Event

ROVA SAX QUARTET

Rova Sax Quartet's musical goal has always been, since 1978, to instigate, to challenge, and to inspire. The group explores the synthesis of composition and collective improvisation, creating exciting, genre-bending music. Rova is one of the longest-standing groups in the music movement that has its roots in post-bop, free jazz, avant-rock, and 20th century new music; often drawing inspiration from the visual arts.

Rova returns to the SF Live Arts series for the first time since fall 2017; the concert will feature several premieres, all composed by members of the band. Rovas Bruce Ackley has been commissioned to create a work dedicated to longtime SF Live Arts assistant-director, community activist, friend and extraordinary artist, Marlene Aron.
"Rova is honored to be able to offer a benediction, a meditation in remembrance of friend and artist Marlene Aron. Our connection to Marlene stretches back some decades to the old Noe Valley Ministry series at the church on Sanchez, where she assisted with shows and was always deeply engaged with Rovas programs there." Provisionally titled Woven, the work centers around two of Arons most powerful works: Weep at the Beauty of her Stones and Ground, the Brown Earth Accepts Everything: Forest Prayer, and Woven in Time, Woven in Time, We Becomeboth paintings from 2016. The two works are circular, and are constructed with a filigree of natural elements, along with traditional media, and each is embedded in square-format frames.
Ackleys work imagines the equal-sided shape corresponding to Rovas 4 voices, and the detailed texture of the paintings surfaces, and their colors, informing the variegated quality of the sounds the quartet will create.
The work will employ a blend of composed and improvised elements, Rovas stock in trade. Like the freedom and play central to her two deeply moving works, composing and planning is intended to create a space for improvisation to dwell.
Rova looks forward to premiering Woven in the beautifully sympathetic space of St. Cyprians Church.