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p r e s s "Ned Rothenberg is absolutely phenomenal.. (He has) opened up new and unheard expressive possibilitties for wind instruments." PHOTO GALLERY
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Press Excerpts "Intervals is an impressive statement by a fully matured multi-instrumentalist whose stock is strangely undervalued" - Bill Shoemaker, The Wire "Ned Rothenberg's compendium of finely crafted pieces (Intervals) - one album devoted to alto saxophone and the other to clarinets and shakuhachi...spring from 20 years of practiced discipline and control of solo reed performance. Rothenberg pushes sonic and spatial barriers in these essays for winds, as he explores combinations of vacillating intervals and knotty melodic kernels, and balances evolving patterns with ripe arpeggios and colorful harmonics. These tautly structured pieces seem more stories than studies and the sounds he attains are fascinating to behold." Fred Bouchard, Downbeat (****) The reed player's recent duets with Evan Parker demonstrated the kind of deep mischief he's capable of. But his solo outings have a near religious focus to them. You'll be entertained - his improvs are compelling on many levels. And you'll understand how dedication to craft can nurture larger questions of art and approach. - Jim Macnie, Village Voice Ned Rothenberg: "Power Lines" (New World). A New York alto saxophonist-composer on the edge of jazz and new music who draws influences from around the world, Rothenberg has made an album full of salon-style, flowing melody and flexible rhythm, with an A-list group from New York's downtown scene -Ben Ratliff, NY Times top 10 of the year
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"Ned Rothenberg's Power Lines is an absolute classic that no other downtown CD — by John Zorn, Dave Douglas, or anybody else well-known or obscure — has ever topped....Power Lines is among the earthiest, most soulful and grooving CDs that anybody from the downtown crowd has ever released. Thanks for this must go to Rothenberg, who has an uncanny ability to compose and arrange music that hits the listener with nearly equal emphasis in all the main places that it can be felt — the body, heart, and head. Some downtowners have been accused of being overly cerebral, but certainly not Rothenberg, and certainly not here. Rothenberg's sense of earthy funk and soul is akin to another altoist from the same community, Tim Berne, although with his circular breathing abilities, Rothenberg is more likely to shape his phrases into endlessly evolving ostinatos à la Evan Parker. And, with the Power Lines ensemble in particular, Rothenberg favors structures more rooted in world fusion, with churning and rolling percussion, multi-layered polyphony, and persistent yet odd-metered grooves. The tracks tend to be lengthy, including "In the Rotation" at over 21 minutes long, but the music stays riveting from the opening fanfare of "Hildago" to the final blast of "In the Rotation" due to the varied structures, infectious circular rhythms, boldly expressive soloing, and overall kaleidoscopic sounds. The music is at its most chamberesque during "Strange Sarabande," but even then the string quartet's romantic flourishes are counterbalanced with low drones, vamps, and pizzicato pluckings that root the piece in deep and resonant ground. "Bellhop Vontz" is actually a reworking of "Fits and Starts" from Real and Imagined Time by Rothenberg's Double Band. Indeed proceeding via fits and starts, the piece is uncanny in how thoroughly improvised it can often seem, and yet even passages that seem completely "of the moment" reveal themselves to be part of the score when the two versions are heard side by side. "In the Rotation" is nothing short of a masterpiece, with its polyrhythmic cartwheels and burrowing groove, its torrid solos, and its massed string, horn, and reed embellishments, all of which coalesce in an absolutely thrilling crescendo at the album's close. Power Lines is a pinnacle of New York downtown music. Next time you read critics or hear fans rave enthusiastically about the downtown scene — and hey, you just did — find this CD and hear what all the fuss is about." — Dave Lynch, All Music Guide "Rothenberg reconciles an unapologetically cerebral approach with accessibility and emotional expression. No mean feat, indeed."- Peter Margarsak, Chicago Reader
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"Rothenberg's (solo) compositions are fortunately a lot more than demonstrations. They are monologues which cast their net improbably wide ethnologically speaking. He is a fluent, comfortable inhabitant of the interesting world he shows us." - Richard Buell, Boston Globe "Ned Rothenberg is absolutely phenomenal.. (He has) opened up new and unheard expressive possibilitties for wind instruments." - Jochen Metzner, Tagespiegel (Berlin)
Ghost Stories, a collection of classically themed chamber pieces, may be his most perfectly realized release to date. Austere but not forbidding, all four of these works recall Rain Tree Sketch–era Toru Takemitsu in their moments of misty, gently disintegrating dissonance, yet they are never derivative. In “Arbor Vitae,” Rothenberg’s clarinet and Riley Lee’s shakuhachi flute alternate as still ocean and trade wind, blowing around and across and through each other. The title composition, for pipa (Chinese lute), cello and percussion, develops fitfully, with moments of politely plucked strings and tapped toms evolving into squalls of scraping bows and scurrying percussion. “Kagami,” for Rothenberg’s solo shakuhachi, remains centered in the preternatural stillness that instrument creates around itself, but shudders with unexpected bursts of tongue and breath. A relentless student, Rothenberg has had many collaborators and teachers. But that welcoming tranquillity is nothing he learned, and it saturates all these ghost stories, which rise far above pastiche or homage, and which really are haunted. - Glen Hirshberg - LA Weekly "If only this were a double or triple or quadruple CD (see Intervals). The Crux is an appetizer, a signpost in the life of America's most intimate composer and improviser. From his New Winds projects to his involvement in the group Semantics to his solo concerts, these works are the result of a career-long fascination with the solo concert, the solo as a means of discovering the depth and breadth of your creativity and putting it out there for others to hear. Rothenberg's playing, particularly on the alto saxophone, has been deeply influenced by his nearly two-decade-long study of the Japanese shakuhachi flute and its attendant form of meditation music "Honkyoku." From his early recordings where his saxophone pieces were filled with fluttering, galloping skeins of notes come a more spare — though certainly not underactive — approach to exploring tonality and timbre. Works such as "Sokaku Reibo" reflect the open, methodical mannerisms of the shakuhachi, as it pursues its own limited scale and makes it rich in tonal and vibrational variation. Rothenberg has taken these attributes and combined them with the circular breathing technique and adapted them for alto with stunning results. His shakuhachi piece, "Do Omoi," is a reflective work from the meditative tradition, but includes Western accents and scalar considerations in a slow cascade of arpeggios that are more about duration and space than dynamics or structural architecture. Also showcased here are the dedication pieces based on stylistic influences. There is the title track and "Epistrophical Notions," both mirroring the different sides of Thelonious Monk's music as it reaches out from jazz and meets Rothenberg's idiomatic compositional concerns and touches Monk's "Round Midnight" and "Epistrophy" for confirmation of the balance — he passes the tests. There is also a work reflecting the deep funk of James Brown. Though it isn't a funk piece, it creates a revolving door repetition around a pair of figures and time signatures that are formulaic figures for Brown and his horn section. The piece, "Maceo," is dedicated to the saxophonist himself, the primary architect of the sound of the Fabulous Flames. In all, Rothenberg offers a startling array of his compositional motifs and his tendency to allow, even in the most rigid of his works, the place for improvisation for them to be current and new each time they're performed — if only by the composer himself. This is easily one of Rothenberg's most important works; if only there were more. — Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
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Paris Transatlantic 2004 (English)