Jazz
Self-released · 14 February 2026
“Live at Celeste” is a single piece of thirty-one minutes eighteen, “Sounds of the Wienfluss”, recorded on 4 November 2024 in Vienna. There is no other track and no editing in between: what gets published is what happened that night, in the order it happened.
Jon Raskin plays alto saxophone and is one of the four founders of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in October 1977 and named for the initials of their surnames: Raskin, Larry Ochs, Andrew Voigt and Bruce Ackley. Beside him are Thomas Lehn on analogue synthesizer, a long-standing partner in Rova and elsewhere, and the double bassist Matija Schellander, whom the album notes present as a frequent collaborator of Lehn’s. The venue has a history of its own: the Monday session at Celeste was set up in 2005 by Marco Eneidi, an American alto saxophonist who had settled in Vienna. When he moved back to the United States in 2014 it passed to three musicians from the city, who run it in rotation: Susanna Gartmayer on bass clarinet, Thomas Berghammer and Didi Kern. Eneidi died on 24 May 2016. Raskin recorded the album himself and the mastering is by Miles Boisen and Lehn.
Thirty-one minutes in a single track, with no internal markers, leave no way of returning to a passage: the improvisation is published as a document and the document cannot be consulted. With two or three index points, or a division into movements, the same recording could be heard in different ways; as it stands, you take it top to bottom or you do not take it at all.
The title points to the Wienfluss, the river that runs through the city. It comes out with no label, designed by Tom Djll.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents