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heike liss (l-r): Larry Ochs, Donald Robinson, and Scott Amendola make up the Larry Ochs Sax & Drumming Core. Flying without a Net A local improv saxophonist articulates By Lisa Hayle "It's art music, which isn't popular," answers East Bay improv musician Larry Ochs when asked why there is such a narrow audience for his music. "Most people don't have the time or think they don't know how to get inside improvisational music. You just need to relax and let it in." Ochs, who has made more than two dozen CDs, been on 30 European tours, and has performed with the likes of Fred Frith, The Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, and Miya Masaoka, recently returned from his first tour ever with the Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core with Scott Amendola and Donald Robinson on drums. "It went really well. In Europe there are more places to play, and a slightly bigger audience for experimental music." But, he says, the experimental scene has seen its time in the Bay Area. "It was more popular in the late '70s, early '80s. Now the center for jazz and for improvised music is New York City. So, theoretically," Ochs laments, " if I had been there for the last 25 years, I'd probably be better known." Apparently there's not a lot of support for Ochs and his stylings on the West Coast. "Did you know the San Francisco Chronicle will not even review jazz anymore because record sales are down for that genre?" But make no mistake, there is an audience here in the Bay Area, Ochs says, it's just that the word jazz doesn't mean much anymore because it covers so much ground. "The scene has been here a long time and it reaches into all kinds of areas. I have done collaborations with musicians from several genres." When asked how the saxophone fits into the mix, he says he sees it as a vocal instrument. "I do a lot of singing through the horn. I am more interested in the sounds it makes than how to play the lines of the pieces. One of my favorite saxophone players is Pharaoh Sanders. It's not so much what he's doing as how he sounds. It's just an orientation. With my music, I am really trying to redefine the instruments' relationships to each other. But I am playing the saxophone, which is a modern jazz instrument. So the connection is there." How did Ochs first get involved in experimental jazz? "I began losing interest in rock when I lost interest in what the rhythm section was doing," he says. "Like Jimi Hendrix, for example -- no matter how far out he took the guitar, the rhythm section took the danger out of it. The bass and drums were safe. Hendrix was flying with a net, whereas in a lot of improvised music, there is no net for the musicians or the listener. "In improvised music," he explains, "even when there are pieces, it's still not the same each time out. That's part of the challenge for the musicians and what makes the listeners like it." Larry Och's music is definitely outside the box, existing in a place that insists the listener let go of what is expected. Look for What We Live and The Larry Ochs Sax and Drumming Core at Yoshi's on Monday, April 29th. The show will be sponsored by Jazz in Flight. When Oakland singer/songwriter Lisa Hayle isn't doing music, she pushes words into other shapes. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]