Sunday, March 18th, 2018
Timucua Arts Foundation and The Civic Minded 5 present
ROVA Saxophone Quartet
Timucua Arts
2000 South Summerlin Ave, Orlando, Fl 32806
7:00 pm doors, 7:30 concert
$10-$20 suggested donation

Click to watch this ROVA concert live via the Timucua YouTube. 

This is the 100th cm5 concert.

It’s significant that ROVA are the musicians for this event. The principals in the Civic Minded 5 started presenting live music with the sponsorship of WPRK-Rollins College. ROVA’s first appearance here was a sonorous 1996 concert in Knowles Memorial Chapel on the Rollins campus, coinciding with our own nascent steps as presenters.

ROVA- Jon Raskin, Larry Ochs, Steve Adams (replacing Andrew Voigt in 1988) and Bruce Ackley are celebrating their 40th year of moving the plumb on how a new music saxophone quartet stays relevant as creators. In noting ROVA’s innovative role in developing the all-saxophone ensemble as “a regular and conceptually wide-ranging unit,” The Penguin Guide to Jazz calls its music “a teeming cosmos of saxophone sounds” created by “deliberately eschewing conventional notions about swing [and] prodding at the boundaries of sound and space…” Expect that practice to continue. In our collective live experiences with the quartet, they are identifiable as consummate ensemble musicians. The four players act atomic in structure, rearranging to create new bonds and molecules that adapt to the environment, compositional rules and their outside collaborators. Witnesses to their 1996 visit heard the ringing, last chords of Lindsay Cooper’s Face In The Crowd mixing with a passenger jet in the flight path overhead the Knowles Memorial Chapel. The 1998 return to Rollins College saw an effusive, extended techniques baritone saxophone solo via Jon Raskin (inadvertently) causing Braxton Hicks contractions for a front-row audience member.

Their 1970’s formation occured at a time when a far-reaching saxophone quartet wasn’t a common choice for group inception planning. A 1998 Orlando Weekly concert preview sums up ROVA’s impetus from recorded outreach in the micro-genres we operate amongst:

“It was probably [Steve] Lacy’s Emanem LP, ‘Saxophone Special,’ that most encouraged or spawned the sax quartet idea,” says Ochs. He also identifies Anthony Braxton’s “New York (Fall 1974)” album as a seminal influence.

Addressing legacy or unclicking the pause button, the quartet added two West Coast collaborators to address Saxophone Special in toto just last year.

ROVA open their U.S. Southeast Tour in Orlando, not for a warmup date, creating a set based on sonic contours of Timucua Arts. The same happens when they concertize twice at the legend-in-the-making Big Ears Festival in Knoxville days later; filling a wide-open, multi-purpose floor of Knoxville Art Museum with Sound In Space, a live saxophone installation, and the 12-member ROVA Channeling Coltrane ensemble reimagining Ascension in the grand-old, city center Tennessee Theater.  

Trade a donation at the show for a solid copy of this commemorative poster.

Come out. Be kind with a donation to this unicorn of an organization. We’ve made this happen one-hundred times in your backyard. Take part in the Timucua instant arts community created at each event by appearing willing – described by composer Anthony Braxton as the “friendly experiencer.” Timucua encourages a small plate dish and a bottle of wine for community distribution. We’ll see you there.