Planetary 2011 by Rova Saxophone Quartet

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. Now 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….

Rova: a group that can move you the way an Eastern European choir of voices can move you, but also a group with force that can feel as if its tearing the walls of the listening space down, or one of nature’s wild phenomena, or conversely, the almost-silent overlapping sound-patterns heard with eyes closed in a field in the wilderness. Since 1978, dealing it, and surprising listeners worldwide.

rova.org