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
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 (****)
Woodwind/saxophone ace Ned Rothenberg has a formidable reputation as an innovator. Specifically, Rothenberg has been celebrated for his circular-breathing techniques, as well as his experiments with overtone manipulation and polyphony. He also shares the restless eclecticism of colleagues like John Zorn and Anthony Braxton, with a particular interest in the more painterly shades of contemporary Japanese classical music. What renders Rothenberg more approachable and, in the end, more significant than many of his peers is the serenity at the heart of his fiercest playing. Even when fronting the Double Band, his long-standing, free-blowing jazz-funk ensemble, Rothenberg infuses solos of breathtaking virtuosity with a rare, peaceful patience. - Glen Hirshberg, LA Weekly
"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: "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
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
Rothenberg reconciles an unapologetically cerebral approach with accessibility and emotional expression. No mean feat, indeed.
- Peter Margarsak, Chicago Reader
Ned Rothenberg is absolutely phenomenal.. (He has) opened up new and unheard expressive possibilities for wind instruments.
- Jochen Metzner, Tagespiegel (Berlin)
Intervals is an impressive statement by a fully matured multi-instrumentalist whose stock is strangely undervalued
- Bill Shoemaker, The Wire
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