Evan Parker, Peter Evans, "Scenes in the House of Music"!

Peter Evans is one of the very best of the new trumpeters in the free-avant zone. Evan Parker plays tenor sax and soprano in ways that have extended the music and he's done it for many years. The same could be said for bassist Barry Guy and drummer Paul Lytton. When they came together for a live concert in Portugal last year, anticipation among the audience must have been high. The new Clean Feed (196) recording of the concert, Scenes in the House of Music gives it to you straight-up. The expectations were justified. Fully.

Here are four superb free players pulling out all the stops, exploring textural-aural intensity and movement in ways few can approximate today. This is STRONG music and it will put all avant fans in a zone that has been reserved for the very best. Music, I mean. That's what this is.

Evan Parker and Urs Leimgruber Lock Horns in Avant Duets

Essentially Evan Parker has over the 40 odd years of his public career sought to perfect a style complex that makes use of punctuated sounds, rapidly swooping slurred lines, enveloped phrasings and expanded timbral resources for the saxophone. By now he can be relied on to do what he does very very well, every time out. His execution and concept are masterful. But his single-mindedness of purpose also means that some of the surprise in the music has become diminished. So he keeps it fresh by varying the players he associates with on any given project. His prolific recorded output would seem to demand such a stance. And this way of going about it gives the Parker aficionado a good deal of variety in the overall sound of the ensembles he consorts with.

So we have a new one, Twine (Clean Feed 194) which pits him in a series of involved improvisatory duets with fellow reedman Urs Leimgruber. Both alternate between the tenor and soprano. The recording was captured live in Koln.

First off Urs certainly seems well suited for such a duet. He has a long track record of avant improvisational collaborations and has a style that fits what Even Parker does from angular phrasing to a richness and variety of timbre.

Second of all the structure and content of the duets is one of all-over density and continual flow. They get rolling on a pace and set of sound producing ideas and stay in that mode for some time, seeking to explore the sorts of possibilities that approach will reveal.

The results are rarefied whirlwinds of sound. Parker and Leimgruber get locked in and stay there. Now the question is whether you would find this music stimulating and how much of this sort of thing you are interested in hearing. I cannot give you that answer. It is cutting-edge avant improv, certainly. If you already have, say, 100 Evan Parker recordings, this may not add a lot that is new to what you already have. If sound-color oriented improvisations interest you and you don't have much exposure to the artists at hand, this is a good bet. If you like the idea of a bare-bones avant duet with two of the more successfully adventurous sax players out there, again this will be of interest.

Evan Parker, The Redwood Session, 1995

Saxophonist Evan Parker has been one of the most consistently challenging of instrumentalists in avant garde improvisational music since his first appearances in the sixties. He is virtually without peer as a sound color painter with a brightly bold pallet. He gets sounds from his soprano and tenor that take advantage of alternate fingerings, embouchure manipulation and other unconventional techniques. There is a series of sounds he has made all his own, and his unusual phrasing and unleashing of torrents of notes in the course of an improvisation make him instantly recognizable among those who follow the music.

Not every album he has made, however, is indispensable. That's only natural for such a prolific artist. When in 1995 he gather together in Rossie, NY with some of the "all-stars" of improv, something special was bound to result. It is hard to imagine more congenial fellow improvisors than these: Barry Guy, a bassist of complete technique, utterly personal sound, and the seeming one-to-one ability to play what he imagines, as he imagines it; then Paul Lytton on the drums, a man of great energy and another important sound innovator on his instrument; lastly, for the final number Joe McPhee joins the group on trumpet and adds the lucid improvisational voice that belongs to him alone.

There of course is the potential of a particular group of artists and there is what they actually do on any given date. The Redwood Session (CIMP) is a happy occasion where the potentials are realized in all their fullness. This is a set of music that startles with sheer power, tickles with its playful ruminations, excites with its terrific energy and devastates with its near-perfect realization of conceptual rigor.

What I particularly like about this session is the complete synchrony of all the members. There are deluges of musical content that come at you in waves, and all the players are keyed into one another to the extent that those waves are constructed nearly perfectly by the entire group. Evan and company phrase the deluges exceptionally well. The music is free but there is an remarkable telepathy among group members, so that the freedom is structured in the spontaneity of the moment, in the sympathetic resonances of each player to the musical thinking of the other players.

This is a monumental achievement in improv. It should be heard by anyone interested in this kind of music. It may not have gotten all the attention it deserves in past years, but it remains absolutely vital. And it is still in print!