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Of Music and Brilliance, the Vision of Evan Parker

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You have to accept that you're only partially in control of the result and you have to enjoy that, the risk and the risk sometimes means failing. Ok, not failing too badly but failing in an interesting way.
It may be almost impossible to be involved in free improvisational forms and not be influenced by the compositional genius of Evan Parker. As a saxophonist, he has created one of the most original voices in the history of the instrument and after several decades, remains one of music's most important pioneers.

Lloyd Peterson: Today our culture here in the U.S. appreciates art but seems to have difficulty with creativity that is not easily explained, understood, or identifiable. Is this happening in Europe and do you think this is a significant obstacle to overcome for creative music?

Evan Parker: I would say we probably benefit from those people who are looking outside the established culture, the officially provided stuff. The ones sick of the idea of being treated as consumers who want a more active part in the music or want more engagement from the music and want more of a challenge. Again, it's a minority but I think it's a minority that will, if anything, grow. I think the more homogenized and standardized the official culture becomes, the more people will seek information elsewhere and I think we're seeing that now. You can extrapolate from that the resistance to global capitalism with large demonstrations happening not just in Europe but also in America. These are mostly young people not happy with being told how and what to consume and maybe we have something that could be of interest for some of them.

LP: Are jazz purists in the U.S. having a difficult time accepting that a music form considered "American" now has more visible international and diverse aspects within it?

EP: I see a trend in American journalism and criticism that does provide that point of view. But I equally well know American writers who understand the European scene better than a lot of the European critics. I think it's pretty obvious that jazz has always been a music that has taken inputs from different cultures and different sources. This is not to take anything away from the great achievements of the classic phases of jazz in America, not at all. One of its successes was to become a world language that was then interpreted in different ways or responded to in different ways by non-American cultures all over the world. This is a tradition that Americans can be very pleased about and they can be proud of the fact that it traveled well. What can't be done is to make those same people feel any particular affection for the responses and interpretations that come back in slightly other languages, other dialects and other forms. We win some and we lose some.



For myself, I started to play because of classic modern jazz from Charlie Parker onward. But my understanding of that tradition was that it was a dynamic one and your creative imperative was to find something new. The idea that jazz is a classical music is something we associate with a younger generation of musicians and ok, that's the way they see it. The chief spokesman I suppose would be Wynton Marsalis. There were exponents of classic jazz who were resistant to the notions of freedom from Ornette Coleman onward and probably before that. It shouldn't be forgotten that many of the Swing Era musicians were hostile towards bebop so the whole thing is cycles of attitudes that are repeated. They are repeated generation upon generation and every so often you have a generation that revives some previous style. The traditional jazz revival here in the 50's included people who discovered Bunk Johnson and the original New Orleans style of playing and they wanted to go back to that. That gradually turned into something here that was called Trad Jazz that you probably called Dixieland more often. I was never very interested in that but I'm interested in the original stuff and I think that's the difference. Some people want the music to stay still, become classical and codified with all the rules and regulations neatly checked in boxes and other people want to add some new boxes and change a few rules.

LP: There is literally tons of information on the chronology and history of jazz but rarely on the history of free or improvised music outside of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. Since you started in improvised music, have you observed any shift in styles or is it still expanding upon the ideas that you first encountered when you first came into this music?

EP: Once you say anything goes then anything is quite a big category. So anything has been happening ever since in the name of anything goes. Anything can be any number of something's. I'm just responsible for some of those something's.

LP: So you don't want to be a spokes person for others?

EP: Well no, I suppose we have our own originals inside the music and our own less originals where people are dependent upon other people's discoveries or approaches and are playing a kind of generic free music that may not be that interesting. In the same way that people that took from the originals in other styles of music. There are generic forms of all types of music if the critics want to jump through the history and name the names. Of course, I could beat my chest proudly and say X,Y, Z about myself but so could every other guy playing the saxophone. This is not for me to say.

LP: Karlheinz Stockhausen said the artist has long been regarded as the individual who reflected the spirit of their time. That there have always been different kinds of artists: those that are a mirror of their time, and the very few who have visionary power. Is it possible that what's happening in creative music is too forward thinking for much of our society today or has this always been the challenge for forward thinking composers? Is the music too complex for most listeners?

EP: It's very possible that the music is too complex for most listeners but we are not playing for most listeners. We are playing for ourselves, for the music and for the people that are interested. I hope that the music is visionary or at least represents an interesting response to the spirit of the time. These times are materialistic times with very low levels of public discourse and consumer patterns and very low levels of ecological and political awareness. So given that I don't think that the people who listen to our music are likely to share those average kinds of views, I suppose I would claim that we are visionary. The Stockhausen category of visionary; even if that's largely an intuitive vision, an intuitive understanding of reactive and reacting against anything but that kind of approach. I also think it has social relevance and it's a question of people that write about it, talking to other people about it, which I know you are doing by writing this book. And gradually people that have an appetite for that kind of something to work with, something to think about, something to chew on, something to study and even learn will be attracted to it. And people that think of music as a way of switching off and relaxing and whatever they call it, then ok, there's plenty of stuff prepared especially for them.

LP: Is it possible that a new type of creative music might come out of all that is going on globally today?

EP: Yes. There is a piece of graffiti that perhaps didn't originate in London but I saw it on a wall in Shoreditch - it said, "War is so last century." Yesterday, I also read a quote from Oscar Wilde that touched on the same idea that was something like, all the while people think that war is sinful; they'll find it interesting. It's only when they see it's vulgar, that the world will turn away from it. And I think more and more that we see clearly that the people didn't want this war. Certain political forces and certain business forces wanted this war but ordinary people didn't want it. It was of dubious legality in terms of UN mandates and International law. Without being at all pleased about it, all the things that were articulated by people who were against the war are coming true. The troops are bogged down now and the situation is not so easy to resolve for outsiders. Whether it would have ever have been resolvable for insiders is another question but this approach was obviously not just morally wrong but tactically inept. I think the people are ahead of the politicians a lot of the time now and there is a feeling that there must be a better way, a better way for manufacturers to make a living rather than making weapons and looking for new markets for weapons all around the world all of the time. This is boring, this is last century, and it's even arguably, two centuries old. And a few people have gradually; certainly the enlightened ones and plenty of them in America are sick of this kind of vulgarity in the Oscar Wilde sense.

LP: There is a helpless feeling with many here in the U.S. and I know that most of the people that I know or interact with feel the same way. I'm not sure if it appears this way for those internationally but for many of us, there appears to be defensiveness about the aggression and about being a part of what's going to be a factor in the future world.

EP: I don't think you have to worry; it's very well understood here that there is opposition inside of America. In fact the basic thing even goes back to the original question as to whether Bush was even really elected, whether he really has a mandate and whether he should be president. We can see how frustrating it must be for people there to be dealing with this situation but there is only one way to deal with it and that's to voice your opinions and to join together with others and hope that the situation improves. I mean the election of Swarzenegger, the governor of California, is not a very encouraging sign. All the while the media is in the hands of big business, it's hard to get any other ideas across but I think that as people start to switch away from media- business-controlled news and go more and more to the internet for the true stories, it is likely that the controlling powers will learn to manipulate that too. We must stay alert.

LP: I hope that in some way outside of people using the internet as a way of acquiring news, people will also find a way to communicate with each other globally and perhaps somehow find a way to influence the choices and direction of our leaders.

EP: It's already happening. I mean there was very intense communication prior to the invasion, the war or whatever you want to call it. I think Marc Ribot has been responsible for an initiative to try to better communicate the feeling of frustration that you are talking about so that Europeans don't assume that all Americans support this kind of activity.

LP: Is it more difficult for a student to be creative in today's society? Is there a different set of challenges the students face today?

EP: No, I think the problem is always the same. It's like, this is what's there, what are you going to do in response to it? But there are changes of course with each generation but what you do in response to it is really a matter of your own intuitions and your own emotional response.

LP: Do you have a philosophy that you try to impart among students or young musicians?

I think that that's a very hard thing to sum up in a few sentences during an interview. Yea, I won't attempt that.

LP: So it is important to you?

EP: Well, they say that a donkey carrying a lot of books is still a donkey. I'm might be one of those.

LP: There is clearly a lack of understanding within the U.S. of what is meant by the term free jazz. For those of us listeners who think we have somewhat of an understanding, we hear the form and the development of that form over the course of a piece take shape. That would describe a clear discipline within the music from the start until the completion of the piece. The question many of us have is, who is leading the development of the form and what happens if there is creative input or energy that differs between the musicians? Does this enhance the creativity and energy of the music or does the form start to lose its function?

EP: This notion of form, the whole thing is the form, what happens is the form. The idea of applying architectural principles to a dynamic form that's revealed in time is not terribly useful I don't think. What happens in the time that it takes to happen, that's the form. Whether you call something logical, surprising or illogical, therefore surprising and whether surprises are good or surprises are bad; all of these issues are dealt with in particular improvisations by particular players over and over again. But the fact remains that this music unfolds in time and the form takes the time that it takes to be revealed. And this is not like saying, ok, so we'll repeat the structure 26 times. This is not to say that you cannot use cyclic elements and repetitions, but those elements and repetitions are both subject to fresh interpretations in the moment so that the final form is not fixed in a box but is fixed in the course of the making of the piece.

LP: Tension seems to be a significant part of the creative process in improvised music. How do you go about constructing that aspect of the music?

EP: Tension is one of the words that's typically used as one of a pair with release. Dominant and tonic would be equivalent to on beat and off beat. Which is the tension and which is the release? As the music complexifies and as our attitudes towards what's fresh are determined by what is already well known and what remains to be discovered, then the whole notion of what constitutes tension changes with time. I don't think there are specific techniques to generate tension or specific techniques to generate resolution in free improvisation. These are issues that are once again, determined in the course of the piece. But what might constitute resolution in a free improvisation may very well be a rhythmic cadence as much as a harmonic shift from closed voice sounds to open voice sounds or whatever the classic harmonic cadence forms might take in free improvisation. That's very often done rhythmically more than harmonically. Some people say rhythm, what rhythm? If you don't hear it, you don't hear it. Some people hear it, some people don't. We're back to the other question.

And I suppose by the same token the music is its own best explanation. We can talk for another five hours and we still wouldn't really explain the music. The music explains itself. And by exposure to the music and by exposure to the history of the music, this is the way somebody will come to an understanding of how the music works. But if they don't like the sound of it, why should they bother and I'm the first to agree. If you don't like the sound of it, don't bother. I'm not proselytizing in that sense except by being there and being ready to play. But I'm not trying to convert people who don't have a degree of initial curiosity. It's very common to find the first reaction of, "The first time I heard you I thought you were crazy. I don't know what made me come back. Something made me comeback. And now, I think I get it or now I think your the greatest thing on the planet." This is the kind of pattern that I hear from people. They have not necessarily fallen in love with it or get it the very first time that they hear it, but there is something about it that fascinates them and brings them back and it's only a small percentage. So again, we're repeating elements of the answers to previous questions but it's all one question in the end I guess

LP: The following is a quote from Cecil Taylor: "Music has to do with a lot of areas which are magical rather than logical; the great artists, rather than just getting involved with discipline, get to understand love and allow the love to take shape." How much of your music is from logic and how much from this other place that Cecil Taylor describes?

EP: When I use the word logic about music, I think it should probably be in quote marks because of course music is not from the place of logic. You could find yourself in a situation where if you believe that, then you will probably believe in formally and balanced equations and therefore X plus Y equals just X plus Y. Therefore, something interesting has happened because of that but that's not what I mean by logic. Sometimes a surprise can be an illogical thing to happen but then you are talking about a very strange notion, a very strange use of the word logic. As usual, when Cecil talks about the music, he says something very profound and very, very important. We need a return to the role of the musician as a shaman or as someone capable of evoking good thoughts in the audience or provoking response. Provoking thought provoking response because people need to wake up. For any number of reasons, they need to wake up. But primarily because of the stranglehold of big business on the planet and they are killing the planet and it's got to stop. The population explosion has got to stop. There are so many things that are wrong with the trends at the moment. The ice caps are melting, what more has to happen before people start to think about the patterns of their consumption and their personal responsibility?

LP: It's quite depressing actually.

EP: This is a complex world but if we can link those kinds of thoughts with the music, I would hope that that does some good. Let people know that the musicians are concerned. Most of the musicians that I know in this field of music are concerned and are trying to do something.

LP: Can you talk about how your musical thinking has evolved towards composition from your earliest writings to the present? What were the significant factors that have evolved in your music?

EP: Again, I think this is best answered by listening to the music itself. In some ways, I think the basic assumptions remain the same but sometimes the ways in which it's expressed are more under control, more sophisticated but I don't know. Again, I feel that this is an answer that somebody else should answer but I hope it's still alive. My main job is to keep my music alive and input into the music alive. Of course the longer you go on the more accretions of habit and stylistic considerations come into it. The skills are improved but the habits are more extensive; it's a question of the musician's relationship with their own habits. It then becomes a crucial thing for keeping it alive.

LP: With many jazz musicians, the listener is a consideration when the piece is developed on paper. However, with your music, I hear someone that is taking a form and looking for all the possibilities of development of that form.

EP: First of all, it has to be for the people I'm playing with and for myself, but it has to be right and if it's right, then it's ready for other people if they're interested. But if I start thinking about what people would like then this would indulge in the most absurd kind of generalization about other human beings. That's part of the thinking that's taking the planet the wrong way. People thinking that they know how a lot of other people think. I don't know how people think but I know how I think and I know how the musicians that I work with think well enough in order to organize a concert or two. Beyond that, it's a question of individual choices about other people's responses of whether they choose to come or whether they choose to do something else. That's up to them, but it's pretty obvious to me that if somebody likes sitting home and watching these so called reality-TV programs, they're not likely to come out and listen to me.

LP: Can you describe your approach and process and what you are attempting to do within the context of the music? Are you getting closer to the sound that you hear or does it keep changing?

EP: Well, if I had an absolutely clear idea of how I wanted the music to sound, I wouldn't improvise. I'm interested in finding out what the music is going to sound like that I improvise. Ok, certain results please me better than other results where I follow those avenues of pleasing results. But that's not with the aim of duplicating already pleasing results but following the path of those results to some new places, hopefully. And the potential for evolution in particular combinations of musicians interest me enormously and obviously staying together with Schlippenbach and Lovens for more than thirty years means that I still find where we go with that stuff interesting. I have been playing with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton almost as long, which means that I find working with them still interesting. However, other combinations and relationships seem to have come to a natural end at different points with fresh relationships starting all the time. I have the advantage of living in a city with a large pool of players to draw from with wonderful opportunities in which to perform on a regular basis. That's it. So when new things come then, ok, see where the life is and where it's leading and go with it.

You cannot get angry if the music doesn't come out at a certain place or a certain way. It's just not a very intelligent thing for somebody interested in improvisation to do. You have to accept that you're only partially in control of the result and you have to enjoy that, the risk and the risk sometimes means failing. Ok, not failing too badly but failing in an interesting way. Not always making it clear where you consider the failure to have been and if somebody wants to go through the records, they'll see and find out that well, it didn't last long or that lasted hell of a long time. What's the difference between those two things? Again, it's the critic's job to do that, not for me to explain all these mysteries beyond a certain point you know. I can give you a clue but I can't tell you the whole answer.

LP: A musician's relationship with time and how they deal with it does not get openly discussed that often. Can you discuss your approach with time?

EP: There is an American scientist, mathematician or philosopher, Charles Arthur Muses whose views on time appeal to me very much indeed. There is a diagram that comes with his book, Destiny & Control Of Human Systems where he plots the various ways of seeing time above and below an axis future past, conscious and unconscious. At the middle of it is an individual breaking into the so called moment and I think the cliché of the moment is somehow over done. Most of us live in a place inhabited by memories that is also driven by desires. Each of those things can be either conscious or subconscious so the complexities of all of those things make up what I take to be the time in which we live. Any moment of time includes those four axis which is like a compass. Four points of a compass around the moment in time in the conscious moment of time of an individual.... or the being moment in time of an individual. Because, as I've said, above is perhaps conscious but below is unconscious. Ahead is future and behind is past but all of those things are in the being time of an individual. Some of that finds its equivalents in the music and certain techniques can only be developed through repetition.

Certain understandings can only come about through discovery and those understandings can only be reapplied when those insights and techniques are recalled. So the whole notion of being in the moment is a little more complicated than it at first appears. You also have to have somewhere you want to go and that's also in this moment where you live. The future is also in that moment or your view of the future branched as it may be at many different points where a decision needs to be made. That's about it. If anybody wants to know further, they should check out Charles Arthur Muses. A great American philosopher and it's very hard to find his stuff. A very remarkable man, the more you investigate, the more remarkable.

LP: Drummers and bass players can come up with their own language within the context of what's happening in a live situation. What do you look for from drummers and bass players and how much of it has to do with their rhythmic approach with each other?

EP: What I want is a sense that somebody is there to find what the music can be and not to show what they already know although that's a fine distinction. They have to bring something. They have to bring a bunch of stuff with them from the past but be looking to the future. Why do some thing's work and other things don't work too well? I don't know. The questions are about compatibility coming from questions of predisposition's, preferences, tastes, styles and congruence. Some people sound great on their own but you put two of them together and they sort of cancel out one another. Some people understand the mechanisms of cancellations well enough so that doesn't happen. That's what keeps it interesting. I have nothing against routine if people want to bring routine but someone has to come fresh. Stay alive. They have to be in that moment where anything can happen or feel that anything can happen. The stuff you bring is just the place to start from. It's the stuff you discover that's the reason for going there.

LP: Where does your inspiration come from or what influences your creativity?

EP: You know, that varies at different times but I tend not to listen to other improvised music on record. I'm so busy with my own stuff and with the things that I would like to issue on my label that I don't really get a chance to listen to what is going on very properly. And the explosion of the exponential growth of recordings of improvised music also makes it very difficult to have a very good overview of the whole thing. Subsequently, I rely on recommendations from other people but if I hear people playing live that impress me, I may go back and look for some recordings. Outside of that, as a record collector, I would say that I more or less only collect ethnic classical recordings, field recordings from other cultures, especially endangered cultures. Those of course can be a source of amazement, absolute amazement. But then again, a donkey with a big load of records on his back is still a donkey. I have some good records of what they call ethnic music. Ethnic music, where did this term get started? I'm interested in music from endangered cultures, minority cultures, known global cultures. I'm not especially interested in world music once it's been pasteurized, homogenized and served up, re-served up; then I'm not so interested. I'm interested in the real field recordings from Folkways onward. That's the kind of stuff I collect.

LP: What do you envision the future of creative music to be and for yourself personally?

EP: The future of music remains there...in the imagination. If somebody can think of it and if somebody can imagine it, that's where it's going to go next. That's the one part of the job of being in the time; you have to know what is possible, what is the future. How is the future beckoning to you? Muses talks about imagination as memory of the future. We just have to keep our imaginations sharp and listen hard to what's going on. Whenever an idea is tested, see what can be done with that idea. See what makes sense.

In a situation where anything goes, it's going to be very hard to shock anybody anymore in the subculture that I operate in. Nobody is going to be shocked in whatever I do and even if they were shocked, they would never admit that they were shocked. And I can't think of anything I'm interested in doing that they would find shocking. So it's really not about shock, it's more about inventiveness and freshness. And life, living life forward, which is the only way it goes.

LP: Do you have a philosophy or some way of looking at life that you would be willing to share?

EP: I would say that the most profound influences in terms of my view would be John Coltrane, Idries Shah and Charles Muses. Perhaps coming a little further down the line would be political philosophers like Bakunin and Kropotkin; contemporaries of Marx who were critical of his theories and for very good reasons that have subsequently been proven to be right. Muses says in his book Destiny and Control in Human Systems that the great tragedy of our times is that too many people spend their lives doing work that is contrary to their own natures. That might be it in a nutshell.

This interview first appeared in Lloyd Peterson's Music And The Creative Spirit (Scarecrow Press, 2006)

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