Evan Parker Quotes

The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.

I think the solo playing, the decision to start playing solo, came out of having discovered what lay behind the doors that that technique opened for me.

But I think the record will actually come from tapes that are not yet recorded.

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

I think it’s a great document of John Stevens’ originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it’s pretty obvious.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

I think the voice does that perfectly adequately without being imitated by other instruments.

A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn’t have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.

I’ve been to the studio several times, and it’s not that I’m not happy with what I’ve got, but each time I come away, I feel that I’ve learned something that I want to work on.

It’s not like, I don’t know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.

Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!

So in the sense that we were all dealing with that freer approach, yes, it was certainly one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact, when Peter came that summer. So it’s a very pivotal moment that is documented there.

Certain kinds of speed, flow, intensity, density of attacks, density of interaction… Music that concentrates on those qualities is, I think, easier achieved by free improvisation between people sharing a common attitude, a common language.

In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations.

You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.