Evan Parker at 80

If I write often about Evan Parker in this space, it’s because he’s one of the most original and compelling musicians of my lifetime. He’s also one of the most prolific, always up to something, usually something new. He turned 80 earlier this year, and by way of a slightly belated celebration comes a box set titled The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc., based around four CDs of previously unreleased solo soprano saxophone improvisations with a book containing interviews, musings, his own and other people’s memories, and a section devoted to his very nice collages, made during lockdown on the blank pages of a necessarily unused Musicians’ Union diary.

The first CD opens with a continuous 22-minute improvisation, an extract from a concert in 1994 at the Unitarian Chapel in Warwick. Parker remembered liking it, and decided to pair it on the disc with 40 minutes of new and shorter pieces recorded in 2023 at the same venue. That gave him the idea for the title of the box: it was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who was reported to have said that you never step in the same river twice. The Unitarian Chapel was indeed not quite the same river: the floor had been renewed. But you get the higher point.

The second of those new pieces, titled “Orwell”, winds itself up to a pitch at which it almost blows your head off. And there are many such outstanding moments throughout these discs, the rest of which were recorded between 2018 and this year at Filipe Gomes’s Arco Barco studio, a converted old harbourside building in Ramsgate, Kent (Parker lives not far away, in Faversham). During “Blériot’s Handshake”, for example, I seemed to feel the ground sliding under my feet — the sensation I sometimes get when listening to Carlo Gesualdo’s choral music.

But the one that I loved most is the 31-minute piece taking up the whole of the second disc, in which Parker approaches the improvisation from several different trajectories, taking his time to pause before switching angle or pace. It’s called “The Path Is Made By Walking”: a most appropriate choice for a man who has followed his own route through the trackless expanses of improvised music for 60 years.

Although the accompanying book isn’t an autobiography, we do learn a lot throughout its various sections. We hear about his relationship with his saxophones, from the first purchase of an old alto at the age of 14, and there’s a semi-technical passage which gives even a non-professional a glimpse of the discipline and study it took to achieve his virtuosity, and still takes to maintain and deepen it. On relationships with other musicians, there are vignettes of Phil Seaman, Dudu Pukwana, Paul Rutherford, Henry Lowther and others, sometimes only a sentence or two but always memorable (“Eat when you can, sleep when you can” was Henry’s valuable early advice about life on the road). When I told Evan he’d made me think about John Stevens, who welcomed him into the SME and the world of the Little Theatre Club in 1967, soon after his arrival in London, and who died 30 years ago, he said: “I think about him just about every day.”

Since Evan has a wider conversational range than almost anyone I know, it’s hardly a surprise to find the text sprinkled with quotes from Borges, Buckminster Fuller, Simone Weil, Idris Shah, Dag Hammarskjöld, Kafka, Iain Sinclair, Chesterton, Koestler, Marcus Aurelius, Hogarth, De Quincey and the Iroquois nation’s address to the 1977 UN Conference on Indigenous Peoples, as well as Eric Dolphy, Steve Lacy and Booker Little. They’re used to support conclusions that are sometimes contentious, always stimulating.

Then I go back and listen again to “The Path Is Made By Walking”. In this wonderful half-hour we hear not just the use he’s made of his evolving technique to create fantastic, mindbending patterns of sound, often mesmerising and sometimes transcendent, but also how he can so fruitfully exploit the acoustical properties of his environment, in this case Arco Barco, and particularly its resonance; he really is “playing the room”, and the result is spellbinding.

Of course I love hearing Evan playing tenor, whether it’s on Tony Oxley’s classic 1969 recording of Charlie Mariano’s “Stone Garden”, or with Spring Heel Jack (John Coxon and Ashley Wales), or with the Necks, or in a big ensemble like the Globe Unity Orchestra. But I’m pretty sure it’s for the solo work on soprano that he’ll be most lastingly remembered. Here, in a fine package benefiting from David Caines’ elegantly austere design, is the evidence of his singularity.

* The photograph of Evan Parker and me was taken by Miranda Little. The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc. is on the False Walls label: http://www.falsewalls.co.uk