Gerd Dudek
an appreciation by
Evan Parker
Evan Parker, Gerd Dudek, Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky (Globe Unity Orchestra, Lisbon 2005) © 2022 Gérard Rouy
I would like nothing better than to reprint the note I wrote for ‘smatter psi 02.01.
The first recording I acted as producer on for the label that Martin Davidson made possible was to make a Gerd Dudek record. “After so many years playing, so many recordings, can this really be the first record under his own name?” I asked at the end of a note which was not an attempt to describe the music but to talk about Gerd.
I think the first time I played with him was as the third tenor player in one of the live versions of Peter B.’s Machine Gun band. Maybe the Frankfurt Jazz Festival. From that time on I was a great admirer of his playing and his way of being. For “Great admirer” read “in awe of.”
By the time the psi CD came out we had done many gigs together in Globe Unity and I knew, as so many other musicians knew, that he was criminally underappreciated by whatever that amorphous entity running the profession is.
The note read:
“We were together for a Globe Unity Orchestra concert in New York. Staying in a hotel near Times Square with a gig at the Public Theater, we were waiting for cars to take us downtown, but getting late. George Lewis led the way for those of us who could carry our stuff to go ahead by subway. We got to the platform as a train pulled in. By the time Gerd got on, the doors were closing. In fact, the doors closed on his backpack, maybe it was even his tenor case. There was a stand-off while the guard refused to reopen the doors and Gerd could not free the case from jamming them. Finally, he pulled the case into the train and there, on the door frame, exactly, not above or below but precisely where the case had been stuck was spray painted
D D
U U
D D
E E
K K
Blind chance? No, the laws of physics are suspended in the presence of holy ones. There are signs. This was one such. ‘Did anyone else see it?’ Yes, we all did. Gerd is a holy one, Music incarnate, an Adolphian Centaur – impossible to say where the body and the saxophone separate.”
The language is unapologetically mystical and reverent. Gerd was a saint and I was privileged to know him.
© 2022 Evan Parker