Jazz Articles about Evan Parker

About Evan Parker

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Album Review

Evan Parker Electroacoustic Quartet: Concert in Iwaki

by John Eyles
September 11, 2021

The year 2021 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first recordings made by Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. It also ended a somewhat fallow period, Hasselt (Psi, 2012) having been the ensemble's most recent release; 2021 brought a flurry of electro-acoustic releases, with Concert in Iwaki following hard on the heels of Warszawa 2019 (Fundacja Sluchaj), and Fixing the Fluctuating Idea (Les Disques Victo), the latter recorded at the 1996 Victoriaville festival with Sainkho Namtchylak. However, despite ...

Multiple Reviews

Spanish-British links on Vector Sounds

by John Eyles
February 5, 2020

In recent decades improvised music has become increasingly international, with improv players from across the world being attracted to global centres such as jny: London or jny: Berlin, playing and forging links there before moving on. Where members of an improvising group were once all of the same nationality, today it is uncommon to find all the members of a group are the same nationality, and not uncommon for all members to be of different nationalities. All of this was ...

Album Review

Evan Parker: Crepuscule In Nickelsdorf

by Glenn Astarita
July 24, 2019

This is another bright spot in acclaimed British saxophonist Evan Parker's extensive career. Along with Matthew Wright's turntable and live sampling activities, Trance Map emanates from the duo's meeting in 2008, for a project that includes field recordings, samples and other EFX-based mediums merged into improvisational creations. It's an electro-organic infusion, complete with the sounds of nature and Parker's circular, whirling and cyclical sax phrasings—a process and technique that he patented and developed into a signature stylization many years ago. ...

Album Review

Evan Parker / Paul G. Smyth: Calenture and Light Leaks

by Don Phipps
July 22, 2019

The live collaboration of the remarkable English tenor saxophonist Evan Parker and Irish pianist Paul G. Smyth on their album Calenture and Light Leaks is like listening to the piano impressions of Debussy while exploring a gallery of Picassos--pure bliss in action. There is an airy quality to the abstractions here, like playful sunbeams streaming through a window's light. Parker's playing flows--whether blowing cool legatos or stuttering rapidly on snappy runs across the saxophone's registers. His playing feels ...

Album Review

Evan Parker: Crepuscule In Nickelsdorf

by Mark Corroto
June 30, 2019

Excise the notion of virtual reality and AI as the force behind the music heard on Crepuscule In Nickelsdorf by Evan Parker and Matthew Wright's Trance Map+. Undoubtedly you might be tempted to have this thought by surveying the instrumentation, which is chock-full of sampling and electronics. Let's reserve those thoughts for a listen to this live recording from July, 2017 in the city of Nickelsdorf, Austria. Parker and Wright collaborated on the original Trance Map (psi, 2011) ...

Ethnographies of Jazz

Provenance, Mal de mer, Duration: Evan Parker and Peter Evans at Solilóquios in Porto

by Arian Bagheri Pour Fallah
March 6, 2019

Provenance Evan Parker needs little introduction. To the listener and to the critic, clearly, but above all to the formation of musical matter. The rudiments of his making are well obscured twenty seconds in after he enkindles the first note. He plays the saxophone durably--static, in deathlike stillness. It is easy, in fact, to mistake his enterprise with that of the snake charmer. After all, he speaks of “the great masters" when questioned about the more rigorous, disciplined composers of ...

Multiple Reviews

Evan Parker and Paul G. Smyth on Weekertoft

by John Eyles
February 17, 2019

In 2016, English guitarist John Russell and Irish pianist Paul G. Smyth set up the independent Weekertoft label to release music they had been involved in, including recordings made at Russell's longstanding monthly Mopomoso concert series or annual Fete Quaqua festival. As the label reached its third anniversary, its catalogue was dominated by two large sets--the four-CD Making Rooms recorded on a seven-date Mopomoso tour of England in August 2013, and the six-and-a-quarter-hour, nineteen act, digital release Channel recorded at ...