Personnel: Bruce Ackley, soprano, tenor saxophones; Steve Adams, alto, sopranino saxophones; Scott Amendola, drums; Nels Cline, guitars; Devin Hoff, bass; Larry Ochs, tenor, sopranino saxophones; Jon Raskin, baritone, alto, sopranino saxophones

[The Celestial Septet] sounds a cosmic death knell for fixed ideas about musical protocol and decorum, and a round trip through its 68 minutes leaves no horizon intact. - Derk Richardson

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Liner Notes:

"When we escape from the place we spend most of our time ... we start thinking about obscure possibilities ... that never would have occurred to us if we'd stayed back on the farm." - Jonah Lerner¹

In his 2009 essay about the transformative power of travel, science writer Jonah Lerner concludes, "When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything." The same thing can be said about listening to music, especially music that causes you to lose your bearings in a territory that cannot be fenced into any familiar category. The Celestial Septet, comprising the Nels Cline Singers and Rova Saxophone Quartet, is a vehicle for time and space travel through dense, narrow thickets and airy, wide expanses of boundary-blurred extrapolations of jazz, rock, late-20th-century European modernism and American minimalism, and 21st-century postmodern fusions. The trip is challenging, but the open-minded listener/traveler cannot help but come through the experience with new perspectives on sound and music.

As individual entities, the Singers and Rova ramble in musical regions that have been variously and inadequately called "avant-garde", "creative", "improvised", "new", "noise", and "free". Such labels are more convenient than instructive. Similarly, the groups' respective names are somewhat deceptive and limited when it comes to describing the configurations of personnel and instrumentation. The singer-less Singers - Nels Cline, Devin Hoff, and Scott Amendola - are ostensibly a guitar-bass-drums trio. But the approaches taken by Cline on acoustic and electric guitars and various effects, Hoff on acoustic contrabass, and Amendola on drum kit, percussion, live electronics, and effects expand the threesome's musical possibilities exponentially. Similarly, Rova - Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Bruce Ackley, and Steve Adams - is a quartet. But the multiplicity of saxophones on which the players double and triple, ranging from baritone at the bottom through tenor, alto, and soprano to sopranino at the top, further extended by the players' mastery of multiphonics, creates a virtual orchestra of sonic shape-shifters..

Conjoined, the Singers and Rova further defy categorization by taking composition as seriously as they take improvisation, and by taking neither so seriously as to let one get in the way of the other.

"I am large, I contain multitudes." - Walt Whitman²

The Celestial Septet was introduced to the world in a series of northern California nightclub concerts - at Yoshi's in San Francisco, Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, and the Palms in Winters. The occasion was the 2008 edition of Rovaté, Rova's annual presentation of interdisciplinary and multimedia collaborations, produced by the nonprofit umbrella organization Rova:Arts. But the Septet's roots go back another decade.

The seeds were planted in 1998 when guitarist Henry Kaiser and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith paid tribute to the later-period electric music of Miles Davis (circa On the Corner, Pangaea, and Agharta) with the first Yo Miles! recording. That double-CD featured both Cline and Rova, as did a memorable Yo Miles! concert at the Fillmore Auditorium during the 1999 San Francisco Jazz Festival. Then, in 2003, when Rova decided to mount and record its electronically enhanced interpretation of John Coltrane's breakthrough free-jazz composition Ascension, they called on Cline as the electric guitarist, a role he has filled in all but one of the Electric Ascension concerts since.

The story picked up steam in June 2006 when all three members of the Nels Cline Singers participated in the Electric Ascension performance at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Six months later, the Singers invited Rova to share a double bill at the Starry Plough, a venerable corner pub and grassroots music venue in Berkeley. When the idea of doing something together arose, Ascension was suggested, since everyone had played it together already, but Rova decided to maintain Ascension as a separate project. However, Rova's Steve Adams had heard Coltrane's "Living Space" on the car radio on his way to the rehearsal, and it struck him as a composition with similarly open-ended possibilities for the ad hoc ensemble. "I kept the arrangement simple so that it could be done without rehearsal," Adams says, "We played it as our one piece together that night, and it was amazing. It seemed to generate much of the volcanic energy of Electric Ascension in a smaller format." Moreover, the potential of further collaboration became evident to all involved.

Larry Ochs masterminds many of Rova's special projects, looking to fashion events that are both "practical" and "exportable". For its ever-morphing occasional big band, Orkestrova, and its annual Rovaté events, Rova has incorporated the writing and playing of Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, Satoko Fujii, Dave Douglas, Fred Frith, Mr. Bungle, Joan Jeanrenaud, Carla Kihlstedt, and many others. "Rova is a collective band, and that is really the guiding light for everything we do", Ochs explains. "We do lead the larger ensembles we organize, but we lead by creating environments in which the collective can thrive."

Parlaying the chemistry of the Rova-Singers one-night stand into something more formal "seemed like a real natural," Ochs says. But the birth of the Celestial Septet was more casual than most Rovaté productions. There were no founding musical aims, Ochs notes, "except to have a really great time and make some powerful music together." Steve Adams confirms the absence of a master plan. "There was never any discussion of how it would work," he says. "It just fell into place. What is unique and compelling about it is that there are two very well defined and rather different entities combining here, so that you always have a complex layering going on in the music. Each band has a very strong personality and cohesion, but each is deeply dedicated to responsiveness."

The way Nels Cline sees it, Rova comes out of the free-jazz and collectivist innovations of the late 1960s and early '70s, while the Singers, also steeped in free-jazz, refer to more recent developments in post-rock, noise, and fusion. "They don't play like jazz guys," he says, "and neither do we." So, there was no way that bringing the groups together could be anything like adding Rova horns to the Singers rhythm section or vice versa. Adams agrees. "It's not one band having appendages tacked on, but an interaction where each entity brings out the best in the other, like food and wine combining in a great meal."

"To study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things." - Dogen³

All the Celestial Septet members except Bruce Ackley and Devin Hoff composed or arranged pieces for the new ensemble. (Jon Raskin's two contributions do not appear on this debut CD.) Scott Amendola had written the opening track, "Cesar Chavez," for his 2005 Scott Amendola Band album, Believe. At Ochs's invitation, and with encouragement from Cline, who played on the original version, Amendola rearranged it for the Septet. Underscoring the suspension of egos that is evident throughout the recording, Amendola emphasized the ensemble's orchestral capacity and kept his percussion parts understated and sparse - skittering undercurrents that support shifting sonic fields and tender melodic lines.

Opening with swirls of electronic sounds evocative of tuning a shortwave radio to a station broadcasting from a distant galaxy, the signal disturbed by swashes of static and solar winds, "Cesar Chavez" becomes a study of shapes and color. Hoff establishes an improvised throb on his bass - "I didn't say much to Devin," Amendola notes. "He has ears the size of Africa, and I wanted him to feel his way through things" - before Ackley, Adams, and Raskin create richly-textured drones that step up and down in a kind of deconstructed chord pattern. Assigned to play the melody on tenor, Ochs explores the deep growling registers of the horn, as well as the bittersweet aching upper range. The piece sets a tone of spiritual exploration for the album, not unlike that of Coltrane's later work with his classic quartet. But the journey here includes an absorbing tenor and guitar conversation between Ochs and Cline, and collective pauses and nuanced timbres that add feelings of tension and release as the emotional intensity builds.

Steve Adams's "Trouble Ticket" is also a new arrangement of an older piece, in this case written initially for Rova and reconstructed with a section to showcase the Singers. In marked contrast to the rolling flow of Amendola's composition, "Trouble Ticket" opens with jittery, bouncy pointillist passages punctuated by car-horn-like sax-section blasts and short melodic statements. There are pleading songlike fragments (reminiscent of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler tunes) propelled by Amendola's furiously precise clatter and Cline's brittle guitar strums and figures. A third of the way through the piece, a flurry of beyond-hardbop blowing leads to a new construal of the opening ideas, a scratchy, noisy, bent-string solo spot by Cline, and a Singers avant-jazz-rock explosion with Rova amping up the hysteria through Greek chorus–like commentary. As if catching their collective breath with a brief reprise of the theme, the saxophonists lead the way into a calming denouement of reedy warbles and musings, the Singers providing arrhythmic accents.

"I must play music that is beyond this world." - Albert Ayler (1936-1970)⁴

The Celestial Septet's centerpiece, the epic 25-minute "Whose to Know (for Albert Ayler)," was composed by Larry Ochs, who was listening to Ayler's 1967 LP Love Cry when he decided to take up the saxophone in 1971. In a collection of compositions characterized by unconventional structures, "Whose to Know" is the most episodic. Its sections include melancholic ruminations; impressionist fugues of melodic shards passed around the ensemble; a three-minute Singers showcase in which Cline worries his guitar strings like a Chicago blues player at warp speed, unhinged from chord changes; an ominous bass solo and a skronky structured sax frenzy in which virtuosity becomes a dangerous weapon; the "hive" effect of swarming saxes that has long been part of Rova's strategic arsenal; and long saxophone exhalations that could be mistaken for accordion chords. After twenty minutes or so, it begins to feel like the Saragossa Manuscript - a tale within a tale within a tale - until all the story lines are bundled up together in a final collective cadenza and climax.

"When I listened to Ayler's music, it said to me, if you feel it, let it out and let it loose," notes Ochs. "And I keep his attitude as a model. I set up some spaces within this long piece that were reminiscent of Ayler - the ballad area, the plaintive chant area, the free blowing areas."

Jazz historian John Litweiler has argued that "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz"⁵ as there was in Ayler's sound. Not surprisingly, Ayler has remained outside the ken of the vast majority of jazz listeners, but his creed ("You have to relate sound to sound inside the music. . . . You have to try to listen to everything together."⁶) and his quest for pure ecstatic expression continue to resonate forty years after his death. "Whose to Know" is both a rhetorical question about ownership of this musical/spiritual space (Is it Ayler's alone? A strictly African-American legacy? Exclusive to his musical apostles?) and a material answer: It belongs to anyone who can feel it.

"The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music." - Hazrat Inayat Khan⁷

The Celestial Septet's longest performance is followed by its shortest. At just over two minutes, "Head Count" is practically a pop tune, in some ways reminiscent of the pithy pieces Jon Raskin composed for Rova's Juke Box, from 2006. Ochs wrote this jaunty, dancelike melody in 1983 for a saxophone octet called Figure 8. In this version, which Ochs re-imagined as a vehicle for Cline, Amendola shatters the beat into countless fragments while the guitarist goes berserk, creating a nonstop lightning storm around and through Amendola's percussion, Hoff's bass, and Rova's loping horns.

Cline's two-minute freak-out on "Head Count" gives way to the tranquil, chiming opening of his spacious CD-closing composition, "The Buried Quilt." Again, Rova demonstrates the uncanny ability to breathe as one, forging seamless chords, taking synchronized steps through a musical walking meditation. Written specifically for this project, the piece discloses no easily discernible patterns. Swells of electronically processed textures fill the field, and the sources of particular sounds are cloaked in uncertainty. In one section of the sixteen-minute performance, slow, keening pulses hint at György Ligeti's Atmosphères (used in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's 2001). In another, Amendola sounds as if he's rummaging through a shed full of chains and bear traps. Eruptions of saxophones and electronics - bookending intimate, unnerving guitar and soprano/sopranino sax duets - put a new, dizzying spin on the concept of "energy music." After storm fronts of bowed bass, sonorous reeds, rolling tympani, and processed cymbals move through, a sense of subsiding ecstasy washes over the soundscape toward a bold but rather wistful summation.

By calling themselves the Celestial Septet, these musicians proudly declare their kinship with an "outside jazz" tradition in which, as Sun Ra put it, "We Travel the Space Ways." Sun Ra's extraterrestrial allusions are legendary and forever enshrined in such titles as Interstellar Low Ways, Moonrails and Satellites, and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra. Cline had Sun Ra, and the notion of visitations, in the back of his mind when he devised "The Buried Quilt." "When we performed it live," he explains, "Rova was instructed to leave the stage and reenter through the audience, eventually surrounding Scott as he processed their increasingly dense fragments/conversations. For me this was a very Sun Ra–inspired idea."

"I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters." - John Coltrane⁸

In the titles of the aforementioned Ascension and "Living Space," as well as "Stellar Regions," and Interstellar Space, John Coltrane indicated his intention to use music to transcend the earthly realm. Likewise, Albert Ayler believed that Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe. But the ear of the beholder is a fickle organ. Listeners are not always willing to follow musicians into their realms of unlimited potential. In music that involves a heavy quotient of improvisation, the players must inhabit a present moment more expansive than the ones that most of us experience in everyday life. Elements of composition and arrangement provide signposts, although they are anything but precise roadmaps. To move together in space and collectively find a direction that works, the members of an ensemble such as the Celestial Septet must detach themselves from prejudices and expectations and listen to one another - and the group as a whole - with empty ears.

Still, what the players and their open-eared audience make of the possibilities is one thing. How listeners tethered to preconceptions will react is another. As Jonah Lehrer puts it, "Our thoughts are shackled by the familiar." On December 7, 2009, Larry Ochs's Sax and Drumming Core (with pianist Satoko Fujii, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, and drummers Amendola and Donald Robinson) performed at the Sigüenza Jazz Festival outside Madrid, Spain. During the first piece, an audience member stormed out and reported the band to the police for not playing jazz. Spanish Civil Guardsmen arrived on the scene to investigate the festivalgoer's complaint, which was allegedly based on his doctor's advice that it was "psychologically inadvisable" for him to listen to "contemporary music," as opposed to jazz. Clearly, the patient did not feel healed.

"The question of what constitutes jazz and what does not is obviously a subjective one," said the festival's director Ricardo Checa, "but not everything is New Orleans funeral music." The Celestial Septet has yet to be formally charged with disturbing anyone's peace of mind, but its unconstrained explorations of texture, color, mood, and space, as well as its manipulations of melody, harmony, dissonance, and rhythm might send even free-jazz devotees into a disoriented swoon. This may not be New Orleans funeral music, but it sounds a cosmic death knell for fixed ideas about musical protocol and decorum, and a round trip through its 68 minutes leaves no horizon intact. - Derk Richardson

Derk Richardson is a senior editor at Afar magazine in San Francisco and a music programmer at KPFA FM 94.1 in Berkeley. He lives in Oakland and writes about music for The Absolute Sound, Acoustic Guitar, and other publications.

1 Jonah Lerner, "Definitive, Incontrovertible Proof: Why Travel Makes You Smarter," in The Panorama Magazine, The San Francisco Panorama, issue 33 of McSweeney's, Dec. 2009

2 From Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass. Bantam Classics, 1983, p. 76

3 Quoted in On Zen Practice: body, breath, mind, edited by Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman. Wisdom Publications, Zen Center of Los Angeles, 2002, p. 89

4 Ayler to Val Wilmer, quoted in "Spiritual Unity" by Val Wilmer, an essay included in the notes to the Holy Ghost CD box set, Revenant, 2004.

5 John Litweiler, The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958. Da Capo, 1984, p. 159

6 Nat Hentoff, "Albert Ayler - The Truth Is Marching In," Downbeat, November 1966

7 David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus, editors, The Book of Music & Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts (Music/Culture). Wesleyan University Press, 2001, p. 19

8 From a 1964 interview with Leonard Feather, quoted in Bill Cole, John Coltrane. Schirmer Books, 1976. Second Da Capo Press edition, 2001, p. 171