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Posts tagged ‘Evan Parker’

Oct 11

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Birdsong in Dalston

After spending some of the morning reading a piece on biodiversity by Simon Barnes in the Observer, I felt properly primed for the second of Evan Parker’s four matinees at Cafe Oto. Simon, an old colleague at The Times, was writing brilliantly about species diversity. His special subject is birds; he can tell the song of a willow warbler from that of a chiffchaff, just as I can (I hope) tell the sound of Fats Navarro from that of Clifford Brown. Whereas the dawn chorus around my suburban home vanished several years ago, in rural Suffolk he is able to log the sounds of 21 different bird species before breakfast.

This afternoon’s performance in Dalston was billed as Evan Parker / John Coxon / Ashley Wales: “With Birds”. Together, Coxon and Wales are known as Spring Heel Jack, manipulating electronics and turntables in order to provide unorthodox and stimulating settings for free improvisers of the first generation (their album John Tchicai with Strings, released on their own Treader label in 2005, is a classic). They have collaborated with Evan on many occasions, and today’s concert was a live iteration of another Treader album, Evan Parker with Birds, released in 2004.

Today Parker had brought his soprano saxophone and was flanked by Coxon at one table, stage right, and Wales at another, stage left. Wales seemed to trigger most of the birdsong during the one-hour set, but he and Coxon both contributed to the electronic sound bed that supported and encouraged Evan’s improvisations.

To begin with, Evan seemed to be responding directly to the calls of various birds. But when, with about 20 minutes gone, Coxon began striking a small handbell and a xylophone with a light mallet, Evan reacted by turning on the afterburners and delivering quite the most astonishing extended solo I can remember hearing from him: one of those improvisations of his in which each phrase seems to overlap the one before it (and, thanks to his use of circular breathing, there are no breaks between them).

It was astonishingly powerful, and I got the feeling that it transfixed everyone else in the crowded room, too. And then over the remainder of the set he did it twice more, not quite with the same degree of intensity but varying his attack and trajectory as first Coxon set up a repeated figure on a little kalimba (thumb piano) and then, in the final section, used kalimba, handbell and xylophone over a drone from Wales that sounded like an organ powered by waves. Eventually Evan fell silent and the xylophone and waves slowly faded into a silence that was anything but empty.

* The third of Evan Parker’s series of Sunday matinees at Cafe Oto is on November 8, featuring Henry Dagg. The fourth is on December 13, featuring Pat Thomas and Thurston Moore. Treader’s albums are available as digital downloads: https://treader-recordings.bandcamp.com/

Sep 14

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‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’

The centenary of John Coltrane’s birth in Hamlet, North Carolina falls later this month; many commemorative events will take place. Yesterday afternoon at Cafe Oto, in the first of four monthly Sunday matinee concerts, Evan Parker led something he titled ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’, which turned out to be the sort of tribute that summons the spirit of the dedicatee without trying to mimic the substance.

I may have mentioned before that the first time I interviewed Evan, at his home in the early ’70s, I was impressed by a shelf of LPs with orange and black spines: Coltrane’s albums on Impulse, of course, in their original US editions. Over the years I learned more about his love of the great man’s work, and the inspirational effect it had on the development of his own playing.

Yesterday Evan sat at the centre of an expanded performance space, with his soprano saxophone and a suspended gong. He was flanked by Matt Wright, his partner in Trance Map, at a table with a laptop and a turntable, and by Filipe Gomes of Ramsgate’s Arco Barco studio, also with a laptop and other electronic devices. At the four corners of the space were a quartet of percussionists assembled by Mark Sanders, himself standing at an array of larger gongs, cymbals and small upturned bass drums, with Miles Levin, Jim Bashford and Tymek Jozwiak each seated at minimal kits of varying configurations.

After the room had fallen silent, Evan began proceedings by striking the gong. His strokes precipitated a very gradual accretion of sounds from the other players, creating an abstract tapestry of rustles, taps, pings and other noises, with the subtle infiltration of electronic sounds at its base. After many minutes of this, and a fade to a silence in which we heard Coltrane’s voice speaking about his desire for growth as a person, Evan picked up his soprano and began the first of several improvisations against the constantly shifting sound-quilt.

He is 82 now, more than twice as old as Coltrane was when he died in 1967. Yet his playing is still mesmerising in its unquenchable flow of invention, based on all the techniques of blowing and fingering developed over the decades and powered by circular breathing as well as a constantly active imagination. I suppose you could trace it back to Coltrane’s three-minute unaccompanied tenor cadenza on the version of “I Want to Talk About You” released on Live at Birdland in 1964 — staggering at the time, and still inspiring awe.

The use of the soprano saxophone recalled how Coltrane, once he had taken up the instrument, must have heard in it echoes of the double-reed rhiatas of the Sufi musicians of Jajouka and the shenai of South Asia. The tapestry of percussion effects, rising and falling in waves as the intensity surged, abated and then surged again, was a reminder of how, in his later years, Coltrane loved adding drummers to his ensemble — Rashied Ali, J. C. Moses, Algie DeWitt, Jumma Santos, Ray Appleton, Juno Lewis, Umar Ali, Joe Brazil, Babatunde Olatunji — in the attempt to realise the vision of a music that, as he once said, would start in the middle and move outwards in both directions.

As Evan and his colleagues made their way through a magnificent performance that lasted well over an hour before returning to silence, it was impossible not to hear in the saxophone’s flutters and skeins and multiphonics a direct evolution — entirely personal to Parker — of what Coltrane began more than 60 years ago. As I said, the best kind of tribute.

* ‘A Ritual for John Coltrane’ will be performed again this Friday evening, September 18, at Foyle’s Studio in the Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham.

May 2

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The return of Kenny Wheeler

‘What Was’ (from left): Ray Warleigh, Stan Sulzmann, Tony Levin, Kenny Wheeler, John Parricelli, Chris Laurence (photo by Caroline Forbes)

The Toronto-born trumpeter and composer Kenny Wheeler left a big hole when he died in London in 2014, aged 84, after more than 60 years in the UK. A quiet and almost pathologically self-effacing man, he was hugely admired by his peers, who recognised not just the originality of his conception as a player and writer but the quality of his vision, which embraced both purity and open-mindedness. He made the music he wanted to make.

And he hasn’t really gone away. Last year some of his big-band charts were recorded for an album called Some Days Are Better by the Royal Academy of Music’s jazz orchestra and guest soloists, conducted by Nick Smart, Wheeler’s co-biographer; rather wonderfully, it received a Grammy nomination. And there’s also a new album called Vital Spark in which the bassist Dave Holland and the singer Norma Winstone collaborate with the London Vocal Project under Pete Churchill’s direction on performances of Wheeler’s unrecorded settings of poems by Langston Hughes, Stevie Smith, William Blake and Lewis Carroll, with new lyrics by Winstone completing some of Kenny’s late compositions.

Of course many of Wheeler’s own albums, particularly the ECM classics Gnu High (1975), Music for Large and Small Ensembles (1990) and Angel Song (1997), remain available. And now there’s an important new addition to his discography with the appearance of What Was, a sextet album originally recorded by Evan Parker for his Psi label in 1995 at Gateway Studio in Kingston upon Thames and now finely packaged for release.

The line-up is Wheeler on flugelhorn with Ray Warleigh on alto saxophone and flute, Stan Sulzmann on tenor, John Parricelli on guitar, Chris Laurence on double bass and Tony Levin on drums — an A-team of the Canadian’s regular partners. There are seven tracks, amounting to 64 minutes of music, all recorded within a single day in a room that had originally been built by Kingston University as a rehearsal space for the London Sinfonietta before being repurposed as a studio. The sextet sounds both lustrous and sinewy; thanks to the resident engineer, Steve Lowe, the tonal quality and balance are unimpeachable.

As is the music. In the sleeve notes, Sulzmann says this: “It was an old-school recording date where we all turned up on the day, no rehearsals, and we all brought a tune or two to try.” The brilliance of the players ensures that there are few dropped stitches, but the spontaneous nature of the session surely accounts for the freshness that the music radiates.

There are two compositions by Warleigh, two by Sulzmann and one by the pianist Mike Pyne before we reach Wheeler’s own two contributions. It’s fascinating to hear what a difference Parricelli’s imaginative background textures can make to a relatively standard post-bop piece, particularly to Warleigh’s Latin-inflected “Blue Nile”, which draws a fantastically inventive alto solo from the composer — one the finest on record, I’d say, from another figure sadly missed since his death in 2015.

It’s all first-class, until we get to the two Wheeler tunes, where things go up another level again. “What Was” glides teasingly through unpredictable changes, distantly related to the standard “What Is This Thing Called Love”, that provoke these master improvisers into compelling solos, with superlative support from Laurence and Levin, and a marvellous series of exchanges between the flugelhorn and the drummer, wittily leading into a closing statement of “Subconscious-Lee”, Lee Konitz’s take on the same source material. “Kind Folk” is a tune Wheeler returned to in various forms, and is the only previously released track in this set (it appeared in 2003 on Dream Sequence, a Psi album compiled from various Gateway sessions); here it slides in and out of tempo, like water flowing from one pool to another, with Sulzmann in particular benefitting from the reflective mood.

I said there were few dropped stitches. The ones you spot — a tiny hesitation here, a truncated thought there — merely confirm that this music was being made in the moment, with full collective commitment. A precious document indeed.

* What Was is out now on the False Walls label: http://www.falsewalls.co.uk. Some Days Are Better and Vital Spark are on the Greenleaf and Edition labels respectively.

Aug 28

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Farewell to Bra Tebs

There used to be a civilised convention that normal reviewing practice should be suspended for certain kinds of musical events: those put on for charity, or memorials. Of the celebration of the life of Louis Tebogo Moholo-Moholo at a packed 100 Club last night, it need really only be said that the whole evening was suffused with the indomitable spirit of the great South African drummer, who died in June, aged 85.

The trumpeter Claude Deppa, his friend and frequent bandmate in Viva La Black, started the proceedings at the head of his warm-hearted quartet. Then the pianist Steve Beresford and the drummer Mark Sanders took over for an intricate and absorbing free conversation. Evan Parker brought out his soprano saxophone, removed its mouthpiece, and tapped the keys to produce a quite extraordinary 10-minute percussion solo which managed to be both a shadow commentary on what he might have played with the mouthpiece in place and a unique tribute to his former colleague in the band Foxes Fox. The trio of Larry Stabbins on alto saxophone, Paul Rogers on bass and Sanders again on drums played a set notable for Rogers manoeuvring his bespoke seven-string instrument into the expressive space between a Celtic harp and a cello.

The heart of the celebration of Bra Tebs (as his friends knew him), which was organised by Hazel Miller and Mike Gavin of Ogun Records, came in the set by Four Blokes + 1, his last London-based band. Pictured above, this featured Jason Yarde and Shabaka on saxophones, Alex Hawkins on piano and John Edwards on bass, with the superb Sanders once more on the drum stool, embodying rather than imitating the characteristics of Louis’s playing. They came out roaring, and that’s how they were still sounding as I had to make my departure, with the darkly ecstatic closing cadences of “Dikeledi Tsa Phelo” accompanying me up the stairs and into the night.

Mar 4

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Brutalised

Maybe you saw Daniel Blumberg’s acceptance speech for the best soundtrack award during the Academy Awards ceremony at the weekend. Honoured for his work on The Brutalist, he finishes off with a mention of Cafe Oto, which is less of a surprise when you’ve noticed, among the musical credits, the names of such Oto-adjacent improvisers as the saxophonists Seymour Wright and Evan Parker, the pianist John Tilbury and the trumpeter Axel Dörner.

After seeing Brady Corbet’s ambitious film at the IMAX in London today, I came away with mixed feelings. Sometimes it feels like three different and much shorter films, maybe four, trapped together in a very large sack and left to fight it out for three and a half hours.

But the real reason I went was to find out what use Blumberg had made of Evan Parker’s unique qualities. The saxophonist is featured in a sequence filmed amid the marble quarries at Carrara, in the hills above the Tuscan coast, the source of the material from which Michelangelo’s David was wrought, along with Rome’s Pantheon and London’s Marble Arch.

As a camera hovers over the spectacularly gorgeous hewn terraces of white stone, the air is filled with the sound of Parker’s soprano saxophone. Unbroken skeins of squiggling multiphonic sound are shaped with a sound-sculptor’s skill and imagination, soaring like birds above a sombre low-brass chorale.

Given the film’s narrative requirements, it’s a moment of audio-visual magic that can’t last long. But I could happily have taken three and a half hours of that alone, without all the plot-driven drama that surrounds it. Right there, perhaps, was yet another film struggling to escape: a potential classic of slow cinema.

Jan 12

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Three in one

It felt like a great privilege to be at Cafe Oto last night to hear the Schlippenbach Trio — Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano), Evan Parker (tenor saxophone) and Paul Lytton (drums) — make a rare appearance in London in front of a capacity crowd. This is a group that has existed since 1972, with one personnel change: Lytton’s arrival some years ago to replace his great friend Paul Lovens, who stopped touring.

At 77, Lytton is the youngster of the group. Parker is 80, Schlippenbach 86. Although their group is one of the enduring monuments of European free jazz, they continue play as though the music is being invented every night — which it is, albeit with its foundations in their vast experience, both individual and collective. Last night’s 50-minute set was a further exploration of the spaces between them: a true conversation of equal voices, merging and separating and merging again with a perfect sense of spontaneous form and balance.

Nov 25

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Outer and inner space

On the 243 bus ride to yesterday’s matinee show at Cafe Oto, I finished Samantha Harvey’s short novel Orbital, the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. Starting as a description of the lives of six astronauts aboard a space station, it finishes as a meditation on the world — the planet, the universe — and our place in it.

With that in my head, listening to Evan Parker, Matthew Wright and their four colleagues in this edition of Transatlantic Trance Map create their intricate musical conversations was like zooming in on the smallest level of earthly detail: an example of our human potential, in the face of cosmic irrelevance.

For two shortish sets of unbroken free improvisation, Parker (soprano saxophone) and Wright (turntables and live sampling devices) were joined by Hannah Marshall (cello), Pat Thomas (electronics), Robert Jarvis (trombone) and Alex Ward (clarinet). The music was calm, collective, and often very beautiful in its constant warp and weft. Maybe it was the occasional (very subtle and always appropriate) pings and hums from the electronics that reinforced the connection in my mind with Orbital: the whoosh of a closing airlock, the light clang of a piece of space junk against a titanium hull. But that was obviously just me.

Many years ago I went to interview Evan at his home in Twickenham. One thing I noticed was that his shelves of LPs had a particularly long stretch of orange and black spines: John Coltrane on the Impulse label, of course. Evan has never sounded like Coltrane, but his study of the great man was foundational to his own development and his interest remains deep. Yesterday, for example, he was keen to tell me about the extraordinary sound quality of the reissue of the 1962 Graz concert by Coltrane’s classic quartet on Werner Uehlinger’s ezz-thetics label. “You can hear the ping of Elvin’s ride cymbal,” he said.

So it was by an interesting coincidence that I went on from Dalston to another event on the last day of the EFG London Jazz Festival, a concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall called Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra. For this performance of arrangements by various hands of some of Coltrane’s compositions (“Impressions”, “Central Park West”, “Giant Steps”, “Naima” etc), and a few other pieces that he recorded (including “So What”, “Crepuscule with Nellie” and “Blue in Green” and a handful of standards, including “My Favourite Things”), the full BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Edwin Outwater, was joined by two horn soloists, the young American trumpeter Giveton Gelin and the experienced British saxophonist Denys Baptiste, and the trio of the pianist Nikki Yeoh, with Shane Forbes on drums and Ewan Hastie on bass.

Inevitably, I suppose, there were times when it felt as though Coltrane was being reduced to something close to light music; there was certainly no attempt to get to grips with the turbulence of the music he made in the last three years of his life in albums such as Interstellar Space. But there were moments of distinction, too. Baptiste tore into “Impressions”, while Gelin — a New York-based Bahamian in his mid-twenties — earned ovations for his poised reading of “My One and Only Love” and for a lovely coda to “In a Sentimental Mood”, mining the elegant post-bop tradition of Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard.

In terms of the response from a full house, it was a great success. But there was one moment when the music went deeper, closer to what Coltrane was really about, and it came in the arrangement of “Alabama” by Carlos Simon, a composer in residence at the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, and the principal begetter of this project.

“Alabama” is Coltrane’s most sacred song, a slow, heavy hymn to the memory of the four African American schoolgirls murdered by racists in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. Simon chose to orchestrate it in the way Eric Dolphy and McCoy Tyner might have done, had it been written in time for inclusion in 1961 in Coltrane’s first Impulse album, Africa/Brass, on which Dolphy and Tyner made dramatic use of low brass.

Here, Simon added trombones and French horns, using tympani and a gran cassa to augment Shane Forbes’s mallets on his tom-toms, thus amplifying the effect of Elvin Jones’s original rolling thunder behind Baptiste’s emotionally weighted statements of the rubato theme. Like the tenorist’s extended but carefully shaped solo on the in-tempo passage, it honoured not only Coltrane’s memory but his intentions, and will be worthy of special attention when Radio 3 broadcasts the concert later this week.

* Transatlantic Trance Map’s album Marconi’s Drift is out now on the False Walls label (www.falsewalls.com), which is also about to release a four-CD box set of Evan Parker’s solo improvisations, titled The Heraclitean Two-Step, Etc. The live recording of Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 between 19:30 and 21:45 on Thursday 28 November, thereafter available on BBC Sounds.

Jan 28

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For Martin Davidson

Martin Davidson, who died just before Christmas at the age of 81, was a valued friend of improvised music in Britain and elsewhere. Most significantly, he ran the Emanem label, which made its debut in 1974 with Steve Lacy’s first album of unaccompanied soprano saxophone pieces. Emanem went on to amass a catalogue of new and archive vinyl releases featuring the first generation of London-based improvisers — John Stevens, Trevor Watts, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford and so on — and then, following its re-emergence as a CD label in the mid-’90s, of their successors and many others.

Today at Café Oto and the Vortex many of those artists performed in celebration and commemoration of Martin’s life. It was my privilege to introduce the Café Oto gig, which began with a set from the quartet pictured above during their soundcheck — Parker, Mark Sanders, Hannah Marshall and Matt Wright — and continued with the duo of the altoist Caroline Kraabel and the pianist Veryan Weston before concluding with the 27-strong London Improvisers Orchestra.

I met him 11 August 1969. I remember it because it was my first day in London, my first day at the Melody Maker, and I was sent to review Mike Westbrook’s band at the 100 Club that night. Martin was the man with a box of very desirable albums for sale, set up on a table in the space between the end of the bar and the stage. I soon learned that he was a man of views that were carefully considered and firmly held, some of them expressed in reviews for the MM over the next couple of years.

I was able to share with the audience a handful of the characteristic aphorisms from his New Musical Dictionary, which he posted online. Easy Listening: Music that is extremely difficult to listen to for anyone who really listens to music. Post-modernism: New things for people who don’t like new things. An Improviser: A musician who combines the roles of both composer and interpreter, yet usually receives less respect and remuneration than either.

At the request of Mandy Davidson, Martin’s widow (and the other Em in Emanem), all the proceeds from the gigs, for which the musicians waived their fees, will go to B’Teselem, a Jerusalem-based non-profit organisation documenting human rights violations in Israeli-occupied Palestine. At the end of the LIO set, which consisted of ensemble improvisations conducted by Terry Day, Ashley Wales and others, Maggie Nichols — who met Martin when she was a member of the SME — read a verse by a Palestinian poet killed in the Gaza fighting. That’s what you can see in the picture below, as she holds up a placard saying CEASEFIRE NOW!!

Dec 10

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For Jason Yarde

Xhosa Cole and Caroline Kraabel arrive at Café Oto

In the middle of the afternoon, an outsized multicoloured scarf walked through the door into the Vortex, playing an alto saxophone. It turned out, after he had unwrapped himself, to be Xhosa Cole, who carried on playing as he made his way to the stage. There he fitted seamlessly into a free improvisation being devised by the trumpeter Chris Batchelor, the tenorist Julian Siegel, the cellist Shirley Smart and the pianist Liam Noble as part of a three-venue benefit for the saxophonist Jason Yarde.

Yarde, who is one of Britain’s very greatest jazz musicians, collapsed on stage in south-west France in mid-October after suffering a massive stroke. The presence of a couple of medics in the audience may have saved his life, and the process of treatment for a bleed on his brain continued at a hospital in Toulouse. He is recovering at home now, but an appeal for funds to meet his costs has met a predictably warm response, leading to the three jazz clubs in Dalston — the Vortex, Café Oto and Servant Jazz Quarters — getting together to organise a highly unusual benefit.

Starting at two o’clock in the afternoon, several dozen musicians of diverse age, gender and ethnicity spent two and a half hours migrating between the three adjacent venues, joining up for collective improvisation in spontaneously self-selected ensembles. I began my listening at the Vortex, where a group featuring the altoist Caroline Kraabel, the tenorists Dave Bitelli and Harrison Smith, the guitarist Dave Okumu, the bassist Dominic Lash and the drummer Sebastian Rochford surged through free passages into a charging section of unruly swing that reminded me of Charles Mingus’s “Hog Callin’ Blues”. Later Cole joined a group with Loz Speyer (trumpet), Neil Charles (bass) and Rochford again on drums, whose interplay was agile and intuitive.

Arriving at Café Oto, I discovered I’d just missed a line-up featuring Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost. Instead I heard a set by a group including the singer Cleveland Watkiss, the baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts, the trumpeter Charlotte Keeffe and the violinist Benedict Taylor, in which the pianist Veryan Weston played a duet with the improvising tapdancer Petra Hasler. As I was leaving, a re-scarfwound Cole was marching towards the Oto’s entrance, accompanied by Kraabel, together creating al fresco counterpoint for two altos.

Next, over in the basement at Servant Jazz Quarters, I had said hello to the pianist Steve Beresford and heard a couple of minutes of a set featuring the tabla player Ansuman Biswas and several string players. But then, with a loud BANG, the lights went out and the music stopped dead. A water leak from adjacent building works had found its way into the club’s electrics. No injuries but plenty of confusion. End of music.

Back at the Vortex, the altoist Dee Byrne, the pianist Laura Cole, the guitarist Daniel Thompson and the drummer Mark Sanders, with Taylor on violin and Lash on bass, had just got started when Charlotte Keeffe and Cath Roberts arrived to join them, already playing as they made their way up the stairs. Soon they were joined by another violinist, Sylvia Hallett, and together they conjured something that soared at first noisily and then gently before floating to earth in the sort of inspired ending that is one of the joys of free improvisation.

It was the kind of a day when the music really does turn itself into a common property, its barriers dismantled and prejudices abandoned, available to all. A day that fully reflected the qualities of the inspired and inspiring musician to whose recovery it was dedicated.

* For those who didn’t know about Jason Yarde’s stroke, or who couldn’t make it to the benefit, and would like to make a donation, here’s the crowdfunding link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/jason-yardes-stroke-rehabilitation-journey?utm_campaign

Feb 16

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Cats, herded

Alexander Hawkins and Evan Parker (photo: Dawid Laskowski)

Organising free improvisers might seem like a fool’s task. Why would the special breed of players who spend their lives resolutely creating music from scratch suddenly want to submit to the will of a composer? Nevertheless, history proves that sometimes it works: notable successes were recorded by Michael Mantler with the original Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, Alexander von Schlippenbach with his Globe Unity Orchestra and Barry Guy with the London Jazz Composers’ Orchestra. Each project depended to some extent on the leader/composer’s familiarity with the techniques of contemporary European straight music, but the idea was given new impetus with the introduction of the looser and perhaps more organic-to-the-idiom technique of “conduction”, pioneered by the late Butch Morris and pursued by George Lewis and Tyshawn Sorey, among others. Slightly to one side were the adventures of the British duo Ashley Wales and John Coxon, known as Spring Heel Jack, who created stimulating modern environments for many individual improvisers, including Wadada Leo Smith and John Tchicai.

The first sound heard on Togetherness Music: For Sixteen Musicians, Alexander Hawkins’ new album, is that of Evan Parker’s soprano saxophone, unwinding its always surprising coils of sound, the seemingly unbroken skeins of notes punctuated by split-second darts and lurches into other registers. As usual, it’s exhilarating and mesmerising, particularly when the sound of the isolated soprano blooms with reverberation, which may or may not be the natural property of Challow Park Studios in Oxfordshire, where the set was recorded. But then Hawkins introduces his other resources: the five string players of the Riot Ensemble and nine other musicians, including the trumpeter Percy Pursglove, the saxophonist and flautist Rachel Musson, the cellist Hannah Marshall, the bassist Neil Charles, the drummer Mark Sanders, and Matthew Wright on electronics, all conducted by Aaron Hollway-Nahum. Gradually they add sombre pedal-points, heightening the atmosphere before Parker drops out and the strings begin to slip and slide until the piece ends, after almost 10 minutes, with several of them holding a tentative D natural.

Sanders and Pursglove are the next to get the concerto grosso for improvisers treatment, a layer of restless percussion under the silvery trumpet continuing into a dialogue with written lines for flute/bass clarinet and viola/cello. On the third piece Parker returns for a pointilliste conversation with Hawkins’ scrambling piano in which the Riot Ensemble make their full presence known, soaring and churning as the music holds itself together through some mysterious centripetal force.

Hawkins, the 16th musician, is featured on the fourth piece, against a walking line played by two basses (Charles and Marianne Schofield) and possibly one of the two cellos, too. Showing the pianist at his most inventive and hyper-alert, it has the loping gait and harmonically ambiguous flavour of the music created by young Cecil Taylor and the bassist with his early groups, Buell Neidlinger, before Parker pipes up with a reminder of another early Taylor collaborator, Steve Lacy, in a passage of ensemble agitation that resolves into an elegant, ruminative diminuendo.

The strings dominate the fifth piece, a collective statement in which the individual instruments glide around each other as if in mismatched orbits, the fine details of tone and timbre revealed within an aural space that feels busy yet uncluttered. The sixth and final composition opens with a trio of Charles, Sanders and Wright, bass and drums working around light electronic taps, thuds and crackles. Pursglove and Hawkins emerge with staccato trumpet figures and a purposefully wandering single-note piano line, continuing as Sanders briefly dominates with thrashing brushwork before the other musicians reappear in a crescendo of exultant sound. A graceful withdrawal gives the last word to Parker and Hawkins, two improvisers who share a near-infallible instinct for an ending.

The six pieces are titled, in order, “Indistinguishable from Magic”, “Sea No Shore”, “Ensemble Equals Together”, “Leaving the Classroom of a Beloved Teacher”, “Ecstatic Baobabs” and “Optimism of the Will”. I’ve described them in such details because the more you listen, the more distinctive they become: each one a living organism with its own cellular structure, texture and micro-climate. I’ve said before that Hawkins has a rare understanding of how to combine composition and improvisation, and here, in this very special recording, we have a perfect example of his gift.

Perhaps I’ve found Togetherness Music particularly valuable because I’ve missed attending live performances of free improvisation very much over the past year. Recordings of small groups, however excellent, aren’t the same thing as hearing and seeing this music conjured in front of you. But by framing improvisation so creatively, Hawkins brings it to life in a different way.

* Alexander Hawkins’ Togetherness Music is out now on the Intakt label (www.intaktrec.ch)

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