Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/23/2018
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
Knoxville Museum of Art
Category(ies)
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Big Ears is presenting ROVA’s spatial music at the Knoxville Museum of Art. This works are performed in and around the audience to put the ears inside a sculpture of sound.
“The Rova Saxophone Quartet is an equivalent of the Kronos String Quartet,” John Rockwell astutely noted in The New York Times. “Both are San Francisco foursomes devoted to new music with a vernacular twist.” That was 1990, less than halfway into a career that has reshaped the very ways the saxophone and the jazz quartet itself are perceived. Formed in a moment of great jazz reinvention, Rova became a pioneer of the woodwind quartet format by ruling that, first and foremost, there were no rules. They’ve since dabbled in wide-open improvisation and neoclassical structure, rock hybridization and electronic updates. The quartets ranks have swollen to big-band and jazz-orchestra size and incorporated a top-notch roster of collaborators and composers, all forcing Rova to think outside stereotypes of its past and its pedigree. The quartet’s forty-year discography is a testament to compulsive restlessness and top-notch musicianship—an empire of borderless exploration, built around an instrument with some of the strongest preconceptions of all.
At Big Ears 2018, Rova will perform twice. In its traditional quartet format, the group will dig into a powerful discography that has gleefully twisted genre lines. And then, they will expand into ‘Electric Ascension,’ an ongoing examination of the musical spirit of John Coltrane based on his 1966 landmark, ‘Ascension.’ Rova largely re-created the album in 1995 before returning to it a decade later with a different task—embrace its lessons and spirit of ecstatic group improvisation while delivering a wildly new interpretation of the sound itself. On 2006’s ‘Electric Ascension’ and 2016’s ‘Rova Channeling Coltrane,’ Rova enlisted an all-star cast of collaborators to pivot between sharp solos and vibrant ensemble work, channeling the operating principle of Coltrane’s ‘Ascension.’ At Big Ears, they’ll gather a new crew in order to ascend again.