Evan Parker Quotes

Improvisation is a compositional method.

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

To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect.

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.

There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.

My roots are in my record player.

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.

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!

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.

When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.

I didn't get where I am today by being timid, young man.

Of course when people are as talented as Jim O'Rourke or Gene Coleman, pretty soon you know that they're going to be part of the bigger scene anyway.

Of course I knew the work of Roland Kirk and Harry Carney and the specific uses they would make of circular breathing, so I knew it was physically possible.

In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.

Remarkable only the very best arrangers can get a sound like that from four horns

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'd met Roscoe in Europe quite a few times over the years, and we'd say hi and so on, but this was the first time we'd actually played together.

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.

If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances.

I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.

So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.