WNUR: Let's begin with some of your earliest music. Emanem has just issued a recording called Summer 1967 featuring you, John Stevens, and Peter Kowald. How did that recording come about?
Evan Parker: There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes. So by negotiation with John Stevens' family and so on, it was arranged that Martin could issue those tapes. They were club dates and some studio recordings. I can't quite remember the circumstances, but they were never intended for release as records initially, when they were made.
WNUR: What were your thoughts when you heard the tapes for the first time in so many years?
[laughs] 25 years is a long time in free music! It sounds very different from the way I play today. I think it's a great document of John Stevens' originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it's pretty obvious. Then again, that whole approach to playing was very new and untried at that time. In that sense we were pioneering, so that's how it was. It's a kind of historical document as much as, uh, great music, or however you would want to put it.
WNUR: It was the first time that British improvisors had worked with people from the continent, is that right?
It depends on how nitpicking you want to get about it. Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days. It didn't imply that you were terribly interested in airplanes or bombs or any of that stuff. But it did mean that you could learn to play an instrument, and it was an easier route for many people than trying to go to conservatory. When they were doing this they were based in Cologne, or somewhere near Cologne, for a long period, and during that time they met Manfred Schoof and Alex von Schlippenbach. So it wasn't actually the very first meeting between some of those characters. But then of course they were all that much younger and still struggling, trying to play straightahead modern jazz. So in the sense that we were all dealing with that freer approach, yes, it was certainly one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact, when Peter came that summer. So it's a very pivotal moment that is documented there.
WNUR: In the last few years there have been a number of other reissues of early recordings of yours from the late sixties through the mid seventies. Do you think that that music has the same meaning now that it did then, or is the meaning of that music tied for you to the period in which it was recorded?
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway. When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated. But what it can do is illuminate the evolution of a method, of a style, a very step by step kind of process of small breakthroughs and small insights which gradually accumulate and develop into a whole language or a whole school of playing. Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records! The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span. When you start to get up to 25 or 30 years of documentation, then yes, I think that people can start anywhere, at random. They find their way to the music however they find it. They may start with a live concert experience and then work their way back through the historical development in the opposite of a chronological sequence. Other people may hear a record and that may lead them to the live music, but there may be a five year difference between the record that they hear and the music that they hear live. Distribution and dissemination of the recordings is relatively haphazard, a fairly underground kind of affair, so there's very little control over making sure that everybody on the planet hears the same record at the same time. It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.
WNUR: One recent reissue has been of some of your early solo soprano saxophone work, from 1975. I think it's interesting to compare that recording to the more recent solo recordings of yours like Conic Sections. On the newer recordings, I would say you're focusing in on certain specific areas of sound and exploring them very deeply, as opposed to the more wide ranging use of sound on the older recordings. Do you think that's an accurate description, and what made you move in that direction if so?
Yes, I think that that's a fairly accurate description. What made me move in that direction is the activity itself. It's a kind of feedback between the player and the instrument and the music that comes out of the technical relationship or physical relationship with the instrument. Sometimes things develop out of moments of loss of control that show you physical possibilities of the instrument which you might otherwise not be aware of. Then having heard those possibilities, you can then work towards bringing them under control. I think that explains a lot of that sense of tighter focus and more detail, because it literally does come from a kind of dialog with the instrument.
WNUR: The specific technique you're best known for is the use of circular breathing. Was circular breathing a technique you developed to solve a particular problem in your music, or did you develop the technique first and find uses for it later?
Of course I knew the work of Roland Kirk and Harry Carney and the specific uses they would make of circular breathing, so I knew it was physically possible. Then I saw a piece in an American journal of new music composition. Someone had written a piece for soprano saxophone which required circular breathing, so I started to think, well, if this is becoming a standard requirement, I'd better put some work in on it. I was working at that time in the Music Improvisation Company with Hugh Davies and Derek Bailey. Both of them were using amplified strings capable of going into controlled feedback and sustaining pitches indefinitely. Sometimes it seemed a good idea to also be able to sustain a tone, in relation to a tone produced by controlled feedback by one or the other of them. That gave me a very practical reason to develop the technique. I then realized that it opened many more doors in terms of approach. I think the solo playing, the decision to start playing solo, came out of having discovered what lay behind the doors that that technique opened for me.
WNUR: When you're circular breathing the sound of the saxophone is continuous, not broken up into phrases. This reduces the resemblance of your playing to speech. Is that intentional?
Yes, yes. I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line. I think the voice does that perfectly adequately without being imitated by other instruments. So I'm looking to the saxophone as a resource which has its own unique set of possibilities. I'm looking to exploit them and develop them and have the fullest range of possibilities of the saxophone be known.
WNUR: You've released several solo recordings featuring experimentation with overdubbing and live electronics. I was wondering if you have anything else like that planned, or any other solo recordings at all. It's been a while since the last one.
Yes, that's right. I've actually revised my view about what the next one, what it will be about. I think the next one won't be concerned with either electronics or overdubbing, but will be a pure acoustic saxophone music record, recorded in real time. I've been to the studio several times, and it's not that I'm not happy with what I've got, but each time I come away, I feel that I've learned something that I want to work on. So these things have tended to get shelved. I've been back to the church or the concert hall in Oxford, the Holywell Music Rooms, where Conic Sections was recorded, twice and recorded two batches of stuff there with Michael Gerzon as the engineer, and I've been to a fairly resonant studio in London called Gateway where I've also done some recording. But I think the record will actually come from tapes that are not yet recorded. I'm still thinking about that. And those other things may just go on the shelf as kind of interim documents.
WNUR: Have you considered doing a solo tenor recording?
Yes, I've been asked to do that. I'm thinking about it. I've done some tapes for Jean Rochard at Nato Records, because we had some spare studio time in that Tony Hymas project with Barney Bush, Left For Dead. I did some solo stuff and some duets with Tony Hymas. I don't know what Jean intends to do with those things. Meanwhile there are several other suggestions coming from people that I should do that. John Corbett's trying to encourage me to think about one, and Jost Gebers wants me to do something, but I don't feel the time's quite right. Whether it ever will be I don't know. You might think, well, if it's not now, when will you do it [laughs]. In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.
WNUR: On what basis do you choose between playing tenor or soprano in a group context?
Simple things like orchestrational considerations, the weight of the other instruments, the tessitura of the other instruments, and what I know of the other players. Of course I can always simply change my mind in mid-piece if I feel I would like to make a change or I think I could have started on the other instrument. It's always possible to stop and change. I don't carry an arsenal like Anthony Braxton or one of the other real multi-instrumentalists, playing flutes, clarinets, and all the saxophones or something. It's just tenor and soprano, so it's not so complicated.
WNUR: In Chicago last year you played a concert with Roscoe Mitchell. What was that like for you?
It was a great night! The HotHouse was packed with a very enthusiastic audience, and it seemed to me that Roscoe was very inspired. It was great for me to play with him. I'd met Roscoe in Europe quite a few times over the years, and we'd say hi and so on, but this was the first time we'd actually played together. So that was very inspiring for me too. I think we got to something which was not like his music, not like my solo music, but something somewhere between the two things. A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.
WNUR: I particularly liked the piece where Roscoe was playing a sort of drone on one note, with you playing your soprano over that--
Yeah, yeah [laughs].
WNUR: --that was really beautiful. That weekend you also played with some younger musicians from Chicago, and you'll be appearing with some others this Sunday including Gene Coleman and Kevin Drumm. How do you approach playing with unfamiliar musicians differently from playing with people you've been working with for a long time?.
You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses. It's a "is the bottle half full or is it half empty" kind of question for me. It depends on your state of mind sometimes, and on the results, and on the sensitivity of the other people concerned. But it's a very important part of every improvisor's total artistic life, I think, to be put from time to time into ad hoc situations. Of course when people are as talented as Jim O'Rourke or Gene Coleman, pretty soon you know that they're going to be part of the bigger scene anyway. I've already seen Jim O'Rourke in different places in Europe... So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things. I would imagine that I'll be working with both Jim and Gene again in different contexts. If they're interested I'll be interested... Every journey starts with the first step... Sorry to spout cliches!
WNUR: Not at all... Many musicians who played freer music in the late 1960's have since turned back, if you will, to work more with composition and more so- called "structured" forms of music, more so in America than in Europe. Why you haven't done that yourself as well?
Without getting too kind of linguistic or semantic about it, the whole notion about where structure comes from is already contentious to me. To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect. Certain ideas, certain kinds of approaches are absolutely easier achieved by composition or notation or pre-rehearsed methods. Other kinds of music are not so easily achieved that way. Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction... Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language. For example when I play with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton, or with the Schlippenbach Trio, we've built up understanding over the years. You couldn't possibly hope to generate that kind of music by composition, notation, or having people read the stuff. There's just not enough rehearsal time. It's too difficult. Then we start to talk about "new complexity" composition on the one hand, and whether systematic aspects of musical structuring are possible in improvised contexts, and I personally think they are. In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations. I mean, what is the smallest unit you can work with. You're obviously dealing with something that has a variable length. In the earlier days with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble we had a very pointillistic kind of approach. Then at a certain point I was drawn to the opposite of that: what are the longest elements of structure you can work with before you're no longer truly improvising. And this impinges on the question of memory. The whole thing is very complicated. It's very hard in a live interview to make very coherent statements about this.
WNUR: In the liner notes to your Breaths and Heartbeats CD with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton, you mention how the recording was made by first recording a number of improvisations and then afterwards sequencing them and deciding how they would be arranged on the recording. That could be thought of that as a kind of composition, applied to the improvisations after the fact.
That's right. First of all, just to be clear about how we did that... There was a first session of instrumental trio material, then a long kind of break from that where we all played percussion. Paul didn't really play the full drum set but played selected items. It was a way of clearing the head, because to keep fresh in the studio during a long session is sometimes a bit of challenge, especially if you were there the day before doing a session with the same bass player, which was the case on that day. Then we did a third session of trio instrumental pieces. We were left with far too much material for one CD, but not enough for two, and no reason for two. We hadn't been thinking about making two. So then it became a question of sequencing and selecting. I'd always had the idea that we'd record the material for that occasion in that way, so it could be sequenced afterwards. And of course that's a decision which is not happening in the real time in which the music takes place. But if you think about it, the decision to bring a saxophone that you've been practicing for 30 or 40 years is also not a decision that takes place while the music's being played. There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore. I've clarified my own thinking by not opposing improvisation and composition as categories. I've been very slow to do this, but I realized that thinking that way wasn't helping at all. Improvisation is a compositional method. I'm not so worried by questions of purism or purity that might arise for someone who thinks that improvisation is something categorically distinct from composition.
WNUR: In the early days of free improvisation, there were many who downplayed recordings and considered them secondary to live performance. Some of your recent projects seem to represent an acceptance of recordings, of the recording process.
Absolutely. If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances. There are a set of historical social circumstances that explain that, which I won't go into, but... I'm certainly not the only musician in this country that would say that. We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from. Gradually it evolved into something more personal, but without those recordings to listen to repeatedly, well, life would have been much more difficult.
WNUR: Your recent recording with Paul Bley and Barre Phillips, Time Will Tell for ECM, is the first recording of yours to be widely available in the United States. Do you get the impression that that recording has helped you to reach a wider audience?
There's some noticeable stirrings of interest. Many of my recordings for smaller labels are now in much more noticeable demand. I'm in contact with some of the distributors here, and of course my friends at Cadence and other places in the states, and they suggest that, yes, there are more people asking for Evan Parker records. Which is great. As long as they enjoy it.
WNUR: How did that session come about?
Well, I've known Manfred Eicher since before ECM started. It may seem extraordinary, but he produced a Peter Brotzmann record for a label called Calig which I'm on along with Derek Bailey, Fred van Hove, Han Bennink... Time Will Tell was actually an idea of Steve Lake's. He presented the idea to Manfred, got his approval, and then asked Barre, Paul, and myself simultaneously, were we up for it? We all wrote back or faxed back immediately to say yes, great, and that was it. It went ahead very quickly after that. It took a while to be issued, so for me, we're talking about something that happened two years ago or maybe more, I can't remember. It took about a year before they started to get it ready for release. If it's just having some impact in the states now, then, hmm! Then I could feel still some side effects, side benefits from that. Steve's talking about doing another one. We've got a tour coming up with Paul and Barre early next year, and Steve has proposed we do a live recording of that, which would be very interesting, because I think Time Will Tell is very much a studio recording. In order to get the full sense of what a particular combination of musicians is about, you really need to hear live recordings as well as studio recordings. Where I've more control myself, I organize things so as to more or less alternate studio, live, studio, live. I think that way the listener gets the clearest picture.
Addendum: While in Chicago, Evan Parker recorded the long-contemplated solo tenor record, but as of January 1997, it has not yet been released.
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