The Squid's Ear Magazine


Parker / Neal / Sorbara: At Somewhere There (Barnyard)

British saxophonist Evan Parker came to Toronto in 2009 as a guest of the AIMToronto (Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto) Interface Series, recording his trio with Wes Neal (double bass) and Joe Sorbara (drums).
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Evan Parker-tenor saxophone

Wes Neal-bass

Joe Sorbara-drums, percussion


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UPC: 777320163820

Label: Barnyard
Catalog ID: BR0321
Squidco Product Code: 14796

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2011
Country: Canada
Packaging: Digipack
Recorded live at Somewhere There, Toronto, Canada by Jean Martin on February 15th, 2009.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"British saxophonist Evan Parker is simply one of the world's premier musical improvisers. He came to Toronto in February 2009 as a guest of the AIMToronto (Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto) Interface Series, and Parker's exceptional trio during that event with Toronto's Wes Neal (double bass) and Joe Sorbara (drums) was recorded by Barnyard's Jean Martin."-Barnyard Records



"The recording of freely improvised music performances offers an especially thorny example of the paradox that attends the recording of all musics, most notably jazz, that claim spontaneity and immediacy as among their fundamental defining characteristics. The radical spontaneity of free improvisation - one-off musical performances with no predetermined form or structure - might appear to represent the ne plus ultra of the discourse of immediacy that has served to characterize jazz since its earliest days. From this perspective, of course, the very concept of recording would appear to be antithetical. But, contrary to Eric Dolphy's famous contention that music is "gone, in the air", the fact remains that the history of jazz and improvised music is largely the history of sound recordings. And for this - all paradoxes aside - we should be grateful. As friendly experiencers (to borrow Anthony Braxton's felicitous phrase), we are indeed lucky that the development of jazz coincided with the development of recording technology, allowing us to engage with and revisit the rich music-making of the last 100 years.

The trio performance on this recording, featuring Joe Sorbara on drums and percussion, Wes Neal on bass, and Evan Parker on tenor saxophone, formed part of the Parker Interface series, coordinated by AIMToronto and held at Somewhere There in February 2009. This session not only offers an excellent example of the success of the Interface concept, which involves invited guest musicians playing in the company of Toronto-based improvisers, but also confirms - notwithstanding the paradox inherent in the process of preserving spontaneity - the value of recording such music. Throughout the performance, Sorbara and Neal engaged with Parker as musical equals, spurring him on to some of his most inspired and unrestrained tenor playing of the series. The 40-minute set is full of rolling highlights - a particular personal favourite comes at the three-quarters mark, with Parker on the edge of breaking into a fractured jig against Neal's bowed bass and Sorbara's gong-like chiming, from what is actually a metal record deck platter (think vinyl - at this point, the history of sound recording implicates itself directly in the music). But it's the sustained intensity of the performance that is most striking, indicating a depth of musical understanding that simply belies the fact that this was the first time these musicians had played together. Contrary to Derek Bailey's contentious claim for improvised music as a "non-idiomatic" form of musical practice, it is precisely the form's idiomatic elements that engender and enable the sophisticated musical communication heard on this recording. And, paradoxical or otherwise, this is genuinely spontaneous music that deserves repeated listening."-Alan Stanbridge


Artist Biographies

"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.

"Canadian drummer and percussionist Joe Sorbara has spent decades developing a reputation as a dedicated and imaginative performer, composer, improviser, collaborator, organiser, listener, writer, and educator. A consummate sonic adventurer, Sorbara's music draws on a vast array of influences, most notably the African American Creative Music tradition. They have performed and recorded with Ken Aldcroft, Jared Burrows, Anthony Braxton, JP Carter, Nikita Carter, Christine Duncan, Paul Dutton, François Houle, Germaine Liu, Joe McPhee, Evan Parker, William Parker, Allen Ravenstine, Clyde Reed, Steve Sladkowski, and Friendly Rich, among many many others. Their own projects include the Joe Sorbara Sextet, Alien Radio, Aurealities, the Imaginary Percussion Ensemble, The Imperative, Never Was, Mars People, and Reliable Parts.

Sorbara is a long-time student of master drummer Jim Blackley. They hold an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music from York University in Toronto, a Master's degree in English from the University of Guelph, and they are currently studying toward a PhD in Critical Improvisation Studies. Joe has worked extensively as a workshop facilitator and guest lecturer and began teaching through the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph in 2007."

-Joe Sorbara Website (http://www.ovalwindowmusic.org/joesorbara/bio.php)
3/13/2024

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


Track Listing:



1. At Somewhere There 39:54

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Jazz
European Improvisation and Experimental Forms
Parker, Evan
Toronto Area Improvisation
2011 Top 40
Trio Recordings
Canadian Composition & Improvisation

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Barnyard.


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