Pipe Dreams

ROVA:

Figure 8: Pipe Dreams
If it means anything, it's got its own kind of swing.

(Bruce Ackley - liner notes)

Recorded in 1994
Larry Ochs tenor & sopranino sax Bruce Ackley tenor & soprano sax Glenn Spearman tenor sax Dave Barrett tenor, alto & saxello sax Steve Adams baritone, alto & sopranino sax Jon Raskin baritone, alto & sopranino sax Vinny Golia baritone, soprano, bass and sopranino sax Tim Berne baritone & alto sax

Ind. Title Composer Dur.
1/ Head Count (for Albert Ayler & Pete Townshend) Larry Ochs 3:37
2/ LG-(S-DB-J)TV (for Ray Charles & Steve Lacy) 15:31
3/ Tracers (for Anthony Braxton & Morton Feldman) 27:07
4/ Drmes Trad., arr. S. Adams 2:46
5/ Triceratops (for Iannis Xenakis & Roscoe Mitchell) Larry Ochs 25:24

Drmes is a transcription of traditional Croatian song.

Recorded January, 1994 at Bay Studios in Berkeley, California. Engineer: Robert Shumaker. Recording consultant: Myles Boisen.

Producer: Larry Ochs. Executive producer: Giovanni Bonandrini.

Cover painting: Robin Winters. Cover art: Lucija Kordic.

Liner Notes

On Pipe Dreams Ochs dedicates each composition to a pair of musical figures who contributed to the way it sounds. Rather than setting out to compose dedication pastiche pieces, he detected traces of these composers in the music after the fact. It's a fascinating list, precisely the kind that twists jazz purism into a pretzel and eats it up : rock, R&B, contemporary classical, and free jazz (both white and black) are represented in the litany of dedications and in the music they accompany.

 LG-[S-DB-J]TV kicks off with a bottom-feeder baritone solo from Golia, giving way to the "skewed R&B-based head" (Ochs's words) with soaring high lines giving it an appropriately Brother Ray-like gospel flair. Chugging blues vamps support an acidic alto solo from Adams, then Big Jay McNeelyish tenor honk from Ochs. The vamp infrastructure pares down as Spearman joins Ochs; one by one, trills interrupt the blues and the vamps disappear, overtaken by a raucous octet improvisation. Trills eventually bridge this into a more disjunct, textural, abstract quartet interaction featuring Ackley, Raskin, Berne, and Golia. From way out on this limb, Ochs reintroduces the slinky A-theme, giving it the feel of '70s Lacy, when our favorite Parisian soprano-man was prone to travel more distantly from the framing compositional material than he does now.

John Corbett (excerpt from the sleeve notes)