Parker, William & ICI Ensemble

Winter Sun Crying

Label: NEOS Music Country: Germany

"William Parker was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1952. For more than thirty years he has cultivated projects of various sizes and composed for these ensembles, as can be seen in the more than twenty albums released under his name. He thus follows in a tradition of bassist-leaders such as Charles Mingus, Dave Holland, and Barry Guy.

William Parker first came to international attention with the Cecil Taylor Trio, with whom he collaborated from 1980 to 1991. He has also played in groups led by Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle, performed with Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Sunny Murray, Louis Sclavis, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, Rashied Ali, Perry Robinson, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Grimes, Mat Maneri, Jeanne Lee, John Zorn, and DJ Spooky, to name only a few of the wide-ranging figures he has worked with.

Together with bassists Barre Phillips and Joëlle Léandre, he recorded the album After You've Gone in memory of Peter Kowald. He also co-founded the Vision Festival in New York with his wife, the dancer Patricia Nicholson, and developed it into a major event.

Parker has taught at Bennington College, NYU, the New England Conservatory, Cal Arts, New School University, and the Rotterdam Conservatory of Music. He is also a poet, theorist, the author of several books (including Document Humanum, The Sound Journal, who owns music? and The Mayor of Punkville), and the composer of the theater piece Music and the Shadow People.

As the Boston Globe wrote in 2002, "William Parker has emerged as the most important leader of the current avant-garde scene in jazz." In 2009 he was named "Bass Player of the Year" by the Jazz Journalists Association.

For Composer in Dialogue 2009, Parker joined forces with the ICI Ensemble to create a work specially tailored to the ICI, using the element of improvisation that typifies their work. The concert thus follows up on the series' path-breaking encounters with Olga Neuwirth, Barry Guy, Pierre Favre, George Lewis, Giancarlo Schiaffini, and Vinko Globokar."-NEOS

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