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Evan Parker – Solo live performance to mark Galerie Max Hetzier’s exhibition of Thomas Struth’s CERN-inspired images
(St James’s Church, Piccadilly, 1 June 2023. Evaluation by Oliver Weindling. Drawings by Geoff Winston)
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Evan Parker carried out solo on soprano saxophone on the invitation of German photographer Thomas Struth to coincide with the launch of his exhibition(*). Parker is without doubt one of the few saxophonists who has innovated what can come from this comparatively small instrument since John Coltrane, one thing he’s persevering with to do as we speak, with resolute depth even together with his eightieth birthday lower than a 12 months manner.
Solo units on extra substantial devices – like piano or guitar, the place the performer has entry to an enormous vary of notes and harmonies – will be anticipated to carry all types of sonic richness. However within the fingers of Parker, an apparently simple melodic instrument is used to create one thing actually superior and thought-provoking, with overtones and different prolonged strategies.
Maybe because of the compelled alternative for reflection and experimentation over the interval of lockdown, the music he’s creating now’s as imaginative as ever was. However he has taken what he does additional. The music ebbs and flows. Multilayered sections result in a single observe as a form of pivot for the subsequent stage of the journey. And the prospect to carry out in a church reminiscent of St James’s Piccadilly gave a further heat and reverb to the sound.
The parallels with Struth’s images are putting. Each look deeply into their subjects of modernity and the way humanity interacts with the previous. In Parker’s case, regardless of the sheets of sound created, there at all times stay components of the music’s historical past for him to mirror on and to innovates with.
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