Ned Rothenberg

Ned Rothenberg will make you reconsider woodwinds. A classically trained player who was educated at Oberlin and Berklee, Rothenberg arrived in New York in the late ’70s to find a downtown scene on the edge of a renaissance. Alongside daring composers and improvisers like John Zorn and Shelley Hirsch, Rothenberg understood the rules of his predecessors enough to break them. “Each of us employed a personal language of normal and extended techniques and a personal chemistry of stylistic influences,” Rothenberg once said. “It was a contrast to many of our European predecessors who self-consciously wanted to avoid idioms.” He built and continues to build an arsenal of extended techniques, allowing him to play involved solo pieces that seem to reinvent the possibilities of the saxophone, clarinet, and shakuhachi.
 
Rothenberg’s massive discography roves from work with peers like Zorn and Marc Ribot to technical and stylistic mentors like Evan Parker and Anthony Braxton, with occasional forays into pop alongside the likes of Elvis Costello. He’s led several ensembles, too. But the core of Rothenberg’s near half-century of sound is his solo work, dauntless and invigorating. His 2025 album, Looms & Legends, is a masterclass of imagination, from the stuttering and shimmering overtones of opener “Dance Above” to the gliding lines and open spaces of “Flurry” to a closing version of “’Round Midnight” on shakuhachi that makes the song feel newly haunted, like an enormous sigh into an endless void. Rothenberg is a consummate technician who plays with absolute heart, making his music both dazzling and absorbing.