Live Webcast: The Celestial Septet (The Nels Cline Singers and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet)

From New World Records newsletter:

Free live webcast with The Celestial Septet

On February 22, Ars Nova Workshop is presenting a concert by the Celestial Septet in Philadelphia, which will be available to non-Philadelphia audiences for free via live webcast. After only four concerts in 2008, this epic ensemble combining the Nels Cline Singers and the ROVA Saxophone Quartet returns for only five US appearances, beginning with this night in Philadelphia. Given the rarity of this celestial union, we've teamed up with a local webcast production crew in order to share the Celestial Septet experience with international audiences.

Ars Nova Workshop is thrilled to present the Celestial Septet, a massive ensemble featuring the Nels Cline Singers and the Rova Saxophone Quartet. After four concerts in 2008 and releasing The Celestial Septet (New World Records 80708-2) in 2010, the ensemble re-emerges for only five performances.

For those outside the Philadelphia area, we are offering a live webcast of this rare concert. Sign up here:  http://arsnova.webillishus.com/

The story of the Celestial Septet is that of two bands becoming one. On their own, the Nels Cline Singers and the Rova Saxophone Quartet have established themselves as the most forward-looking groups not only in their respective formats -- a trio of guitar, bass, and drums, and a quartet of saxophones ranging from baritone to sopranino -- but also in the area of music that has variously and inadequately been called "free," "avant-garde," "creative," and "improvised." The Septet is a vehicle for time and space travel through dense, narrow thickets and airy, wide expanses of boundary-blurred extrapolations of jazz, rock, late-20th-century European modernism and American minimalism, and 21st-century postmodern fusions. The trip is challenging, but the open-minded listener/traveler cannot help but come through the experience with new perspectives on sound and music. Perhaps most significantly, separately and conjoined, these units defy categorization by taking composition as seriously as they take improvisation, and by taking neither so seriously as to let one get in the way of the other. 

Of related interest:
80708 ROVA Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers - The Celestial Septet
80708b An Interview with Larry Ochs (Free Download)
80574 Jon Raskin Quartet - The Bass & The Bird Pond
80553 Quintet for A Day - What We Live

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