From the opening strike of metallic percussion, the oscillator-like wave of soprano saxophone, the burble of electronics, a resonant piano bass string, the shimmering decay of a gong and the broad-toned brilliance of the trumpeter’s brief melody-then-feint-to-intermittent-oscillation, we are in the special ‒ spectral and material ‒ world of Evan Parker’s ElectroAcoustic Ensemble (EAE), a band over 50 years in the making, its official existence 30 years. It is, in an era-defining way, both a great moment in the history of late-20th century music and the early-21st century’s, a unique response to the notion of large-scale free improvisation that, rather than the cultish practice of a disaffected elite, is a signifying laboratory for human interaction, social, meditative, meaning-defining and edge-blurring, a forward probe in the necessity for calm that sees atheists going on pilgrimage, the tone-deaf joining choirs and an explosion in sales of fashions for fitness in which to sit around and drink coffee, no qualitative judgement here, all perhaps equally beneficial. It is a moment of collective definition, an episode of a group mind in which shared concentration gives meaning and form to shared time and space, the period of its making and its later listening.
This listening, I’m 19 minutes in, to a piece I’ve listened to perhaps 20 times, and I’m in a space I can’t recall hearing before, a space where a room’s locating echoes are sufficiently vast to suggest the distance between planets or solar systems, national economies or, for the cognoscenti, the musical instruments and appurtenances floating as a space station in a brown cosmos in Richard Jenning’s (aka “Prophet”) painting on the original 1961 release of Eric Dolphy’s Out There. There is nothing undemanding, jejune, simplistic, coddling, easy about this music. It asks just enough to challenge, and when you’ve met that reward, it asks just enough to challenge again, leading you into a world of increasing grandeur, intensity and, strangely, intimacy, like being alone in a room with Guernica, Des canyons aux étoiles or the Grand Canyon itself.
The EAE is one of the great bands of improvised music with a prehistory of over twenty years before it formed in 1992, and with a history of nearly thirty years since. In its later forms, it’s a big band; in its beginnings, a duo. Reflecting on this latest form, Parker remarks that only he and Paul Lytton are left from the original. That references the 1990s sextet of Toward the Margins (ECM) but it could suggest the 1969 Parker-Lytton duo, whose performances sometimes added previous performance tapes.
A notion of the double is essential. If there’s a clear parallel for the EAE, it’s Ornette Coleman’s Double Quartet of Free Jazz (1960), in which Coleman paired each member of his then-current quartet with a musician playing the same instrument. To create the EAE, Parker matched an electronic musician, each processing an individual signal, to the members of his trio with Lytton and bassist Barry Guy.
Each successive episode balanced the physical and the abstract, the acoustic and the electronic. Eventually, it would assume a global element. By 2010, an 18-member version appeared in a Lisbon concert. Earlier technologies were supplemented with other developments, including an Apple MacBook, as well as precursors, like a Stroh violin and an electric guitar.
Ancient instruments, a Japanese sho and a shakuhachi were also included. The original twinning reached its apotheosis in a kind of globalized, pan-temporal process of recording and reprocessing and rethinking, all in an essentially free-improvising big band in which sectional play and organization could also be perfect, live as Memorex, instruments picked up and processed in the instant.
In this latest incarnation, Parker and Lytton remain from the ensemble’s earliest days; the electronic duo of FURT, Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer, have been present since 2007’s The Moment’s Energy, while clarinetist Peter van Bergen first appeared in 2010. They’re balanced by five recent arrivals: Adam Linson, bass and electronics; Matt Wright, laptop and turntable; Percy Pursglove, trumpet; Mark Nauseef, percussion; and Sten Sandell piano and synthesiser.
Usually adding to a band means adding more of the same thing. With the EAE, Parker has expanded relationships. As well as contributing their own material, the electronic musicians pick up the precise content of the acoustic improvisers, creating facsimiles and treating that material accordingly, adding essential quantitative levels, the literally recorded, to the process. If Parker once said with a special precision, “My roots are in my record player,” so too are the processes of the EAE. Ideas of the section, of call and response ‒ many of the components of the big band ‒ were translated into a form that contained both free improvisation and that transforming and transformative electronic unison. Quite wonderfully, Barrett, Obermayer and Wright have added music made out of Evan Parker records.
The spontaneous exchange of data with repetition and transformation connects the EAE to the great tradition of the jazz big band, specifically the riff culture of the early Count Basie band, a spontaneous phrase picked up, replicated, exchanged, multiplied, to assemble a piece of music out of the interconnected syndicates of brass, reeds and rhythm. Here it’s expanded to include synthesizers and samplers as modes of digital reproduction rather than the digital reproduction from ears to fingers on keys. The special time of the Basie band: it more fully occupied time than any of its orchestrated contemporaries, by its very appreciation of spontaneous creation.
As the piece continues to unfold, it becomes increasingly about the experience of sounds in space, sounds as they’re picked up, repeated, reimagined, redistributed. Eventually, it grows increasingly sparse, its components fewer and further apart, yet the sounds themselves more resonant, the space both opening and enriched in the process. These spatial relations have temporal consequences. Priority belongs to the immediate sound as it comes to the fore, occupying attention, attention as earworld, we are both in the process and in the sound, and the reverberations in space combine with those of time to create the collective composition, a collection of instants in time mixed together in the incipient moment, this music moving us closer and closer to its present.
Eventually our specific position in this space, so immediately pressing, loses its very particularity…it is the shared uniqueness of position that becomes the collective moment for musicians and audience alike, as well as the community of sounds themselves, which have become an entity, a pattern, that is both continuous with and distinct from the experience of the group. Resonance, an echo as continuity, stretches duration.
What is happening to time here? Sometimes individuals‒Parker, Pursglove, Sandell stand out‒will at times play very rapidly, at others very slowly, seemingly independently of one another and what is going on around them, later in the music particularly, amidst the multi-spatial echoes, the resonant hang of piano, percussion, gong. As the piece seems to spread out, especially in the final third, this cumulative effect of rapid and stretched music develops its special quality, a mutation in the perception of time: the way in which a listener experiences the present has stretched; the musicians become architects and engineers of time itself. Stuart Broomer
The ElectroAcoustic Ensemble was formed in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real-time signal processing in an improvising context. and shortly became an opus magnum ensemble in the whole of Evan Parker's musical biography. Most of the CDs documenting the development of this exciting large ensemble were released by the legendary ECM label. The last time when EAE brought us its new CD titled Hasselt was nine years ago (PSI).
Now, after this very long period, we proudly announce the brand new Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble is coming! Beautifully recorded two years ago on the Warsaw-based festival Ad Libitum by Kuba Sosulski and beautifully mixed by Fil Gomez and Evan Parker himself in the middle of 2020 at Arcobarco, Ramsgate, UK.
So let's listen and enjoying the ten pieces ensemble led by one of the greatest musicians in the world. Here comes WARSZAWA 2019
1. Warszawa 2019 part A 24:42
2. Warszawa 2019 Part B 33:58
Evan Parker - soprano
Matt Wright - laptop and turntable
Paul Lytton - percussion and analogue electronics
Richard Barrett - sampling keyboard
Paul Obermayer - sampling keyboard
Percy Pursglove - trumpet
Peter van Bergen - bass and Ab clarinets
Mark Nauseef - percussion
Sten Sandell - piano and synthesiser
Adam Linson - bass and electronics
Recorded live on 12 of October 2019 at 14th Ad Libitum Festival, Laboratorium, U-Jazdowski, Wojciech Krukowski Hall, Warsaw by Kuba Sosulski
Mixed by Evan Parker with Fil Gomes at Arcobarco, Ramsgate, UK
Mastering by Grzegorz Piwkowski (High End Audio)
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