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Artist Profiles
Evan Parker: Solo
Parker quantifies this concept as such: "For me the art of collective improvisation involves finding the appropriate elements from your approach for that given situation and being ready to involve new elements for that approach in response to people that you've never played with before. So, it's not a matter of simply going in there and being myself regardless of context. There should be a sense of self or a sense of self as musician, which is flexible enough to generate slightly different - or very different depending on the context - music, according to whom I'm playing with. That was brought on to me very early. I was playing this very delicate, atomistic music with John Stevens in duo when I was invited to play with [saxophonist] Peter Brötzmann for the [1968] Machine Gun thing, which was absolutely the opposite: very robust and loud, energetic, and not so delicate. It was like a baptism of fire in that sense for me that I'd go ‘okay this is a whole other approach to improvising, I'd better think of something different to do in this context.’ Having dealt with those two extremes was a good early training or early experience for me to know that an essential part of an improviser's arsenal is flexibility.”
Part of Parker’s flexibility is his work, not only with the creative side of music, but with the business side. He, Derek Bailey, and drummer Tony Oxley founded the record label Incus in the ‘70s, releasing much of the music created in the vibrant European scene. He has now reembraced this idea with his new label Psi, a collaboration with Emanem Records. He releases his own solo work, partnerships with percussionist Paul Lytton, trombonist George Lewis and drummer Han Bennink, as well as a rarity: an album led by saxophonist Gerd Dudek. Parker cannot understate the importance of recording: “I've always encouraged other musicians to document what they do as soon as they can because this is the only way you exist in a bigger community. Of course in the town where you live and play, okay, you can function without a record maybe, but in order to make contacts and travel further afield, which is essential if you want to survive as a musician doing this kind of music exclusively, then you really must have documentation...It seemed that the only way that we could be sure of maintaining a process of ongoing documentation was to take control of it ourselves.”
Though the arguments about the validity of free improvisation continue, despite its rich history over the past 40 or more years, mainly by proponents of the retro-mainstream style that accumulates most of the listeners, funding and critical praise, Parker is not discouraged. "We're actually on a cusp or a watershed in that respect. If the more instrumental approach, the more expressive approach is gradually succeeded by the PowerBook players and the very quiet players, you'd have to say it has evolved into something else or it simply died out depending on the way those successors choose to represent their activities. I think there are enough people playing in what you might call a ‘straight ahead free way’, that's a very clumsy term, to guarantee the life of the music for a good while yet...I think the rewards of playing the music are such that people will always come into it. Whether the style of the music or the way of talking about the music or the way of theorizing about the music stays the same I don't know. It's an absolutely untheoretical music but there are a lot of theories about the lack of theories.”
