Saturday 22 May 2021, 7.30pm
Please note that this event will begin at 8pm sharp.
Excited to present a very special evening with Evan Parker to celebrate the re-issue of his legendary boxset "Collected Solos" on our in-house OTOROKU label.
Originally issued in 1989 and long ago sold out, "Collected Solos" brings Evan Parker's first four solo LPs issued on Incus - "Saxophone Solos", "The Snake Decides", "Monoceros" and "Six of One" together, alongside a cassette featuring extra cuts from the sessions at FMP studios which didnt make it onto "Saxophone Solos" and an accompanying booklet written by the late writer, Paul Haines. Housed in a specially made and screenprinted box, and numbered in an edition of 250, the collection celebrates Evan Parker's remarkable commitment to a creative life and work.
Evan will perform two rare solo sets either side of a chat with John Coxon about his life and work.
"If you've ever been tempted by free improvisation, Parker is your gateway drug." - Stewart Lee
Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.
John Coxon, perhaps uniquely for an improvising guitarist, is inspired as much by the plangencies of Reggie Young as by the astringencies of Derek Bailey. As irascible and as spiky as it gets, his playing is always haunted by the ghosts of popular song and fragments of the blues.
