Saxophonist Evan Parker: ‘It’s all about how you blow and how you wiggle’

As Evan Parker, the UK’s greatest exponent of free jazz, settles in for our interview, he pulls out a copy of Christopher Ricks’s Beckett’s Dying Words. Before long we’re discussing whether there might be a similarity between the ambiguities of Beckett’s language and the multi-layered constructions of Parker’s approach.

“In so far as sounds can have equivalence to words, then at the structural level, if not at the level of meaning, there might be some grist to that,” says the Bristol-born saxophonist. “But sound is very broad — that’s the attraction. Perhaps some of the things to do with repetition and inversion?”

Rigour tempered with humanity might be another parallel. Parker’s multi-faceted fluency, circular breathing and control of pitch and tone are rooted in years of study, yet his head isn’t stuck in the clouds. Laughing, he describes how his oboist grandson sends up Parker’s phonics, microtones and multiple lines. “Some people don’t hear them at all — they just hear a racket,” he says. “My grandson’s impression of my solo playing is to basically blow and wiggle his fingers. Of course, that’s what I’m doing — but it’s all about how you blow and how you wiggle.”

That “racket” has won Parker, 74, an appreciative audience. On Monday, he was named instrumentalist of the year at the Jazz FM Awards; this coming Saturday he will perform at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival with Trance Map, a five-piece ensemble that sets Parker alongside electronics duo Springheel Jack, bassist Adam Linson and Matt Wright on laptop and turntables. “It all looks desperately up to date on paper,” Parker says. “Maybe it is.” It’s a project that is helped by a comfortable onstage understanding, he adds: “Two or three words from me, and that’s it.”

The Cheltenham gig will explore the aesthetics of the late British drummer and composer Basil Kirchin, whose experiments with found sound helped lay the foundations of ambient music. Kirchin made natural sounds sound like instruments and instruments sound like natural sounds, says Parker. With some pleasure he tells a story of fellow saxophonist Alan Barnes meeting Kirchin some years ago: the composer played Barnes two recordings — one of a whooper swan, and the other of Parker playing sax. Kirchin challenged Barnes: “I defy you to tell me which is which.” That is Parker’s kind of compliment.

Kirchin spent the last decades of his life in Hull, where he died in 2005 at the age of 77. The three-part epic that Parker will present at Cheltenham opens with pre-recorded birdsong, interweaves acoustics and electronics in the middle and ends with the ensemble at full tilt, representing the port city’s more industrial aspects.

Parker first collaborated with Kirchin long ago, on the 1971 album Worlds Within Worlds, an innovative — and challenging — mix of found sound and free jazz. But Parker’s interest in electronic music had taken root earlier, when as a youngster he saw the 1956 sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet, the first film with an entirely electronic soundtrack. It was the score’s bloops and bleeps that came to mind when, in the early 1960s, a student friend asked Parker to provide futuristic sounds for a film project.

The drummer and founder of the influential Spontaneous Music Ensemble, John Stevens, heard the resulting soundtrack, and asked Parker to join his experiments in free jazz. These were held at after-hours sessions at the Little Theatre Club in London’s St Martin’s Lane. “It was a conceptual thing — quite strange. We weren’t [even] playing like that at the time,” says Parker, whose first gigs with the SME were based on a set of harmonically rooted Coltrane covers.

The group found inspiration in the music of Cecil Taylor, the Jimmy Giuffre trio and others grouped loosely as New York’s jazz avant-garde. Parker had seen the Cecil Taylor Trio play at the Take 3 club in New York, in 1962, though at first he refused to believe that the great pianist could be performing at such a lowly establishment. The admission deal was that you had to buy a drink, but Parker refused unless he actually saw his idol walk on stage. As soon as Taylor took his seat at the piano, the bartender demanded his drink order, or he would be thrown out. “I suppose it was pretty ballsy for an 18-year-old. But when the music started it was . . . ‘Aaaaaah!’” That gig, he later said, marked him for life.

Free jazz, says Parker, is ‘a natural place for instrumentalists to go’

The SME’s shifting personnel soon evolved into a core part of London’s jazz scene. A line-up featuring Parker recorded Karyobin for Island Records (recently reissued) and Kirchin used the band on his score for the 1968 Glenda Jackson film Negatives. When the director of Berlin’s Academy of Arts came over to see what swinging London meant in practice, she was impressed enough to persuade the ensemble to perform in Berlin.

That booking helped to establish Parker in European free jazz, and his network continued to grow. Parker’s work in the 1970s alongside the uncompromising British avant-garde guitarist Derek Bailey brought him into contact with American musicians such as Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith, giving him a secure foothold in US improvised music.

Parker’s 1976 album Saxophone Solos identified him as one of the few saxophonists able to sustain unaccompanied improvisation for any length of time. “I’ve got one or two quite personal approaches,” he says, referring to the split notes and harmonic overtones that allow him to sustain several lines at once.

Live solo performances come down to something more basic: the beginning. “You’re standing there; you have to start. So you choose a fingering, a pattern on the instrument.”

Free jazz might be a niche within a niche, yet it is resilient and Parker’s date sheet is comfortably full. “I’m in that luxurious position of ‘nothing can really stop me now’,” he says. “I don’t mean world domination is on the cards, but that I have connections everywhere; opportunities everywhere. My cup runneth over.”

In Parker’s view, free jazz is “a natural place for instrumentalists to go”. “They don’t want to be told what to do other than some polite niceties like ‘don’t play too loud’, ‘don’t play too many notes’.”

By the time Parker arrives at Cheltenham this weekend, he will have performed in acoustic, solo or electronic contexts in Ireland, Europe and the US as well as guest spots and ongoing residencies in the UK, such as his monthly Mopomoso sessions at London’s Vortex club.

The revolving line-ups he assembles there, he says, are “like alchemy. I have to imagine what would happen if I put a drop of this with a drop of that. It’s a little bit like test tubes — will it change colour, evaporate immediately, explode?”

Evan Parker plays Cheltenham Jazz Festival on May 5, cheltenhamfestivals.com/jazz