Two Different Parker Vintages

By Stuart Broomer

Given the scale of Evan Parker’s discography (no complaint here, it’s both record of a brilliant, innovative career and a boon to many micro labels and some lesser-known musicians), it’s still slightly surprising to find fresh gems, whether 45 years old or 14. Here is a vintage solo concert with the earliest solo tenor saxophone pieces I can recall hearing and a quartet that is as worthy of the adjective “free” as any music might be, a wonderland of impulse and achievement.

Evan Parker - NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch, 2023) 

Few musicians have influenced solo improvisation as Evan Parker has, from the adaptation of circular breathing to the vast exploration of his instruments’ potential for harmonics, quarter tones and apparent polyphony. While there are numerous recordings of its more developed stages, there’s far less of the early solo work.

While Parker had previously travelled to America to hear music, 1978 marked his first appearances as a performer, touring in Canada and the United States as a soloist and also appearing in various ad hoc formations. He had recorded his first LP of solo soprano saxophone (Saxophone Solos) in 1975 and had recorded Monoceros, the first recording to begin documenting the significant scale of his technical innovation in April 1978, just prior to the tour.

Parker’s developing virtuosity drew on multiple techniques, each one difficult to master. The inspiration to develop the harmonic vocabulary might be traced to John Coltrane’s extended cadenza on “I Want to Talk about You” from Live at Birdland. The circular breathing technique that he was developing, used discreetly by some earlier jazz musicians like Duke Ellington’s baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, seems to have come from Indian wind musicians like Bismillah Khan, whose accompanists further substituted a double-reed drone for a tamboura; the overblowing and polyphony are prefigured in the tenor jeremiads that Pharoah Sanders started to produce around 1965. The marvel was that Parker was proceeding along all of these lines, whether sounding like the inhabitants of an angry aviary or a group of flutes.

Recorded at the performance space Environ, the pieces here are simply entitled “Environ” and numbered sequentially. Four are soprano saxophone solos, ranging from “Environ 1” with its impression of a flock of birds to the ultimate “Environ 6”, given over to rapid short phrases that tumble over each other, often with sharply differentiated timbres in a single burst. Unlike his contemporaneously released solo work, New York 1978 includes examples of his solo tenor saxophone, already as developed as the soprano and making effective use of the instrument’s lower register. “Environ 2” moves from turbine-like blasts to wild, burred runs, while “4” gives the impression of a bank of oscillators in a vast cavern.

Once, at the conclusion of a later Parker solo soprano performance, a Buddhist friend exclaimed, “it’s like illumination in music”, and it’s precisely that which makes it more than just technical achievement, but rather achievement near the current limits of known music’s possibilities. Here one gets more of the origin story. 

 

Marteau Rouge (Foussat/Pauvros/Sato) & Evan Parker - Gift (Fou Records, 2023)

 

Parker’s history with the French trio Marteau Rouge dates from at least as early as 1988, evidenced on Gift by a photo of the quartet from that year, but the present concert recording comes from Les Instants Chavirés in 2009. It stands out amongst Parker’s collaborations because of the group’s special character, combining a collective attentiveness with a penchant for fabricating competing layers of turbulent sound. Jean-Marc Foussat, on AKS synth, toys and voice, and Jean-François Pauvros, electric guitar and voice, create a brilliant diversity of sound, often hard to divide up for attribution but somehow often both chaotic and subtle, while drummer Makoto Sato is a subtle and essential acoustic partner, a reality principle in a dreamscape.

There are two long improvisations here, “Air Frais” running to 27 minutes, “Into the Deep” 35, with a 7-minute “Will-o’-the Wisp” as encore. Parker’s tenor saxophone is the first voice on the opening “Air Frais”, at once abstract and pensive, suggesting a kind of nocturne, but it will soon turn to an anarchic carnival of sound with the entry of Foussat and Pauvros (best sorted out on headphones), the former generating a maze of whirrs, whistles, blast and roars, the latter responsible for sounds that might come from a processed electric guitar, including passages on both of the long tracks that suggest diverse string instruments (Asian and African and cello), whether bowed, plucked or Echoplexed. Sato is, in this context, an understated drummer, precise but propulsive, somehow pressing in the undergrowth, coming to the fore in the midst of “Into the Deep” which concludes with a wondrously strange passage of electronically processed muezzin vocal that gradually shifts to African chant, no guarantees of authenticity beyond the quartet’s own.

Given how much the band has created in the hour, it’s remarkable how much is left for that “Will-o’-the Wisp”, with processed free vocalizing and consistent drive and yet more cascading tenor saxophone, a music of both high and good spirits. Among Foussat’s credits are recording, mixing, editing and mastering – all at a high standard and all the more noteworthy given how much of the music he was also making.