evan parker john edwards tony marsh @ the vortex 10/20/2011

words + photos: gian paolo galasi

Skimming through bookstores during my free time can culminate in picking up an old copy of Roland Barthes' Image Music Text. In Musica Practica, a short essay included in the book and dedicated to the music of Beethoven, Barthes took his good care in order to describe the inaudible in the composer's music - 'something for which hearing is not the exact locality' - and defines as musica practica something as an approach to music and its codes that consists 'not in receiving, in knowing or in feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription, so too reading [...] is to operate music, to draw it (it is willing to be drawn) into an unknown praxis. [...] What is the use of composing [...]? To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to do, not to give to hear but to give to write'.

Since one of the last Parker's solo efforts on records, the 2010 Psi release 'Whitstable Solo' features a poem written by Harry Gilonis especially for that record and contains an open reference to Roland Barthes concept of jouissance - usually translated in English with 'bliss', related to the effort of listener to re-enact the different codes of a text reinforcing one another - it can seem suitable reasoning in those terms about the old diatribe 'improvisation vs composition', and the stress improvisers like Derek Bailey or Cecil Taylor put on the blurring of the boundaries between the twos.


Tonight Evan Parker plays with John Edwards - a mainstay of the London scene, that started playing the bass in the '80s in context related to both music and dance - and Tony Marsh on drums. A long, dense concert, full of jouissance so, and, for the first time since I'm here, full of references to the blues. Thelonious Monk openly - well, not the first time so far, but also some nods to John Coltrane and - far from pure saxophone references - a feeling reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. Something in the air, not necessarily related to the interplay. The warmth, the feeling.

evan parker _ louis moholo moholo _ john tchicai _ tony marsh @ the vortex 10/15/2011

word + photos: gian paolo galasi

Left to right: Tony Marsh, Evan Parker, John Tchicai, Louis Moholo

Lair of Evan Parker when he's in London, on 14 and 15 october the Vortex Jazz Bar hosted a quartet composed of drummers Tony Marsh and Louis Moholo Moholo, Evan Parker on tenor and John Tchicai on drums. The program of residence offers a couple of duo performances - Parker/Moholo Moholo and Tchicai/Marsh - before a final tutti. 

Drastically late to report about the first duo performance - cabs are futile if you don't know the postcodes and I'm paying a fee for being in London only since one month and a half exacty - I can finally enjoy Tchicai and Marsh together. Tchicai style is recognizable since his first appearances on record, notably with the New York Art Quartet and their manifesto 'Black Dada Nihilismus', featuring Amiri Baraka on voice, that mislabeled him as a New York-based musician - in fact his most well-known collaborations of the '60s were related to NY artists like Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler - while he spent most of his playing in Northern Europe, being born in 1936 in Copenhagen. 

Tony Marsh

His duo with Tony Marsh was of high interest since his "way of floating over [...] a non-metric pulse", as Evan Parker himself told to Graham Lock during an old interview for The Wire, produced a particular alignement with Marsh's way of building rhythms around a variously produced pulse, now explicitly stressed, then elliptically beckoned with brushes or a cymbal, and sometimes suspended with the purpose of opening the space for more stratified and rapid interventions. Such ability is due to his heritage, since Marsh started playing in the Seventies with the jazz-rock band Major Surgery, and then with people like John Surman, Mike Osborne, Paul Rutherford, Barry Guy, Elton Dean and Harry Beckett.

After a short break, the announced trio performance of Parker, Tchicai and Moholo Moholo became a quartet with the two horns and the two drums. While Marsh was mostly floating around with a saving feeling, without loosing his ability to express nuances, Louis Moholo Moholo pulsed almost (ir)regularly at the core, while Evan Parker showed, being this the fourth time I see him since in London, a notable versatility. Tchicai built his assertions in a way that is melodically reminiscent of the most obliques Albert Ayler lines and sometimes nod to the lyrical approach of John Coltrane, but with an attitude that reminds of Archie Shepp even if in a controlled and never redundant way. 

If this description is a superficial and general statement, the result is a music that reaches climaxes avoiding dramatic constructions, and leads to an essential flow of music in which the peaks are never obtained with open references to the melodies but via the layering of different elements emerging with the interplay. Evan Parker in this context showed a great adaptability, sustaining and dialoguing with his partner. Probably tonight gig will be featured on a BBC Radio 3 future broadcasting or record.