Strings With Evan Parker (2001)

At the start of 1997, Evan Parker invited 23 musicians into the studio to record some large and medium scale improvisations. The most focused result was a performance by the strings with some electronics, heard here as Flying Spark.

A year later, this inspired Parker to just invite string players, some of whom use electronics, to a recording session. The session resulted in about two and a half hours of magnificent music, all of which is heard here in the order of performance. (Less than one minute of music has been edited out.)

Having invited these performers into the studio, Parker basically just let them get on and make music. The results were so good that he did not join in until towards the end of the session. After the first five improvisations, he asked the ensemble for a piece to be used as an accompaniment for an overdubbed saxophone solo. Two and a half years later he did overdub the ensuing piece, and the end result is Double Headed Serpent. Since the original piece is also very fine (and quite different) in its own right, it is also included without the overdubbing as Single Headed Serpent.

Following this extended dense drone-like piece, there was a complete contrast with two short, plucked group improvisations and a bowed one. After this, each member of the ensemble chose a subset of four to six players, resulting in the Sub-Groups. Some of these included Parker playing for the first time that day. The final and longest piece of the day - The Spider's Web - was the only time all ten musicians performed together.

The performances show the influences of both of the great English traditions of group improvisation - those of AMM and SME. Evan Parker had been a member of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in 1967 when the SME method was first put into practice; but he has also been an admirer of AMM since his first exposure to them around the same time, and has been invited to guest with them occasionally in the intervening years. Starting with his work with the Music Improvisation Company in 1968, he has been involved in exploring ways of combining the AMM and SME methods. By now, these two methods, and the ways to combine them, are 'in the air' - lingua franca to most improvisers on the scene, as can be heard here. Martin Davidson (2001)

DISC A
1. The Sitting on the Roof Series 1
2. The Sitting on the Roof Series 2
3. The Sitting on the Roof Series 3
4. Laughing in the House
5. Another Fire Drill
6. Double Headed Serpent

DISC B
1. The Ghost Series 1: (Pizzicato)
2. The Ghost Series 2: (Pizzicato)
3. The Ghost Series 3: (Arco)
4. Sub-Group Marcio Mattos 1
5. Sub-Group Marcio Mattos 2
6. Sub-Group Rhodri Davies
7. Sub-Group Mark Wastell
8. Sub-Group Peter Cusack
9. Sub-Group Phil Durrant
10. Sub-Group Hugh Davies
11. Sub-Group John Russell
12. Sub-Group John Edwards
13. Sub-Group Kaffe Matthews

DISC C
1. The Spider’s Web
2. Single Headed Serpent
3. Flying Spark

PHIL DURRANT: violin
KAFFE MATTHEWS: violin & electronics
MARCIO MATTOS: cello
MARK WASTELL: cello (except C3)
JOHN EDWARDS: double bass
RHODRI DAVIES: harp
PETER CUSACK: bouzouki, guitar & electronics
JOHN RUSSELL: guitar
HUGH DAVIES: strings, springs & electronics (except C3)
SUSANA FERRAR: violin (C3 only)
PHILIPP WACHSMANN: violin (C3 only)
EVAN PARKER: soprano saxophone (A6, B10-B13 & C1 only)

All recorded in London, 4/1/1998 (except C3, 10/1/1997)
Evan Parker was overdubbed on A6 (5/7/2000). C2 is the same piece without overdubbing.
Released by Emanem in 2001.

disc a :: disc b :: disc c @320

Ghost in the Machine featuring Evan Parker (1996)

This 1993 date featured British saxophone and improvisation deity Evan Parker with Copenhagen's Ghost-in-the-Machine trio and Martin Klapper on electronics. This traditional quartet -- saxophones, bass, drums, and piano -- added Klapper to extend the sonic possibilities of all the instruments, which were amplified by microphones. The results are studies more in texture, atmospherics, and sonic constructions than they are in spontaneous composition. They hold the listener's interest simply because there is no way to predict what direction any particular passage, let alone entire piece, will take. This quintet was making music for its own edification, for its own sense of investigation and discovery -- and that's just fine. The more outside a work's context the listener is placed in -- especially with improvised music -- the deeper one is required to listen to find a common bridge to the sonic language spoken on the recording. Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

1. Beginnings
2. Highup
3. Hipawl
4. Throy
5. Intertuba/Extremii
6. Radio Djibouti
7. Tivoli After Dark
8. Free Techno
9. The Base Piano
10. Birds in Cages
11. Train

Christer Irgens-Moller: piano, keyboards, voice
Peter Friis Nielsen: electric bass
Pere Oliver Jorgens: percussion, drums
Martin Klapper: amplified objects, dictaphone, tapes, toys
Evan Parker: soprano and tenor saxophones.

Recorded in September 1993 in Copenhagen
Released in 1996 by Leo Records.

link@320

Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble - Toward the Margins (1996)

British saxophonist Evan Parker was one of the first musicians to record for ECM, appearing on the label's fifth album in 1970 as a member of the Music Improvisation Company; his partners in that collective included Stockhausen associate and electronic composer Hugh Davies.

Over the past three decades, electronics have been one of Parker's abiding interests and his collaborations both with improvisers using electronics and with composers of electronic music have been many. In 1992 he formed the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble to explore more fully the potential of live electronics in improvisation, a potential that has grown as the technology has become more sophisticated.
The Ensemble pools musicians from the worlds of free improvisation, jazz, contemporary composition and computer music research, with most of its members straddling more than one idiom or area of activity. The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble has toured widely, and its North American debut at the Victoriaville Festival was widely hailed as the event's highlight: "An orchestral music of panoramic scope, full of spatial detail...cascading layers of morphing transmutations ... the electronic manipulations charged the music with a sense of spontaneous discovery" - Cadence, "Ardent ... grandly ambitious ... broadly sweeping schemes, mating improvised activity with MIDI-fied crosstalk" - Jazz Times.
There is a great deal of slowly-evolving tone colour and space, with the opening track almost entirely textural and hung around Guy's sonorous bass. Sepulchral gong-sounds echo behind Parker's whirling soprano sax, there are spooky percussion solos of slithery whispers and sounds like buckets of broken glass being emptied onto concrete, and the leader's remarkable capacity for contrapuntal solo playing acquires even more voices as the electronics echo it. Serious play, in every respect. John Fordham, The Guardian (Jazz CD of the Week)

Evan Parker - soprano sax, gong
Barry Guy - double-bass
Paul Lytton - percussion, live electronics
Philipp Wachsmann - violin, viola, live electronics, sound processing
Walter Prati - live electronics, sound processing
Marco Vecchi - live electronics, sound processing

1. Toward the Margins
2. Turbulent Mirror
3. Field and Figure
4. The Regenerative Landscape (for AMM)
5. Chain of Chance
6. Trahutten
7. Shadow Without an Object
8. Epanados
9. Born Cross-Eyed (Remembering Fuller)
10. Philipp's Pavilion
11. The Hundred Books (for Idries Shah)
12. Contra-Dance

Recorded in May 1996 at Gateway Studios
Released in 1997 by ECM

link@320

Joe McPhee, Evan Parker, Dauník Lazro - S/T (1996)

There are four pieces here, each of which is an exercise in polytonal inquiry or microtonal extrapolation. These four exercises are sound-on-sound explorations that come through a brief series of melodic ideas and are turned inside out to reflect the timbral essence of each note being played to construct them. McPhee draws many of these exercises in these pieces back to a blues or groove framework, evoking ghosts of heroes long since passed and seldom acknowledged by the rest of this hyper-literate mob.
Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

Joe McPhee: soprano & alto sax, pocket trumpet, alto clarinet
Evan Parker: tenor & soprano sax
Dauník Lazro: alto & baritone saxophone

1. The Emmet's Inch
2. The Snake & the Scorpion
3. Fire on the Water
4. And Eagle's Mile

Recorded Live 13/5/1995 (Colmar) and 23/5/1995 (Vandoeuvre)

link1 : link2 @320

Evan Parker + Lawrence Casserley - Solar Wind (1997)

"I approached Solar Wind by Evan Parker (soprano Sax) and Lawrence Casserley (signal processing instruments) without looking at covers, titles or liner notes. Waves of acoustic, electronic, analog and digital cyclic delays, inseparable music expanding in all directions at once. Particles/waves of sound some with no discernible mass, shooting through. My perception is without pause for association. The intended equal with the unintended. Muffled bottom end and difference tones are sieved from the colliding systems above. I go looking for Parker in this mist - his instrument has expanded into a metasax. Four minutes into the second track he suddenly emerges, the rasp of his reed chased by an attentive delay which diffuses into overall washes and strangely vocal-like side effects. Computational number crunching produces digital glitches and pops that provide a topography, a surface, like the dust in Duchamp's Large Glass. Serene long tones against a faint tapping evolve into sculptured slithers of shimmering unstable filtered tones. At one point there are lots of raucous little harmonized Parkers sounding like my modem. Foreground and background crossfade as new distortions evolve.

This music mimics natural open-ended systems because this is a chaotic natural phenomena itself. The byproducts of process are everywhere, nagging difference tones and the gritty dirt of chaos. Gated turbulence is engulfed by searing long tones that fry your ears with intensity (phased sherbetty tingly sensations). Key clicking foregrounds with power and presence: digital drips in a sea of bright white sound. It's an awesome CD. After listening I peruse the photos of Karen Mirza, Jon Wozencroft's design, the quote from Borges in the booklet and the ambiguous titles. None would have harmed my experience." Jim Denley, Resonance

1. Pachacamac
2. Epicycles
3. Coyolxauhqui
4. The Central Region [for Michael Snow]
5. Tlaloc
6. Solar Wind

Evan Parker - Soprano Sax
Lawrence Casserley - Signal Processing Instruments

link @320 (back again)

Read an article by Casserley himself on the technical apparatus behind this recording here.