When I am stationed abroad as a stand-up, in New York, Montreal or Melbourne, I spend hours searching for venues showcasing the kind of sounds that are right here on my doorstep all along. London, and specifically North London, is the best place for free-improvised music in the world, and the saxophonist Evan Parker is now the scene’s elder statesman. Even if you don’t think you know him, you may yet have heard him, floating glacially through Scott Walker’s Climate Of The Hunter album, collaborating with left-field rock types like Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, or Spring Heel Jack, or staffing the absurdly overqualified house band on Vic Reeves’ early 90’s I Will Cure You collection, which is where I first failed to notice him. His London Jazz Festival appearance next week is with the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble he formed in the mid-90’s, still looking for new challenges. I’ve probably seen Parker perform thirty or so times, in various permutations, over the last ten years, and the fact that he’s usually playing somewhere around N16 once a month is one of the reasons that makes life in London worth living.

I don’t really know anything about Evan Parker as a person. It was only whilst writing this piece I found out that he was born the same day as me, the 5th of April, 24 years previously, in 1944, in Bristol, eventually pitching up in London in the late 60’s. I’m an avid reader of musicians’ biographies, and I write music reviews and the odd feature for a newspaper, but I’ve never felt the urge to swot up on Evan Parker. Press releases for musicians detail their disastrous lives, as if providing supporting notes to justify their work, but when I sit and watch Evan Parker, instead of struggling to work out how the music fits together, or what it might have to say about the artist, or to the listener, I find I’m simply transported. In the best possible way, Evan Parker’s music doesn’t make me think of anything. I don’t find I’m editing filmic images to it in my head. It doesn’t sound angry, even when at its most clattering or abrasive. And it doesn’t move me to introspective reflection, even in moments of apparent lyricism. And yet often it provokes joyful laughter, or stifled sobs. I remember a solo performance on New Year’s Day at Stoke Newington’s old Vortex club once that will simply stay with me for ever. The American jazz avant-garde of the 60’s, like the European cathedral builders of the middle ages, mistook their own innate abilities for the voice of God speaking through them. At the same time, Parker and his British contemporaries, Derek Bailey, The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, co-authored a similar sound that came without subtext. What’s going on? I don’t know. Part of me hopes I never find out.

Much free-improvised music requires, initially, a certain suspension of disbelief from the newcomer, a degree of trust that all this heads-bowed scraping is really working towards something, a faith in the credentials of the players. But when you watch Evan Parker blow, even during a lengthy improvisation that initially seems unformed, his prowess is so immediately obvious that you feel instantly in safe hands. Lead on. We’ll follow. Evan Parker gigs are the ones I take sceptics to when I want to convince them free-jazz is worth the investment. I’ve never known anyone leave anything less than stunned. I know there are anxieties within the free-jazz community that Parker’s concessions to tonality betray some of the movement’s first principles, but this is a chink that lets in the uninitiated. The saxophone is second only to the guitar as being an instrument that has nothing left to say, the shiny life-preserver that rock musicians reach for when they need a meaningful solo to add n impression of emotional content, but Parker redeems it nightly.

In the flesh, Parker has a monastic quality. He’d look good in a Franciscan robe feeding bread to small birds, with twigs stuck in his beard. And when you wonder what the point of life is, sometimes his sets seem to answer the question. Over a timescale of elephantine proportions, the monoscerous gets better at the special thing that he does. When The Vortex Jazz club was threatened with closure four years ago, I helped out with fundraising largely because I didn’t want to lose the luxury of having Evan Parker perform regularly on my doorstep, when if I lived anywhere else I’d be shelling out to see him state-subsidised auditoriums. This is one of the things you tend to take for granted about London. There are great artists, here with us, right now, and they’re probably performing for peanuts in your post code.

THE BARE FACTS

EVAN PARKER
1944 Born 5th of April, in Bristol
1966 Leaves Birmingham university for London and joins the Spontaneous Music Ensemble with John Stevens and Derek Bailey.
1970 Founds Incus records with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley.
1971 Forms the Alexander von Schlippenbach trio was Schlippenback on piano and Paul Lovens on percussion.
1980 First recordings by The Evan Parker Trio with Barry Guy on bass and
Paul Lytton on percussion.
1998 First recordings with The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble