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A private screening took place at Dolby Studios in San Francisco at the very end of April. John Rogers documentary about Coltrane's Ascension and Rova's Electric Ascension ("Cleaning the Mirror") was shown first. Then the concert video of Electric Ascension was shown in glorious Blu-Ray with 5.1 Surround Sound. 

Some of you were there, plus 4 of the musicians in the performance, plus music and film associates, board members,  and friends of both Rova:Arts and Ideas in Motion. It's very clear from the response that afternoon that the entire project has been a fantastic success.

So two things are now in process. John Rogers and Ideas in Motion are now trying to line up film festivals and - eventually - big city venues that are capable of presenting the concert film in 5.1 Surround Sound. For those of you who don't know, "surround sound" adds a third speaker to a normal stereo system;  instead of having your typical left-front and right-front speaker, you now have an added speaker in the center of the screen in front of you. This third speaker makes all the sound much clearer, better defined, and especially allows for the low end of the sound spectrum to be heard much more distinctly. And then there are also two side speakers which really open the sound up, even though 95% of the musical sound is still in the 3 front speakers. But the side-speakers make the sound feel more immediate and real.

The second process in motion is to figure out how to best release a DVD version of the two videos, so that people can purchase this to watch at home. We imagine the package including both the stereo DVD and a blu-ray version with the 5.1 sound included on the blu-ray. The blu-ray version, it is hoped, will also contain an amazing "extra." In June the film producers will consult with an expert in the computer field who thinks he will be able to create this extra. If it works out as imagined, then anyone will be able to go to any  section of the concert video, and then choose one player to highlight. When highlighted you would, for example, be able to hear Nels Cline's playing raised above the rest of the ensemble during that section of the piece. On repeated listenings you will be able to highlight any other player you choose. So if the ensemble is in a very dense section, an orchestral section, and you are wondering what exactly is Cline's contribution to this mass of sound, you will now be able to investigate that. In other words, for students of music and hard-core fans, there will be a whole lot more listening to do over time since you could make this choice with any player, but only one at a time.

I spent many, many hours mixing both the stereo and 5.1 surround sound. (I'm more the adviser than the mixer, since I sit behind the official engineers - Jim McKee on 5.1 and Marc Urselli on the stereo mix - and suggest what should come up and go down.) On this performance, I can say that everyone's contributions to the music were worthy of being heard alone all the way thru the piece. But of course, this is an orchestral work and much of the time, when the entire band or a large portion of the band is playing, choices are made that lift one or two players above the others, or purposely equalize all sounds so that the final mix is orchestrally balanced. The "extra" on blu-ray would  allow you to hear individual contributions to the orchestral sound, should you want to get into that kind of detail. It's a pretty cool idea, and worth the delay it may cause in getting the final product out.

In the meantime, for those of you in or near to San Francisco, let me take this moment to alert you to the fact that a sextet of Rova plus Ikue Mori and Gino Robair will present the first performances of a new work called "Grand Electric Skull" on June 6 and 7 in San Francisco's Kanbar Hall; the Hall is located in Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and is one of the best places in San Francisco to hear music. Initially inspired by the topical urgency of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada’s calaveras imagery, Rova teams up with world renowned visual artist, Ikue Mori, and composer and multi-instrumentalist Gino Robair to create this  ambitious collaborative work. Robair will provide a map of the piece, and Rova will collaborate with Robair on the composed-improvised musical score. Mori will be focused on providing live-mixes of images to multiple screens onstage.  Robair and Mori will mix and manipulate audio and visual information in real time, lending improvisatory elements of surprise and correspondence to the concert experience.......for tickets: bit.ly/ROVA2013       

...............To see a small sampling of the raw images Mori has chosen for possible use in the piece: 

So sorry for the long gap between Updates. Since maybe early December we have felt we were just a week or two from being able to post this same update. But "getting it right" was paramount, and so there have been, not delays so much as a repeating desire to tweak either the sound or the picture "just a little bit more."  In the end (much to my surprise), the visual side of the live performance video was finished up before the sound mix was. Today, Friday March 22nd, Jim McKee, John Rogers Starr Sutherland and I made our second visit to Lucas Ranch studios where we were able to complete the 5.1 Surround sound to our satisfaction. A stereo version, mixed by Marc Urselli, is also completed now.

Folks: THE VIDEO PERFORMANCE IS SMOKING!! AND SOULFUL! You must see it in a theater with the 5.1 sound, and we will be trying to get showings of this in various cities over the next year or more. WOW!!! I am wigging out at how awesome this looks, but even after mixing this with Marc and Jim since last October, I am still blown away by the contributions of all the other musicians. 

In the meantime, if you're expecting a reward involving the sound or the video, that will be going out very shortly. The music download next week hopefully. Still a bit longer until we have the video download ready.

As we get more news, we will pass it along.

Ciao,

Larry Ochs

First of all, if you're in the Northeast, we hope you and yours are all safe after the storm. And that any damage to homes etc can be dealt with as quickly as possible.

 On October 20, Larry Ochs and Marc Urselli spent 8 hours mixing the sound for Electric Ascension in New York. We are not done yet, but we got far enough to know that we really have something very special on tape. (Sorry, showing my age with the phrase “on tape” but you know what I mean.) Yes: we did hear the enthusiasm of the audience on the night of the concert; we heard it again the whole next day from individuals who had been in the audience and were not shy to come up to us at the hotel or in the streets of Guelph and enthuse. And we felt great about it after it was over. But none of that guarantees that the music will come across in a recording. So it’s nice to able to confirm that the music is there. Wow! The Blues according to John Coltrane - that feeling - really comes through on this take of the piece.The process of mixing though takes time. 

 My main observation upon listening to each player’s contributions - listening to the individual on her/his own track -  was that I could easily pick certain trios, quintets etc. out of the group and just create a recording from one of those configurations that would be amazing/beautiful/profound. So there are choices to be made during mixing as to what to feature and then what exactly to collectivize into “the firmament of sound” that bubbles along like a beautiful orchestral voice. I’m speaking now of the ensemble improvisations mostly, when more than five or six people are involved. The duo, trio, quartet and quintet sections within the larger piece are beautiful now (…maybe a few minor tweaks left to do on each small grouping.) And one of the very exciting parts of this recording of Electric Ascension is just how musically different in feel it is from the recording made of the first performance in 2003 (released by the Chicago label Atavistic in 2005). Which makes it another example of how cool the Coltrane composition Ascension is. That the piece could accommodate both versions performed by 12 musicians, ten of whom were there at the first performance, and be so different. Quite cool. 

And then there’s the video: it looks great even at this early stage in production. High definition video is a great invention. John Rogers continues to work on editing the picture to best show the music-making and, hopefully to capture some of the magic. The process of editing from five synched cameras is made tremendously easier by multi-camera editing software, but still takes a lot of work. How did they do this stuff in “the old days”? Once the picture cutting is completed the next step for the video will be to bring in a specialist to do the final color correction. 

 Hope to have the music download available sometime in January, early February … As for the video: late spring sometime, as a download. The photo diary however, shots of the load-in, rehearsal and show, is almost ready to deliver. Toronto based photographer Marek Lasarski was kind enough to spend the whole day with us. Most of the shots in this photo diary (over 90%) are his, with a few added shots from the tech people showing you the recording set-up and the cameras in the audience. Plus maybe a few stills from the video footage. That will be online for download in November. 

Finally, it seems to make sense, as I talk about full ensemble versus smaller ensemble sections: here below we show you what we call “The Map” of the piece as performed in Guelph; it shows you what you can anticipate hearing and seeing as the audio and video are completed next year. The Map simply shows which players are performing in each section. The complicated thing is cueing the sections in and out in real time as the piece develops onstage; mostly “phased in or out,” one player at a time…. primarily these cues were made by Jon Raskin, who did a fantastic job on this performance. From my perspective, it’s possible that any one of these instrumental combinations could perform an entire set of music based on the EA theme all by themselves, so deciding when to cue sections out and bring in the next one is a series of tricky decisions that determines the overall arc of the piece and really makes or breaks the show. And those decisions are improvised as the piece develops

Here below is the Map for Guelph, somewhat modified due to this update form:

PREMONITIONS: HAMID - IKUE = add CHRIS add FRED or NELS add NELS or FRED

HEAD (the notated music) and CHORUS (chord progression) into GROUP IMPROVISATION

1. OCHS with NELS - FRED – HAMID – CHRIS - IKUE // followed by CHORUS and/or GROUP IMPROVISATION

2. NELS with FRED – HAMID – CHRIS - IKUE

3. IKUE – CARLA - FRED // add HAMID // followed by CHORUS and/or GROUP IMPROVISATION

4. JON – ROB – HAMID // followed by CHORUS and/or GROUP IMPROVISATION

5. JENNY – NELS duo // add CHRIS

6. add BRUCE / add FRED and HAMID / phase out JENNY (BRUCE with NELS-FRED-HAMID-CHRIS) //  followed by CHORUS and/or GROUP IMPROVISATION

7. CHRIS with IKUE, ROB 

8. JENNY – CARLA – HAMID

9. add NELS cycler / add FRED / add CHRIS and IKUE cyclers // followed by CHORUS and/or GROUP IMPROVISATION

10. STEVE with NELS - FRED – HAMID – CHRIS - IKUE // Group Improvisation

11. HAMID and FRED (Ochs =  COLORS cues)

12 GROUP IMPROVISATION and Final reading of HEAD

(from Larry Ochs and John Rogers) 

Like Larry, although I am reluctant to say so less there emerge some still-hidden technical gremlins or artistic failures, I too am stunned by the apparent “overwhelming success of it all.” There were so many things that could have gone wrong, and hardly anything did. Instead, it was an absolutely stunning Electric Ascension, and the footage looks and sounds fantastic. As I write this, the last of the video files are being entered into the Avid, and it looks like we’ll be able to start editing this week. 

Having been blessed to witness five performances of Electric Ascension (SF, Paris, Philly, Saalfelden, Guelph) I am struck by how different they have been; overpowering, stormy, skittish, intense, unsettled, passionate. I have heard it played with 4 different drummers, 2 different guitarists, 2 different bassists, different violinists (4), trumpet players (2), electronics players (5), and a harpist. It is always a powerful spiritual journey that stays with me for months. Guelph was somehow, unexpectedly, the most beautiful. 

Perhaps in the long run, all the preparations necessitated by the filming, served the music. Once the plans to film became a reality, the venue was changed to the lovely concert hall at the River Run Performing Arts Centre. As well as allowing several locations for cameras in the house, including a big jib, the large stage gave everyone in the band and the on-stage handheld cameras plenty of room to move around. The River Run had installed a fine new sound system in the hall, and acoustics in the room were excellent. Plans for a double bill were scratched, giving the band and the video crew 4 full hours for their sound check and run through. Several days were devoted to preparing for this one performance, refining the lighting, the backdrop, the musicians' positions on the stage, the correct microphones, the stage monitoring. On the day of the shoot, the River Run house crew was calm and professional and everything went like clockwork. On our side of things, we had been working since June with a super production manager in Toronto, Allan Levine. He recruited the crew of thirteen and lined up a video rental house to supply all the cameras etc. So, again, by the time load-in day arrived everyone was well-prepared. A space was  constructed where creation could take place.

My only big scare came at 7:55pm when I looked out into the hall and it was basically empty for a 8:00 show. What if people don’t show up and we have to shoot this thing in a half-empty house? I felt my heart sink. Ten minutes later the crowd had piled in and the orchestra was packed. My heart was beating hard when I took my place at the table next to the video director who directs  the cameras and calls the shots for the live cut. As the first sound of the electronics improvisation that opens the piece came through the speakers, the five cameras and all our preparations didn’t seem adequate. How could we hope to capture the energy and feeling radiating from that stage. Then with the first notes of the head, we were off. When the band returned to the head over an hour later, I felt like only 40 minutes had passed and was wondering what we were going to do with such a short version.  Have we captured the essence of Ascension? That remains to be seen.  - JR              

(To be continued)