Rova Saxophone Quartet is an American,

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based saxophone quartet, formed in October 1977. The name "Rova" is an acronym formed from the last initials of the founding members: Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt, and Bruce Ackley. When Voigt left in 1988, he was replaced by Steve Adams, but the group did not change the acronym.

Music

The quartet's music was inspired by a broad spectrum of influences, such as

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...

John Coltrane John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of br ...

Ornette Coleman Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album '' Free Jazz: A Colle ...

Anthony Braxton Anthony Braxton (born June 4, 1945) is an American experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto. Braxton grew up on the South Side of Chica ...

, Steve Lacy, Charles Ives,

Edgard Varése Edgard may refer to the following: *Edgard, Louisiana *Edgard Félix Pierre Jacobs * Edgard Varèse See also *Eadgar (disambiguation) *Edgar (disambiguation) *Edgardo Edgardo is an Italian-language form of the name Edgar. It may refer to: * Edg ...

, and

Olivier Messiaen Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen (, ; ; 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically ...

. Its debut album, ''Cinema Rovaté'', was released by Metalanguage Records in 1978. Metalanguage was founded in 1978 by Henry Kaiser and Ochs. It showcased Rova as well as many independent artists and produced the Rova Arts Festival in 1980. Rova's tour of the Soviet Union in 1983 was filmed and shown on PBS. In 1985, it became a non-profit organization.

Reception

In noting Rova's role in developing the all-saxophone ensemble as "a regular and conceptually wide-ranging unit," The ''

Penguin Guide to Jazz ''The Penguin Guide to Jazz'' is a reference work containing an encyclopedic directory of jazz recordings on CD which were (at the time of publication) currently available in Europe or the United States. The first nine editions were compiled b ...

'' calls its music "a teeming cosmos of saxophone sounds" created by "deliberately eschewing conventional notions about swing ndprodding at the boundaries of sound and space...." ''Jazz: The Rough Guide'' notes, "Highly inventive, eclectic and willing to experiment, Rova sarguably the most exciting of the saxophone quartets to emerge in the format's late '70s boom."

Discography

* 1978 ''Cinema Rovaté'' (

Metalanguage In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the ''object language''. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quot ...

) * 1979 ''The Bay'' ( Ictus) * 1979 ''The Removal of Secrecy'' (Metalanguage) * 1979 ''Daredevils'' (Metalanguage) * 1980 ''This, This, This, This'' (

Moers Moers (; older form: ''Mörs''; archaic Dutch language, Dutch: ''Murse'', ''Murs'' or ''Meurs'') is a German List of cities and towns in Germany, city on the western bank of the Rhine, close to Duisburg. Moers belongs to the district of Wesel (d ...

) * 1981 ''As Was'' (Metalanguage) * 1985 ''Saxophone Diplomacy'' (

Hathut Hathut Records is a Swiss record company and label founded by Werner Xavier Uehlinger in 1974 that specializes in jazz and classical music. The name of the label comes from the artwork of Klaus Baumgartner. Hathut encompasses the labels hat ART, h ...

) * 1984 '' Favorite Street'' (

Black Saint Black Saint and Soul Note are two affiliated Italian independent record labels. Since their conception in the 1970s, they have released albums from a variety of influential jazz musicians, particularly in the genre of free jazz. History Black S ...

) * 1986 ''The Crowd'' (Hathut) * 1987 '' Beat Kennel'' (Black Saint) * 1989 ''The Aggregate'' (Sound Aspects) * 1990 ''Long on Logic'' (Sound Aspects) * 1990 ''Electric Rags II'' (New Albion) * 1991 ''This Time We Are Both'' * 1993 ''From the Bureau of Both'' (Black Saint) * 1995 ''The Works Vol. 1'' (Black Saint) * 1996 ''The Works Vol. 2'' (Black Saint) * 1996 ''John Coltrane’s Ascension'' (Black Saint) * 1996 ''Ptow!!'' (Victo) * 1998 ''

Bingo Bingo or B-I-N-G-O may refer to: Arts and entertainment Gaming * Bingo, a game using a printed card of numbers ** Bingo (British version), a game using a printed card of 15 numbers on three lines; most commonly played in the UK and Ireland ** Bi ...

'' (Victo) * 1998 ''Morphological Echo'' (Rastascan) * 1999 ''The Works Vol. 3'' (Black Saint) * 1999 ''

Freedom in Fragments ''Freedom in Fragments'' is a studio album by English guitarist, composer and Improvisation, improvisor Fred Frith. It was composed by Frith in 1993 as "a suite of 23 pieces for saxophone quartet", and was performed by the Rova Saxophone Quartet ...

'' * 2002 ''Resistance'' (Victo) * 2005 '' Electric Ascension'' ( Atavistic) * 2006 '' Totally Spinning'' (Black Saint) * 2006 ''The Mirror World'' (Metalanguage) * 2007 ''Juke Box Suite'' (Not Two) * 2010 ''Planetary'' (Solyd) * 2011 ''

The Celestial Septet ''The Celestial Septet'' is an album by The Nels Cline Singers and Rova Saxophone Quartet which was released in March 2010 on the New World label.

'' (New World) with

The Nels Cline Singers The Nels Cline Singers are an American free jazz trio led by Nels Cline, following his work in the Nels Cline Trio. They have released five albums on Cryptogramophone Records. Despite the name, there are no singers in the group. Studio albums * ...

* 2011 ''The Receiving Surfaces'' (Metalanguage; limited edition LP as a sax quintet with John Zorn) * 2012 ''A Short History'' (Jazzwerkstatt) * 2016 ''Rova Channeling Coltrane Electric Ascension'' * 2017 ''Steve Lacy's Saxophone Special Revisited'' (Clean Feed)

References

External links

Rova.org
featuring a track from ''As Was'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Rova Saxophone Quartet Avant-garde jazz musicians American jazz ensembles from California American instrumental musical groups Saxophone quartets Musical groups established in 1977 Black Saint/Soul Note artists