The Squid's Ear Magazine


Parker, Evan / Andrea Centazzo : Duets 71977 (Ictus)

Bringing to light an excellent concert from 1977 in San Marcello, Portugal, and studio recordings at Ictus Studio, Pistoia, Italy from the same year, between UK free improvising master saxophonist Evan Parker on soprano & tenor, and Italian percussionist Andrea Centazzo on drums, percussion, and electronics.
 

Price: $15.95


Quantity:

Out of Stock

Quantity in Basket: None

Log In to use our Wish List
Shipping Weight: 2.00 units

Sample The Album:





product information:

Personnel:



Andrea Centazzo-drums, percussion, electronics

Evan Parker-soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone


Click an artist name above to see in-stock items for that artist.




UPC: 814519022541

Label: Ictus
Catalog ID: ICT 178
Squidco Product Code: 23259

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2016
Country: Italy
Packaging: Digipack
Recorded live in concert in San Marcello (PT) and at Ictus Studio, Pistoia, Italy, July 1977

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"Four decades has not dated these sounds a jot: this is exciting music. Long thought lost, it is an historic meeting of two master improvisors at the very peak of their powers, and sounds just as fresh and modern as the day it was made. This is music that transcends time, style, and genre. It is pure. It is real. It is Truth and Beauty"-John Zorn, October 2016


Artist Biographies

"In an artistic career that spans over twentyfive years, Andrea Centazzo has given more than 1000 concerts and live performances in Europe and the United States, as well as having appeared and performed on numerous radio and television broadcasts. He has recorded over 60 LP's and CD's, and has authored 350 compositions and eight musicology books. His musical endeavors and creative expression range from the sublime to the passionate, from lyric opera to orchestral symphony and solo percussion. He has performed in momentous festivals as soloist of his own compositions or as conductor of symphonic orchestras. Centazzo is a pioneer of contemporary percussion. In the early years, he performed with some of the greatest avant-garde soloists and composers, including J. Zorn, S. Bussotti, S. Lacy, D. Cherry, A. Mangellsdorf, E. Parker, etc. Deservedly, Centazzo has received a number of prestigious music and video Awards (Premio Speciale della Critica Discografica Italiana, USA Downbeat Poll, International Video Festival Tokyo, Prix Arcanal of French Culture, etc.) A doctoral graduate in musicology, he has taught seminars and workshops in Europe and the USA. Since 1983, Centazzo has been dedicated to creating multi-media experiences. This expansion began with an exhibition of his scores rendered as painted ideograms, and evolved into video performances combining both live performance with video images. These efforts culminated in his directing award-winning videos and films. As a soundtrack composer, he unites traditional instrumentation with current technological advances in musical expression through sampling machines and computers. These efforts give a new perspective to the fusion of sound and image through his theatre, television, video, CD rom, and feature film scores. The music of A.C. captures and expresses the rhythm and pulse of life by synthesizing the mystery of Oriental percussive vibrations with the timbral harmonic understanding of contemporary music and the soul of jazz and rock post-culture. A.C. continues to contribute his unique artistic vision to the evolution of contemporary culture."

-Andrea Centazzo Website (http://andreacentazzo.com/bio.html)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Evan Parker was born in Bristol in 1944 and began to play the saxophone at the age of 14. Initially he played alto and was an admirer of Paul Desmond; by 1960 he had switched to tenor and soprano, following the example of John Coltrane, a major influence who, he would later say, determined "my choice of everything". In 1962 he went to Birmingham University to study botany but a trip to New York, where he heard the Cecil Taylor trio (with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray), prompted a change of mind. What he heard was "music of a strength and intensity to mark me for life ... l came back with my academic ambitions in tatters and a desperate dream of a life playing that kind of music - 'free jazz' they called it then."

Parker stayed in Birmingham for a time, often playing with pianist Howard Riley. In 1966 he moved to London, became a frequent visitor to the Little Theatre Club, centre of the city's emerging free jazz scene, and was soon invited by drummer John Stevens to join the innovative Spontaneous Music Ensemble which was experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation. Parker's first issued recording was SME's 1968 Karyobin, with a line-up of Parker, Stevens, Derek Bailey, Dave Holland and Kenny Wheeler. Parker remained in SME through various fluctuating line-ups - at one point it comprised a duo of Stevens and himself - but the late 1960s also saw him involved in a number of other fruitful associations.

He began a long-standing partnership with guitarist Bailey, with whom he formed the Music Improvisation Company and, in 1970, co-founded Incus Records. (Tony Oxley, in whose sextet Parker was then playing, was a third co-founder; Parker left Incus in the mid-1980s.) Another important connection was with the bassist Peter Kowald who introduced Parker to the German free jazz scene. This led to him playing on Peter Brötzmann's 1968 Machine Gun, Manfred Schoof's 1969 European Echoes and, in 1970, joining pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and percussionist Paul Lovens in the former's trio, of which he is still a member: their recordings include Pakistani Pomade, Three Nails Left, Detto Fra Di Noi, Elf Bagatellen and Physics.

Parker pursued other European links, too, playing in the Pierre Favre Quartet (with Kowald and Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer) and in the Dutch Instant Composers Pool of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. The different approaches to free jazz he encountered proved both a challenging and a rewarding experience. He later recalled that the German musicians favoured a "robust, energy-based thing, not to do with delicacy or detailed listening but to do with a kind of spirit-raising, a shamanistic intensity. And l had to find a way of surviving in the heat of that atmosphere ... But after a while those contexts became more interchangeable and more people were involved in the interactions, so all kinds of hybrid musics came out, all kinds of combinations of styles."

A vital catalyst for these interactions were the large ensembles in which Parker participated in the 1970s: Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO) and occasional big bands led by Kenny Wheeler. In the late 70s Parker also worked for a time in Wheeler's small group, recording Around Six and, in 1980, he formed his own trio with Guy and LJCO percussionist Paul Lytton (with whom he had already been working in a duo for nearly a decade). This group, together with the Schlippenbach trio, remains one of Parker's top musical priorities: their recordings include Tracks, Atlanta, Imaginary Values, Breaths and Heartbeats, The Redwood Sessions and At the Vortex. In 1980, Parker directed an Improvisers Symposium in Pisa and, in 1981, he organised a special project at London's Actual Festival. By the end of the 1980s he had played in most European countries and had made various tours to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. ln 1990, following the death of Chris McGregor, he was instrumental in organising various tributes to the pianist and his fellow Blue Notes; these included two discs by the Dedication Orchestra, Spirits Rejoice and lxesa.

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. Parker's first solo recordings, made in 1974, were reissued on the Saxophone Solos CD in 1995; more recent examples are Conic Sections and Process and Reality, on the latter of which he does, for the first time, experiment with multi-tracking. Heard alone on stage, few would disagree with writer Steve Lake that "There is, still, nothing else in music - jazz or otherwise - that remotely resembles an Evan Parker solo concert."

While free improvisation has been Parker's main area of activity over the last three decades, he has also found time for other musical pursuits: he has played in 'popular' contexts with Annette Peacock, Scott Walker and the Charlie Watts big band; he has performed notated pieces by Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Frederic Rzewski; he has written knowledgeably about various ethnic musics in Resonance magazine. A relatively new field of interest for Parker is improvising with live electronics, a dialogue he first documented on the 1990 Hall of Mirrors CD with Walter Prati. Later experiments with electronics in the context of larger ensembles have included the Synergetics - Phonomanie III project at Ullrichsberg in 1993 and concerts by the new EP2 (Evan Parker Electronic Project) in Berlin, Nancy and at the 1995 Stockholm Electronic Music Festival where Parker's regular trio improvised with real-time electronics processed by Prati, Marco Vecchi and Phillip Wachsmann. "Each of the acoustic instrumentalists has an electronic 'shadow' who tracks him and feeds a modified version of his output back to the real-time flow of the music."

The late 80s and 90s brought Parker the chance to play with some of his early heroes. He worked with Cecil Taylor in small and large groups, played with Coltrane percussionist Rashied Ali, recorded with Paul Bley: he also played a solo set as support to Ornette Coleman when Skies of America received its UK premiere in 1988. The same period found Parker renewing his acquaintance with American colleagues such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and George Lewis, with all of whom he had played in the 1970s (often in the context of London's Company festivals). His 1993 duo concert with Braxton moved John Fordham in The Guardian to raptures over "saxophone improvisation of an intensity, virtuosity, drama and balance to tax the memory for comparison".

Parker's 50th birthday in 1994 brought celebratory concerts in several cities, including London, New York and Chicago. The London performance, featuring the Parker and Schlippenbach trios, was issued on a highly-acclaimed two-CD set, while participants at the American concerts included various old friends as well as more recent collaborators in Borah Bergman and Joe Lovano. The NYC radio station WKCR marked the occasion by playing five days of Parker recordings. 1994 also saw the publication of the Evan Parker Discography, compiled by ltalian writer Francesco Martinelli, plus chapters on Parker in books on contemporary musics by John Corbett and Graham Lock.

Parker's future plans involve exploring further possibilities in electronics and the development of his solo music. They also depend to a large degree on continuity of the trios, of the large ensembles, of his more occasional yet still long-standing associations with that pool of musicians to whose work he remains attracted. This attraction, he explained to Coda's Laurence Svirchev, is attributable to "the personal quality of an individual voice". The players to whom he is drawn "have a language which is coherent, that is, you know who the participants are. At the same time, their language is flexible enough that they can make sense of playing with each other ... l like people who can do that, who have an intensity of purpose." "

-Evan Parker Website (http://evanparker.com/biography.php)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Duets 71977 #1 10:15

2. Duets 71977 #2 11:09

3. Duets 71977 #3 12:24

4. Duets 71977 #4 11:36

5. Duets 71977 #5 5:59

6. Duets 71977 #6 7:17

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
European Improvisation and Experimental Forms
London & UK Improv & Related Scenes
Duo Recordings
Parker, Evan
Saxophone & Drummer / Percussionist Duos

Search for other titles on the label:
Ictus.


Recommended & Related Releases:
Other Recommended Releases:
Parker, Evan / Seymour Wright
Tie the Stone to the Wheel
(Fataka)
A meeting between two accomplished saxophonists recorded live at Kernel Brewery, in London in 2014, and at The Studio in Derby, with Seymour Wright on alto saxophone and Evan Parker on both alto and soprano, criss-crossing and combining in exuberant and astonishing ways.
Parker, Evan / Leimgruber, Urs
Twine
(Clean Feed)
British sax giant Evan Parker meets Swiss tenor and soprano explorer Urs Leimgruber in an album of intertwining sax discussion using an unusual and unique language.
Parker, Evan / Sainkho Namtchylak
Mars Song
(Les Disques Victo)
Intense meeting of saxophone legend Parker and the remarkable Tuvan improvising vocalist Namtchylak performing live at Music Gallery in Toronto, 1996.



Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought:
This Is It! (Satoko Fujii / Natsuki Tamura / Takashi Itani)
1538
(Libra)
Part of pianist Satoko Fujii's "Kanreki" (60th Birthday) tour and monthly album release, the "This Is It!" Trio with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and drummer/percussionist Takashi Itani is heard at Koendori Classics, in Tokyo, Japan, in January 2018, for an incredible album of Fujii's compositions that include quirky asides in coherent and effusive playing.
Moore, Thurston / Umut Caglar
Dunia [VINYL]
(Astral Spirits)
Recorded in Istanbul, Turkey, guitarist Thurston Moore teams up with Konstrukt guitarist Umut Caglar to record these three rich and twisting pieces, each guitarist extracting unique performances from the other over three pieces that draw on technique and effects to create fragile and heavy sonic environments, an impressive album of modern guitar potential.
Eisenstadt, Harris / Mivos Quartet
Whatever Will Happen That Will Also Be [VINYL]
(NoBusiness)
NY free jazz drummer and composer Harris Eisenstadt brings his talents to the compositional world with this four movement suite performed by the Mivos Quartet of Olivia De Prato, Josh Modney, Victor Lowrie and Mariel Roberts, a creative composition blending melodic and textural approaches to the strings in a bold rendering of Eisenstandt's work.
Mazurek, Rob (w/ Takara / Granado / Rohrer / Somervell)
Chants and Corners
(Clean Feed)
With members of Sao Paulo Underground, Pharoah and The Underground, and Chicago Underground, cornetist/electroacoustic artist Rob Mazurek leads a quintet with Mauricio Takara (drums), Thomas Rohrer (winds), Philip Somervell (piano) and Guilherme Granado (keys) through a unexpected confluence of styles to create an otherworldly blend of spiritual music.
Eisenstadt, Harris Canada Day (w/ Wooley / Bauder / Niggenkemper)
On Parade in Parede
(Clean Feed)
A live recording of drummer/composer Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day band performing as a quartet with trumpeter Nate Wooley, saxophonist Matt Bauder, and bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, recorded at SUMP during their 2016 European tour, an exemplary set of free playing over a great set of original compositions, including a large work in 3 sections and 5 parts.
Lazro, Daunik / Joelle Leandre / George Lewis
Enfances 8 Janv. 1984
(Fou Records)
A live recording at 28 rue Dunois, in Paris, France in 1984 from the trio of Daunik Lazro on alto sax, Joelle Leandre on double bass and voice, and George Lewis on trombone, a trans-Atlantic enounter of creative inventiveness and innovative vision, a great document of three persistent masters captured early in their incredible careers.
Kowald, Peter / Daunik Lazro / Annick Nozati
Instants Chavires
(Fou Records)
Recordings from 2000 at Instants Chavires in Montreuil, France from the free improvising trio of Peter Kowald on double bass, Daunik Lazro on alto & baritone sax, and Annick Nozati on voice, in a uniquely informed dialog representing the only time this masterful trio performed.
Parker, Evan / John Russel / Ian Brighton / Phillip Wachsmann / Marcio Mattos / Trevor Taylor
Reunion: Live From Cafe Oto
(FMR)
London's Cafe Oto organized a reunion of String Thing, guitarist Ian Brighton's project with violinist Phillip Wachsmann, bassist Marcio Mattos, & Trevor Taylor on percussion and electronics, adding guitarist John Russell and saxophonist Evan Parker, here capturing an impressive night of improv, and Brighton's first public appearance in nearly 40 years.
Brotzmann / van Hove / Bennink
1971
(Corbett vs. Dempsey)
Unreleased material from legendary European players Peter Brotzmann (sax), Fred Van Hove (piano) and Han Bennink (drums), captured live in 1971 for intensely heavy playing at the 2nd Internationales New Jazz Meeting Auf Burg Altena, and in detailed studio work at Radio Bremen.
Chicago Reed Quartet (Mazzarella / Rempis / Williams / Vandermark)
Western Automatic
(Aerophonic)
Four generations of Chicago saxophonists--Dave Rempis, Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, and Nick Mazzarella--come together in an interactive saxophone quartet with each player providing 2 compositions of well-developed, powerful, engaging free and lyrical jazz.
Moondoc, Jemeel / Connie Crothers
Two
(Relative Pitch)
Two New York jazz originals, pianist Connie Crothers and alto saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc, performing 6 improvisations and one original compositions from each artist; melodic and deeply sensitive playing.



The Squid's Ear Magazine

The Squid's Ear Magazine

© 2002-, Squidco LLC