The Book Cooks The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc.
From Evan Parker Interviewed by Martin Davidson Martin Davidson founded the Emanem label in 1974, which was particularly dedicated to new and archival releases of improvised music. Martin sadly passed away in 2023. This interview took place in April 1997, and first appeared in Opprobrium 4. In 2024, Evan Parker added some responses throughout the interview, which are highlighted in colour. MD: Your solo music started off like you were playing in other contexts, but it seems to have become more about the continuous complex aspect. EP: Yes. It is now. It’s feeding off itself, like all of these things do. It looks at itself and is disappearing into its own mouth. (Ouroboros.) I have a sense of sometimes banging my head up against the wall, but every so often a brick drops out and I can see some light on the other side or even push a hand through. You think that you’ve come to a kind of limit, and then you have a day where something happens and you realise that’s not a limit at all – it’s simply that you’ve worked out how to control this or that. It’s clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to do it, but if you can’t imagine it, whether or not there is a technical solution never occurs to you because there’s no need to. So it’s very necessary to listen closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at the fringes of what you’re producing is something that you’re not really in control of – that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of, and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come with the central thing that you’re in control of, whether it’s a wisp of breath escaping from the side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push harder, or some key noise which you can’t escape. There’s always something there, and if you’re listening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other possibilities. It’s a strange way to proceed – I hope there’s some sense of progress. What I’m scared about is, because, many of these things are added, it’s like a process of adding something to what’s already there, especially if it’s added in the overtones, and people are maybe first of all drawn to the loudest thing which is happening lower down, and maybe the same thing happens often. But that’s a vehicle for the stuff that doesn’t happen very often, and which isn’t completely in control. I had the experience of listening to a sitar player (I have still forgotten his name but it was an unforgettable concert at the Wigmore Hall) and had the sense that there were two concerts happening – one was in the normal register of the sitar and the other was in the overtones, and he was completely aware of both of these things and was playing two concerts at the same time. I try to work with that a little bit. Also I have deep memories of going to the Dafni Wine Festival in Greece in the early sixties and hearing Greek clarinet playing and lyra. The way the overtones work in Greek clarinet playing is fantastic. I know I could give more varied concerts quite easily, but I’m not interested in that. I want to work on this stuff. It’s to do with layering stuff that I don’t know on top of stuff that I do know. A lot of the time now, that is what it’s about. So there’s an element of it [where] you can say, “I swear I’ve heard him play that a hundred or a thousand times before”. (My dear friend Paul Rutherford used to ask, “Will you be playing the solo tonight?”) But the truth is: yes and no is the real answer. Yes, you have in the sense that well I’ve got those same four fingers on that hand and the same four fingers and thumb on that hand, and the key works the same, and if I want this level of layering to take place I have got to have certain things happening with all of that down there and something in the overtones. So there aren’t that many possibilities. If I need all of the fingers to be at work most of the time, and the overtones to come out on top of that, then certain things have to sound like they’ve happened before. They have happened before, but that’s not the point really. It’s connected with that idea about what are the longest elements and still be free and all of that. Okay, how much are these things really repeated, or are they just familiar? I find the whole thing too absorbing, and lose the sense of my responsibility to the audience, which has perhaps never been a strong point of this music. I think there’s a problem for the audience, which is also there, say, in a Cecil Taylor solo performance, in that you get an enormous amount of detail over a long period. How do you see the importance of detail versus the overall? I think the overall comes about as a sense of a sequence of details that have been taken through a logical or somehow narrative sequence and have come to an end. So the details would be like words in a book, and there has to be some sense of a story. You might say that in Finnegans Wake [by James Joyce] it’s sometimes hard to say what the story is, because there’s too much absorption in the words as individual entities, and maybe it’s the same kind of criticism. There should be some kind of narrative, but it may sometimes get a little bogged down in the detail of the words. MD: You normally practice four hours a day, do you? EP: Four hours can have gone by in the twinkling of an eye. It might not always be that long, and some days not at all if I am travelling. Also, I might only do about half an hour or so in the morning if I know I’ve got a gig that night. It varies enormously – other days I might do six hours. MD: Do you find the soprano more rewarding than the tenor? EP: I practice it more. I don’t know if that’s because it suits this room (the kitchen) better, I like the sound of it in the room more, or I like the instrument more, or I like the sound of the soprano solo more. I think I do. The tenor, I don’t practice so much – I should do. MD: In both your solo and your group playing, do you think in terms of the whole performance while you are playing, or are you just following your nose as it were? EP: There is a sense of overall shape. I mean this is why the endings are endings. They’re not contrived in that way. Musicians know. Something that I need to have pretty much down with people that I play with, is that people know when a piece has finished. I hate it if they don’t. A fundamental requirement really is that sense of ending, and if there’s a sense of ending – working back in a kind of reverse logic – it must because there’s a sense of form. It’s not exhaustion after all. There’s a sense of something being completed. Then of course it gets complicated by the circumstantial requirements of performance – you are more or less required to play certain units of time. A set is forty-five minutes; a set could be an hour; a concert performance might require that you play half an hour; another concert situation might require that you play twenty minutes. It’s not just good enough to occupy the twenty minutes, or to occupy the thirty minutes. You also have to shape the whole so that the sense of completion arrives at the right time as well. And this is also possible in my experience. In fact that’s also a kind of requirement – it’s a slightly higher level requirement from players. I’m not sure to what extent I can manage it at every time frame, but a combination of very varied concert situations, club situations, and then the recording situation does mean that you start to develop a fairly keen sense of duration. It’s like this is a clock that is buried somewhere, but is activated at the right time when the sense of winding down or conclusion has to be arrived at. It doesn’t have to be winding down, but somehow there has to be a sense of working towards that sense of completion. That’s a regular occurrence, and in fact sometimes with the trio with Barry and Paul we have to avoid too many slick endings, because if we want to we can finish on a sixpence kind of thing – “boom” – and the audience – “huh?!?.” But if you do too many of those in one night then you start to feel a bit like a stripper or something – it is a little bit cheap, unless it happens not just to show that you can do it, but it happens because it is necessary.
© 2025 Evan Parker
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