Search - Rova Sax Quartet;Nels Cline Singers :: The Celestial Septet

The sum is greater than the parts.

greg taylor | Portland, Oregon United States | 03/22/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The ROVA saxophone quartet is one of the oldest enduring groupings/institutions in all of creative improv/free jazz. For about three decades they have promoted/commissioned/premiered new music from the classical and jazz world. They were among the first Western groups to play behind the Iron Curtain (some of you reading this were not alive then). As individuals and as a group they have persued collaborations with pretty much everybody they could. The results of those collaborations have set very high standards.

The Nels Cline Singers are a guitar-bass-drums trio comprised of Nels Cline, Devin Hoff and Scott Amendola. They have their own history of accomplishment in a wide varieties of music. Cline has playes in Wilco, he has played in the West Coast jazz scene for years and has played with other musicians from around the world

These guys have played with each other before as on the ROVA Ascension project.

The Celestial Septet evolved from those experiences. The result is something almost unimaginable. For this grouping makes music of a majesty and beauty that it almost makes the sub-groupings obsolete.

It helps that (maybe) all the individual musicians are very accomplished composers. I say maybe because I have not heard any compositions by Hoff. Perhaps he will contribute to the next recording. But all of the others have an established repretoire of compositions for the group to rework and the ability to write new ones.

The recording starts off with one of the reworkings; Cesar Chavez by Amendola was recorded on an earlier album of his, Believe. This song shows off a side of Ochs of which I never tire. Ochs on his tenor has a tone that stands alongside other soulful tenor greats like Fathead Newman or Lockjaw Davis. In other words, Ochs can be a preacher and he does so to great effect on this tune. Later in the piece, Cline gets to demonstrate another way of creating beauty in melodic exploration. He dances around the melody with lightening runs and atomospheric shards.

One of the things that really struck me on this CD is how little a sense there is of the quartet versus the trio. Those groupings are certainly present but the works have been arranged much more around the individual members and the septet as a whole.

The other thing that surprised me for some reason is how much the ROVA members hear Cline as the main voice on a section of a piece. The two groups have merged completely in this music to form something new, flexible and wonderfully musical.

The liner notes (very well done by Derek Richardson) imply that there are more CDs to come from this grouping. I certainly hope so. This extraordinary collection of performers/composers could be one of the most influential and productive ensembles in this music for years.

"