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Evan Parker at 80
(Cafe Oto. 7 April 2024. First night time. Overview and drawings by Geoff Winston)
The factor about Evan Parker is that he’s continuously transferring on. His music by no means stands nonetheless. He pushes himself to the restrict, embracing an unlimited vary of musical ventures and instructions, collaborating with those that share his intense sense of musical journey, it doesn’t matter what their chosen medium.
So, it was most becoming that, on the primary night time of Cafe Oto’s celebration of Evan’s eightieth birthday, there have been two units of contrasting trio codecs pulling in musicians with whom he has collaborated considerably through the years.
To set the scene, Jackson Burton, on behalf of Cafe Oto, thanked Parker for his dedication to the venue and to the quite a few connections he initiated, noting these with Peter Brötzmann and Anthony Braxton.
Parker’s first set was with Springheel Jack, the experimental electronics duo of John Coxon and Ashley Wales, who labored with Parker on the momentous recording, Evan Parker with Birds, which launched their ground-breaking Treader label 20 years in the past.
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The second set was with two main figures in jazz and improvisation, double bassist Barry Man and drummer Paul Lytton, whom Parker first met within the Nineteen Sixties and with whom he has recorded and carried out many occasions.
The primary set was, in essence, a reimagining and enlargement of Evan Parker with Birds, a very immersive expertise and the right car for Evan’s soprano sax enjoying together with his unstintingly imaginative interplay and dialogue with area recordings of hen calls, echoing within the storm-lashed soundscape created by Coxon and Wales. There was no let up, no rest, as Coxon blended with two turntables, and huge, darkish canyons and oceans have been evoked via his and Wales’s electronics. Samples of Parker’s enjoying have been discreetly performed again inside fractions of a second so as to add additional layering to Parker’s breathtaking multiphonics.
The frenzy of Parker’s breath and the tapping of the saxophone keys mixed to play their half in furnishing the luxurious reinterpretation of his complicated dialog with the avian world, as he despatched out his personal calls to the digital birds, amongst the waves breaking on the shore and the tumbleweed being blown round. To not point out the loud quacks which drew out a large smile from Parker!
With Barry Man and Paul Lytton, after the break, no holds have been barred. Parker, now standing, launched straight in to full circulate on tenor sax, no frills, no pack drill, evoking the spirit of John Coltrane with the phrasing, tempo, and energy of his deeply trawled melodic sequencing, out on the inspirational edge.
Man and Lytton have been the right companions on this journey. Man, drawing on an array of implements set out on his facet desk, chopped, scraped, plucked, bowed and clattered, treating his upright bass with simply the best mixture of respect and disrespect so as to add the brightest of articulation to the trio’s vocabulary. Lytton, likewise, though primarily out of my line of sight, added cracks, snaps, rolls and cymbal rushes to the trio’s rhythmic interaction.
Characteristically extremely animated, Man, in direction of the tip of the set, unnervingly thrust sticks of varied lengths via the 5 strings of his bass, sliding them up and down the fretboard, to achieve further articulation at he tapped the strings with fingers and knuckles, concluding with a heartfelt ‘yaah!’.
Parker, briefly alone to ship a fastidiously gauged, richly colored solo sequence then restored full energy to the ultimate leg of this tinderbox trio’s explosive improvisation and, to rapturous applause, an encore.
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