1. El Amor En Los Tiempos De La Finca (Voigt) 7:50
2. The Aggregate (Raskin) 10:05
3. Sportspeak (Ackley, Ochs, Raskin, Voigt) 7:05
4. Composition 37 (Braxton) 5:39
5. What Was Lost Regained (Raskin) 10:53
1987 - Black Saint (Italy) 120 126 (LP)
1987 - Black Saint (Italy) 120 126 (CD)
Barigozzi Studio, Milano, Italy, April 13-15, 1987
Bruce Ackley: soprano saxophone
Larry Ochs: tenor saxophone
Jon Raskin: baritone saxophone and lead alto on "The Aggregate"
Andrew Voigt: alto saxophone and sopranino on "What Was Lost Regained"
Beat Kennelis the tenth release since 1978 by ROVA, the innovative
San Francisco-based saxophone quartet. During a recent conversation with Larry Ochs,
ROVA's de facto spokesman, I asked how he thought ROVA's music was evolving. This
was too broad a question, and not surprisingly, it drew a blank until I commented
that ROVA's relationship to jazz was becoming steadily more obvious. "Exactly."
Ochs said. "We're always going through cycles and we've just completed one in which
we composed and performed many pieces that were melodically and rhythmically direct
by our standards, including some with chord changes."
Don't expect bebop, though, from Beat Kennel, the album that Ochs and his bandmates
agree concludes this "cycle" (which arguably began with Favorite Street [Black Saint
BSR-0076], ROVA's 1983 album of Steve Lacy compositions). There is recognizable
jazz content here, in the gleeful quasibop opening unison of the group-composed
"Sportspeak," the blues grit of Andrew Voigt's "El Amor en los Tiempos de la Finca,"
the dance-band rapture of portionsof Jon Raskin's "TheAggregate" (on which the players,
although free to wander where they will, are restricted to the twelve tones embedded
in the theme), and the Monk-like quick step of the second of the two harmonically
related "heads" that set Raskin's "What Was Lost Regained" in motion. There is also
the relentless drum beat of Raskin's baritone to consider (espescially propulsive
on "Sportspeak," where an Ochs tenor solo with baritone accompaniment quickly escalates
into a full-scale simultaneous improvisation as heated as those of John Coltrane
and Elvin Jones), to say nothing of the vocal bite of all four saxes (Bruce Ackley's
soprano, in particular), for which there is no precedent outside of jazz. Since
the jazz tradition now also includes Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, it is worth
mentioning, in making a case for ROVA's music as jazz, the Coleman-like spontaneous
accelerations of tempo on "El Amor en los Tiempos de la Finca" and ROVA's "through
time" method of blurring the distinction between composition and improvisation,
an offshoot of Taylor's "constructivist" approach. And the flawless interpretation
of a schematically titled piece for four saxophones from Anthony Braxton's album
Fall 1974 serves as a reminder that, no matter their divergent paths, ROVA and the
World Saxophone Quartet (three of whose members joined Braxton for the original
performance) shared the same point of originÑBraxton's intimation that free jazz
could be a vehicle for something more than visceral self-expression.
Still, if only because the word itself has become so restrictive (or so malleable,
depending on who's using it) ROVA's relationship to "jazz" is not as self-evident
as I make it seem. Besides, I prefer to think of their music as "antijazz," but
certainly not in the way that John A. Tynan and Leonard Feather used the term to
smear John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy in 1961. That same year, ironically, Russian
poet Andrei Voznesensky (who knew more than either of those journalists about both
physics and language, after all) celebrated "Antiworlds"Ñ"Long live Antiworlds!
They rebut / With dreams the rat race and the rut." In utilizing elements of jazz
to rebut the rat race and the rut that jazz was becoming, Coltrane and Dolphy were
indeed playing antijazz. And in doing much the same thing as jazz again finds itself
in danger of succumbing to conformity and contrivance, the men of ROVA are clearly
Coltrane, Dolphy, Taylor, Coleman, Lacy, Braxton, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Roscoe
Mitchell's children.
-- Francis Davis, October, l987
Francis Davis is the author of In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980's and the forthcoming Outcats, both published by Oxford University Press.