• limited copies left of PLANETARY CD!

  Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

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  The final 25 CD copies of this classic Rova recording were shipped by the recording label to California from Moscow, and we have them all. Recorded in 2009 and released on the Russian label "SOLYD" in 2011.
  
  SIGNAL to NOISE review by Michael Rosenstein: "It was a long time coming, but here is the first recording by the Rova Saxophone Quartet on a Russian label, released almost three decades since they headed off on their initial tour of Eastern Europe. It is worth searching out this CD for the liner notes by Alexander Kan alone, which provide the great back-story on how that first tour in 1983 came about. But of course, the music recorded by Rova is always well worth checking out and this collection of realizations of compositions by Steve Adams and Larry Ochs are no exception. The recording opens and closes with readings of two of Adams’ “Parallel Constructions” series, built off of long melodies as a framing focus for group improvisation, with particular note going to the closer, which builds labyrinthine waves of harmonized clusters and duo sections that course against each other with gathering layers of countering detail. Sequencing Ochs’ “S” and Adams’ “Flip Trap” together provides complementary examples of how the ensemble uses overlapping lines and mercurial, constantly morphing time signatures as the various sections of the quartet move in and out of synch with each other. Adams’ “Glass Head Concretion” and Ochs’ “Planetary” are more expansive structures, the first providing an immersive structure of changeable collective densities and textures and the later providing a jumping off point from a pulse-based theme into a swirling interactive game structure for spontaneous simultaneous solos. This 17-minute piece is a tour de force as each of the reed players spin off on propulsive excursions that constantly careen off of each other in new directions, using cellular motifs as a focal structure. With such a deep and extensive discography, it’s easy to miss out on Rova’s output, but this one is a particular winner."
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  Following the success of their 2010 collaborative CD with Nels Cline Singers, Rova returned to the classic acoustic quartet format for the first time on CD since 2007. “Planetary” brings the listener to several of Rova’s music worlds and shows that the band, as always, was still refining that “Rova sound,” still pushing the envelope, and still looking for new sound worlds to inhabit and make their own.
  
  This also marks Rova’s reconnection with the Russian music scene. The band made two ground-breaking tours to the USSR in 1983 and 1989. ON Feb 15, 2011, this new CD was released by SoLyd Records, the first Moscow-based recording label to commercially produce CDs from the improvised music universe. (Also made popular Russian bootlegs of The Beatles LPs way back during the USSR years!)
  
  Featuring four chamber-jazz works from Steve Adams and two idiosyncratic tour-de-forces by Larry Ochs, Planetary promises to take you to parts of the musical universe you always wanted to hear, but didn’t know to ask about.
  
  these are the CD liner notes by Alexander Kan:
  Hard to believe that only now are we seeing the first Rova Saxophone Quartet recording released in Russia – so long and eventful is the history of the group’s love affair with this country.
  It all began in the midst of the Soviet stagnation: Leonid Brezhnev was still alive, Mikhail Gorbachev had just started his climb up the stairs of the top party hierarchy, the words glasnost and perestroika were as yet unfamiliar to anybody non-Russian and vaguely known in Russia. All international contacts were strictly limited, closely monitored and possible only when sanctioned officially by one of the omnipotent state’s numerous government agencies.
  In May 1979, we, a bunch of new music enthusiasts, set up something called Contemporary Music Club. Hiding under the politically acceptable guise of “music of contemporary composers from Eastern Europe” or “jazz from the Soviet Baltic republics” we in fact functioned as an alternative cultural-guerrilla-type organisation. A relatively small venue in one of Leningrad’s mammoth Palaces of Culture featured nothing other than cultural contraband: – anything from electronic avant-garde to radical free jazz to subversive rock.
  And so on until the end….
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  SIGNAL to NOISE review by Michael Rosenstein: "It was a long time coming, but here is the first recording by the Rova Saxophone Quartet on a Russian label, released almost three decades since they headed off on their initial tour of Eastern Europe. It is worth searching out this CD for the liner notes by Alexander Kan alone, which provide the great back-story on how that first tour in 1983 came about. But of course, the music recorded by Rova is always well worth checking out and this collection of realizations of compositions by Steve Adams and Larry Ochs are no exception. The recording opens and closes with readings of two of Adams’ “Parallel Constructions” series, built off of long melodies as a framing focus for group improvisation, with particular note going to the closer, which builds labyrinthine waves of harmonized clusters and duo sections that course against each other with gathering layers of countering detail. Sequencing Ochs’ “S” and Adams’ “Flip Trap” together provides complementary examples of how the ensemble uses overlapping lines and mercurial, constantly morphing time signatures as the various sections of the quartet move in and out of synch with each other. Adams’ “Glass Head Concretion” and Ochs’ “Planetary” are more expansive structures, the first providing an immersive structure of changeable collective densities and textures and the later providing a jumping off point from a pulse-based theme into a swirling interactive game structure for spontaneous simultaneous solos. This 17-minute piece is a tour de force as each of the reed players spin off on propulsive excursions that constantly careen off of each other in new directions, using cellular motifs as a focal structure. With such a deep and extensive discography, it’s easy to miss out on Rova’s output, but this one is a particular winner."
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  Includes unlimited streaming of Planetary 2011 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more
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