ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Favorite Street (side A)

I have a lot of Steve Lacy records, and I've never heard half of the pieces that ROVA rearranges here (the tracks that I own are on some of my less-favorite Lacy albums, though he often recorded pieces more than once). Their treatments of Lacy are generally deferential without being (from what I can tell) literal. At times they reference jazz (despite the lack of a rhythm section), while at others, they become more fragmented and syncopated—this description could also fit a lot of Lacy's albums. By 1984, ROVA seem to have smoothed over some of the oddities from their early records on Metlanguage, as Favorite Street feels a bit more refined and careful. Art Lange's liner notes are both informative (I learned what Lacy record one of the pieces came from) and slightly pretentious (he was really eager to talk about Charles Olson).