones
» Damon Smith - bass

Friday, January 29^th, 8:00 PM
Gino Robair & Friends
Celebrating Derek Bailey’s 80 th Birthday
21 Grand
Oakland

Gino Robair – stuff;    Bruce Ackley - saxes, clarinet;    Tom Djll - trumpet;
Thea Farhadian - violin;    Henry Kaiser, Ava Mendoza and John Shiurba - guitars;    Kanoko Nishi – koto;    Tim Perkis – electronics

Gino Robair presents a ‘Company’-style evening of free improvisation with various small groupings of the players, in memory of guitar master and fearless improviser, Derek Bailey.

21 Grand - Oakland
416 25th Street
Oakland
(510) 444-7263
http://www.21grand.org/

Tuesday, February 9^th, 9:00 PM
Jon Raskin and the Oakland Active Orchestra
Premiere of new works by Jon Raskin
The Uptown Night Club
Oakland

The Oakland Active Orchestra is a new improvisers/composers collective performing compositions of its members. The concert will feature new works by Jon Raskin.

Phillip Greenlief,  Aaron Bennett,  Aram Shelton,  Cory Wright – saxophones and clarinets;
Tom Djll,   Darren Johnston – trumpets;   Rob Ewing – trombone;
Kristian Aspelin – guitar;   Marielle Jakobsons, Hilary Overberg – violins;   
Agnes Szelag – cello;  Lisa Mezzacappa, Damon Smith – bass;
Kjell Nordeson vibes;   Sam Ospovat – drums

The Uptown Nightclub
928 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland
www.uptownnightclub.com

[TOP]

Ochs Reports from the Front

Music tours tend towards being predictably unpredictable. That may sound interesting, but most of the unpredictability is musical—as it should be. In other words, most days (or daze) on my tours go like this: wake up early.... grab some breakfast at the hotel if you don’t have to leave it before 7 am, go to a train station or airport, load onto a train and try to grab some sleep before having to unload from train A and switch to train B or grab a plane, or get picked up for a drive to some remote location...Grab a sandwich somewhere in there...Go to hotel and clean up and if lucky go for a very short walk or nap; Sound check around 4 or 5 PM. Eat a bit of dinner before the concert. Finally: perform for 2 hours or so; spend some time talking to members of the local audience. Return to hotel; repack; grab 3 to 6 hours sleep. Start over.

It’s a business trip without much time to rest. When someone at home asks, “where are you going on your tour” and you respond something like, “ Esslingen, Krakow, Graz, Vienna, Poitiers and Tours in France, Brussels, and a small festival in a 16th century fortress-town in Spain,” they usually respond: “Wow! I’m jealous, but have a great time!”—pretty much imagining that you get to see something besides what passes by your window in the car or train. But often there is no time. It’s about delivering the music, and only Santa Claus works harder.

But then there’s the exception to the rule. For Rova, the exceptions have happened often enough: the two tours to the USSR as prime examples, where the context for the concerts was in fact way more interesting than the concerts themselves. And as many of you who read this newsletter probably know by now, that “16th century fortress-town in Spain” mentioned above is called Siguenza, and that list of cities is the tour that Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core completed in December 2009. But the Siguenza stop led to my first real experience with modern-day communications gone wild. A very funny but innocuous incident turned into a scandal at the push of a button—that button being on computer email or twitter accounts, or blog-postings, or rather on all those communication avenues, and led to articles in The Guardian, New York Times and many others, and to radio interviews on BBC Radio (two) and the news show called ‘As It Happens’ on the Canadian Broadcasting System (the Friday December 11 show, still available up there on the As It Happens website.)

Trying really hard to imagine what this might have been like if this “news” was scandalous for me personally or in some other way truly negative for me is pretty scary. The event happened Monday night December 7. On December 8 articles hit all the Spanish newspapers, and the incident was even reported on prime time newscasts on two of the main television stations in Spain, located in Madrid. Imagine a publicist trying to get airtime for a band like this. They wouldn’t even think about approaching such stations. But in this case an unnamed local listener goes to the police to report his health impaired by some music he went to listen to, and that a jazz festival is defrauding him when they present Ochs as representing “jazz,” and then—and I think this is the part of the story that caught everyone’s imagination—the policeman (a member of the Guardia Civil, who still wear impressive, formal uniforms capped off by their loaded revolvers in big hip-holsters) went back to the concert hall, listened for himself to the music, and  proceeded to walk up to the mayor who was in attendance, and announce that in fact this music was “not jazz”. A report must be filed the next day in case charges are made later! What kind of charges? In the end that didn’t matter. Suddenly this was a case of liberties possibly being cut off by the police, and BANG! The Spanish Jazz Press interviewed the mayor of Siguenza and sent out the story, making it larger than life, way larger.

For awhile, it was fun receiving so many emails from friends and music allies everywhere. And, most wonderfully, as a result of this story being published in El Pais (essentially the NY Times of Spain) and making the 6 o’clock news equivalent on 2 major Spanish television networks, the city of Siguenza called an “extraordinary meeting” of the city council on December 9 or 10. In addition to inviting “Mr. Ochs to return whenever he chooses” (!), they announced in the same official proclamation that the Siguenza Jazz Festival would definitely continue into the foreseeable future. Of course, this announcement was great news for the curator, who over the last couple of years had to wait until very late to get official approval that the festival would be allowed to take place again. So, rather than not knowing his fate until late summer 2010, he now knows already that the 2010 and 2011 Jazz festivals will occur, and in the same format, and that there will be a good budget for hiring musicians.

I felt good.

Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core in Siguenza, Spain
(Ochs, Satoko Fujii, Scott Amendola, Natsuki Tamura, Donald Robinson)           Photo by César Merino

By the way: (1) The audience in Siguenza gave us a mutli-curtain call after the concert ended. I guess whether it was or was not jazz didn’t matter to most of them. (2) My answer to that question about the Inquisition was: “Prop open my eyelids with toothpicks and force me to watch and to listen over and over to the newly released movie Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.”


[TOP]

Favorite Street: Jon Raskin

BOOKS:
Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh
Sea of Poppies is the first book of Gosh’s Ibis Trilogy. It is an historical adventure that follows the lives of a widowed Indian Villager, a bankrupt Raja, an orphaned daughter of a French botanist, an evangelical English opium trader, and a recently freed American mulatto. The story moves between the poppy fields of the Ganges, the high seas, and China. The time period is 1838, and the first British Opium war, and the book follows the cultivation of opium in India for use in China, and the indentured Indian workers sent to cut sugar in Mauritius, Fiji, and Trinidad. The story brilliantly details the emerging global economy, and cultural clashes. Its use of language is especially compelling.

Buddha’s Little Finger
Blue Lantern
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Victor Olegovich Pelevin
I recently discovered the Russian writer Victor Pelevin, who fuses science fiction, philosophy, literary allusion and politics’ in well crafted stories that have original and unusual premises. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is told by a shape-shifting fox spirit that works as a call girl in Moscow. The central character in Buddha’s Little Finger inhabits two worlds—one a mental hospital in the present day, and the other as poet/warrior during the Russian Revolution. The Blue Lantern is comprised of eight short stories.

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body
Steve Mithen
This thought provoking book looks for evolutionary reasons for music making, using anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and archaeology research. Steven Mithen, a cognitive archaeologist and professor of early prehistory at Reading University, creates a very readable analysis of a broad range of material to support his premise.

Asterios Polyp
David Mazzucchelli
This modernist graphic novel is a satirical treatise on aesthetics and design. The protagonist is a “paper architect”—an architect who never has a building actually constructed. The story is told using flash backs as he abandons his life when the building he lives in is destroyed by a lighting fire and buys a ticket to “anywhere”. We learn about his past life as he starts his new one working as a mechanic in a small town. The artwork is integral in telling the story, with many digressions about religion, history, aesthetics and design. It is a masterpiece.

RECORDINGS:

An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music Volumes 1-5
The label Sub Rosa (subrosa) has released the first 5 of 7 planned double CD volumes of noise and electronic music, which begins in the 1920’s. Each volume spans the history of electronic music and noise and focuses on different artists from diverse backgrounds and countries. The recordings are accompanied by descriptions of the artists and their work.

This 3 CD anthology features the work 44 different artists and a 98 page booklet of archival essays, photos, and notes from the composers. The set covers diverse artists, from Vladimir Ussachevsky to Brian Eno, Steve Reich to Sonic Youth.

FILM:

F for Fake
Orson Welles

Orson Welles uses the film to talk about truth and fakery, examining what is the “lie” and what is fake, adding in his own hoaxes as well. The Criterion edition has wonderful commentaries from Oja Kodar.

INTERNET VIEWING:

A long take is an uninterrupted shot in a film, which lasts much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself, or of films in general, and usually lasting several minutes.

This long take was shot by Kaiser swimming under the ice in Anarctica.
http://www.youtube.com

RadiOM - Improv:21 Archives

Want to sample some of the earlier Improv:21 informances?
We will be uploading one show every two months to RadiOM (the archive website of Other Minds) until the entire series is online. There is a lot of stimulating information in each show. We just added a couple more.

Here’s what’s available at the moment:

Contribute to Rova:Arts

We want to express our deepest gratitude to all the generous private and public donors who contribute to Rova:Arts. Your support has been essential to the successful presentation and documentation of our projects over the year.

Formed in 1977, Rova’s been in a state of continual artistic renewal for over 3 decades. Rova:Arts, formed in 1986 to support the activities of Rova, has been instrumental in producing local projects and advancing an ongoing cultural exchange between local Bay Area artists and the international scene through its Rovaté concert series. These events, made possible by funding to Rova:Arts, have engaged Bay Area musicians and composers—as well as musicians from around the world. Rova:Arts projects are often reproduced in other parts of the world, thereby bringing the work to a broader audience. Also, many Rova:Arts events have been recorded, resulting in releases which have been enthusiastically celebrated.

Click here to find out more and to Join Rova:Arts. Thanks for being part of the art.