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php All about Jazz Interview By John Eyles, published: March 9, 2003

One of the many benefits of being a music fan in London is the opportunity to se e Evan Parker perform regularly. Parker is one of the giants of improvised music , with a career that stretches back to the dawn of the music in the mid sixties. But he is always pushing forward, and appears in a wide variety of contexts fro m solo performances up to large ensembles such as the London Improvisers Orchest ra and the Dedication Orchestra. In January, he was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Spring Heel Jack national tour that also featured Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Han Bennink and Jason Pearce. On February 19th, Parker appeared at the (packed out) Vortex in an amazing quartet with Steve Beresford on piano, John Edwards on bass and Mark Sanders on drums. Spring Heel Jack (Ashley Wales a nd John Coxon) were in the audience, and there was talk of them appearing at the Vortex with Parker soon.

Two days later, I met Parker for this interview. We met in the cafe at Ray's Jaz z shop, one of the best in London, which has recently relocated to Foyles booksh op in Charing Cross Road. This meant that music was playing over the sound syste m, some of which occasionally distracted Parker. AAJ: I'd like to start off talking about the Spring Heel Jack tour, as it is com paratively recent. Talking to them at the Vortex the other evening, their reacti on was that it had exceeded their wildest dreams. EP: They are fantastically enthusiastic guys. They are definitely a breath of fr esh air in their open mindedness and their voracious appetite for music of all k inds. It reminded in some quite fundamental way why I got involved in music myse lf. For such a long time it has just been what I do. It was nice to be reminded of that state of jumping around enthusiasm, and even to be infected by it to a d egree. Plus they are very interesting characters apart from their relationship w ith music. They are great as individuals and then you put the two of them togeth er, a quite unlikely pairing in many ways, and you get the synergy which is prec isely what Buckminster Fuller says you should get. They are a nice illustration of that. It was a real pleasure to be with them for ten days, or whatever it was . AAJ: How did that work out? Because it wasn't just them you were with? EP: We had one day's rehearsal. And we had done the recordings [ Masses and Amas sed ], although I don't think that impinged very much on the material we prepare d for the tour - there may have been a couple of samples. It suited me very well , because in one rehearsal I could memorise everything I needed to know. So I di dn't have to bother with music stands and bits of paper and all of that for the first few gigs or for the whole tour. Sometimes that is necessary because there is just too much to memorise. In this case there was a real minimal amount of fi xed material and even what was fixed was open to fresh interpretation every nigh t. Probably the one who freshly interpreted the most - as you might guess - was Han Bennink. He never takes a great deal of interest in what is supposed to be f ixed and what is supposed to be free anyway, which is good because he knows his own temperament very well indeed. That one rehearsal didn't even last all day. W e had set it for about ten or twelve hours but we just did a sensible minimum an d went to Bath, the first concert, with just that edge you need of not being ove r-rehearsed. From there, we just consolidated the material each night. The Queen

Elizabeth Hall was the second gig but everybody knew what were the things that were supposed to happen and what the degrees of flexibility of interpretation we re. It was good in that way too. AAJ: As far as your own playing was concerned, what were the constraints? EP: There were certain key elements that could switch from one area to another o r from one predominant player to another - I wouldn't really say soloist. Someti mes it was a bit like that, but they never really described anything as being a solo as such. There were different areas that were defined very simply ... [Park er slowly drifts into silence, distracted by the music coming over Ray's sound s ystem.] (I'm listening to Coltrane. Not all the records they play will catch my attention so much as this one)... The first set had an opening clang, a sample f rom Ashley of some bells, something he had prepared as the opening of the set. T hen a two-note guitar response that was repeated a few times. Then it was up to people to find their way into whatever that set up. Then a period of collective improvisation with the saxophone as a lead voice. After a good deal of playing, there was a transition to a piece with three chords that were given, that set up an almost kitsch mood. OK, now we all know where we are again. That was open fo r me to play around on those chords. The set finished with a figure that John pl ayed on the piano that was like a ballad feel. In rehearsal, I had worked out a kind of counter melody or response to that figure. So that was it. If you tried to write these things down, you would be struggling to fill more than about thre e lines. But because, from the rehearsal, we had a good sense of how that stuff would be used to generate and influence improvisations, there was no trouble mak ing that into a set. It was all we needed. Of course, I play a lot of times in o ther contexts where the only preparation is that we all know one another. It is so hard to talk about this stuff. You sort of contradict yourself whatever you t ry to say about free improvisation you turn out to be saying something that is t rue but also not true at the same time. It is very ... AAJ: ... slippery, isn't it? EP: "Slippery" is a good word. Yesterday I was using "minefield", which is perha ps overdramatic. I think "slippery" is good. It is a slippery beast. You try and grab it and whoops! It's gone. Like the fox in the Goethe story, Reinecke Fuchs , [translated as Reynard the Fox] who covers himself in grease at the end of the story, very slippery. We wanted to call a piece that with the Schlippenbach gro up. He changed it to "Fux" rather than "Fuchs Geffetet" - the fatted fox - becau se he thought it sounded too vulgar. ["Fux" is the last track on Elf Bagatellen (FMP CD 27) by Schlippenbach Trio.] It is a slippery beast, improvisation. AAJ: Which isn't to say I won't keep probing you about it! But it is a good plac e to start, to recognise that it is slippery. With the recording with Spring Hee l Jack, one of the things they did was to have control over which bits they woul d pull out of the collective improvisation. There is one notable example ["Maroc " on Amassed ] where they just pulled you and Jason out. EP: Well, they didn't have the complete separation to tracks. There was a lot of bleed through from one track to another, because we weren't recording one track at a time. I'm not sure of the technical circumstances, but there must have bee n enough separation (even though we weren't looking for complete separation) for them to have some rather radical control over what happened. In fact, Han is a good deal quieter in the mix than he was in the studio. That is very often the c ase with drummers. It is one of the ways you can domesticate music so that peopl e can play it at home. The last thing people really want is Han Bennink in their living room. You know that, Han! [Laughs.] AAJ: I was wondering how you felt about that process of manipulation. Going back fifteen years, it would have been anathema, wouldn't it? There was much more of

a focus on the recording capturing as faithfully as possible what it had been l ike to be there. Did that shift start with Process and Reality ? The idea that i t didn't have to be a faithful capture of the circumstances. EP: I can't think o f a prior example. It allows me to speak a little about Steve Lake who was alway s on the side of the music and loved the music but was always disappointed that we weren't braver in respect of studio technology. I think now he must be sittin g there quietly saying, "Yes. I knew that they would have to deal with it eventu ally." But the truth is partly to do with defiance. "OK, we can't afford it so w e'll pretend we don't want it anyway." That may have come into it. That may not be quite the whole story. But also sensible amounts of multi-track technology li ke 24-track are now affordable. It comes as the basic entry level for any halfwa y decent studio and is affordable in a way that it simply wasn't fifteen years a go. When the documentation, warts-and-all, this-I-how-it-was, of a gig has been done often enough then perhaps you do start to wonder what it would be like to o verdub or edit. To be fair, there were people all along who were interested in t hat kind of thing. Tony Oxley was always very interested in the studio possibili ties and, at the time, was given quite a hard time for that by the so-called pur ist elements. And I might have been one of them. But when the stuff is there and you are at ease with the situation, which really means that you are no longer w atching the clock like someone in the back of a London taxi - anyone who is not a millionaire in the back of a London taxi! - then ideas come and a use arises. So, yes, I think you are right to identify a change and that it is significant. And I hope that the studio possibilities and the creative interaction between im provising musicians and the studio has become another part of the story of impro visation. I like to think that when I am using that technology that I am using i t as an improviser. I work very fast with the technology. That is not to say tha t I am a technological whiz, I'm not. I try to work with people who respond very quickly to my ideas, running back and forwards from the control room, if I'm in volved in overdubbing. I'm learning how to work with that technology. The proble m with building up lots of layers is if you are doing it with real-time playing rather than with Pro Tools, the possibility of moving samples around and not nec essarily working for every bit of track that gets overdubbed. That is still a te chnology that is fairly new to me and one that I am quite unresolved about wheth er it will have beneficial effects for my way of making music. But the old tape drop-in style of overdubs, gradually finding ways of avoiding stupid repetition, stupid hanging around, the best example of that would be the four-minute piece I did for the CCA four-by-four series of commissions, a couple of years ago. It will probably be a track on a Process and Reality type follow-up that is about t hree-quarters done. The process of overdubbing is still interesting to me. AAJ: Just to finish that off, it seemed that fifteen years ago, it wasn't just t he practicalities of what was available. It almost seemed like an ideological po sition. EP: Yes. I think that would still be my approach to a live recording. I think so . I would want location recordings of a group to represent fairly strictly what happened on the gig. Even though you have the problem of which gig. Many gigs ge t recorded. Many recorded gigs get quietly slipped on the shelf and forgotten .. . AAJ: ... or edited down?. EP: Let me finish! [Laughs.] Even the ones that are issued are often edited. May be it starts with the rationalisation that you have two hours of music but only seventy-nine minutes of disc space, so which bits should you leave out? Of cours e, they are the bits that you think are not as good as the best bits. So that wh ole question of documentary purity starts to look very shaky anyway. It always d id. There were always constraints. I have spoken before about the most radical e dit of all being the edit of complete omission. You can join things up together, but at least you are admitting those things happened. When you record something

and don't use it at all, then you are almost trying to say it didn't happen. Ag ain, you see how slippery it is? You're not really doing that. You are just tryi ng to make a record. And there is no intent to deceive. There is simply the best intention to work within the constraints of the process. That means making choi ces, post facto choices. But you are right to shine the light in these dusty cor ners. Let?s see what we can find there. Let's clarify a few things. But I am sti ll pretty purist in that sense. If the thing is supposed to be a live recording, then I probably won't snip anything out, unless it is some preparation noises w here somebody thought the piece had started and somebody else didn't, or there i s just an obvious place, structurally, where one thing stops and another thing s tarts. So, for example, on Live at Les Instants Chevirs, with the trio, there wer e two sets. And the option is to put out a double CD and include everything. But that everything was designed as two sets in a jazz club, not to be a CD. And an yway, there were one or two little technical problems and dropouts. But apart fr om that, it is just which bits do you chop, which do you leave out. I think that has always been true of even the purest documentary recording. Except, say, the direct to disc thing that I did, Monoceros, that wasn't a live recording. But, in effect, that is as close as you can get to making a live recording in a studi o, playing straight to the cutting lathe. Even there, I recorded two sides and t hose were the two sides that came out. I could have carried on recording sides u ntil I was happy and thrown away the sides I didn't like, and it still would hav e had the air of something absolutely unedited. But there would have been that f act of what happened to the stuff you didn't like. I don't know if it was stubbo rnness on my part to just do the two sides, so I could say, "Well, that's it. Th at is what I did. I played one side, had a break and then played the other side. " AAJ: Interestingly, that is a studio recording. You still seem to be prepared to make the distinction between purity in the live context and impurity (or whatev er) in the studio context. EP: Don't forget that you are talking about work over a span of over thirty year s. At a certain point, I suppose you feel that nearly everybody knows pretty wel l what you stand for, and if there is too great a contradiction or fall from gra ce, then somebody will remind you of it pretty quickly. I hope I am making sense in terms of my own work, and in terms of trying to explain it. [ Passage to Had es by Jah Wobble and Evan Parker is on the sound system.] This music in the back ground is an example of how complicated things can get. Jah Wobble's engineer, C ai Murphy, is a guy who goes for broke. Jah Wobble uses him on gigs and on recor ding, which is quite unusual. He is a phenomenal risk taker. Sometimes things ca n go completely mad, because he drives things so hard. But when it works, I thin k it is extraordinary. This record sounds to me like somebody spent five months in production. Actually, Cai works so quickly, he was almost itching to begin th e post-production before we had finished playing. He was already playing us back stuff with bits of dub-type interactive engineering while we were supposed to b e listening back to what we'd done. "Let me at it. Let me at it." This thing was worked at very quickly. He is an improvising engineer. He wants to get involved . He takes chances that sometimes produce howling feedback; everything has gone for a moment. But the payback when it works is extraordinary. There is a depth t o the mix that is extraordinary for something that is done so quickly, so sponta neously. AAJ: I want to talk at some length about Psi. Firstly, why was there so long bet ween the end of your involvement with Incus and the start of Psi? It is a core beli ef of mine that group improvisation works partly because there are intuitive and telepathic understandings between the players. At its best, there are psi pheno mena at work. Evan Parker. EP: There have been lots of things going on in my life, so some of it was to do with that. I started to make tapes and assemble ideas. I was thinking about it a

ll the time as something I would have to do eventually. Once you have had that f eeling of complete control, it is very hard to beat. I have been extremely fortu nate in the support I have had from Leo Feigin [of Leo Records], Martin Davidson [of Emanem Records], from FMP, from Okkadisk, from various labels. They have al l been a delight to work with. I suppose it is a testament to the community arou nd the music. You just don't find many people that are not a pleasure to work wi th. In the case of Martin and Leo, you are dealing with two guys who have been t here effectively from the beginning. I knew and got on well with Leo for years b efore I recorded for him. And I was always in touch with Martin whether he was l iving in America or Australia. Wherever he was, we stayed in touch. In fact he h elped organise the first solo tour I did in America, when he was living near Phi ladelphia. Martin has always been an excellent friend of the music and the music ians. Leo's impact worldwide has been very significant in making people in diffe rent parts of the planet aware of what is going on, making people in America hea r Russian music, people in Russia hear American music. Another thing about all t hese small companies is that they are all honest, and on the artists' side. And polite. If they reissue something, they send you a copy. Even if there is no mon ey involved, they are polite enough to send you one, which major companies are e xtraordinarily inept about. When they reissue things, they don't let the sidemen have copies of anything. Very strange. The very people who could afford to, and have the administrative wherewithal to behave decently are the ones who don't, and the people who are really struggling, working fourteen hour days, have good manners. So, eventually it became clear that Martin was ready to really be a par tner. Effectively, Psi is a sub-label of Emanem. Although when things get that m icro, I don't know if it matters. I can do things that Martin would not do himse lf, such as the Gerd Dudek record. He likes it very much but he just says that i t wouldn't be something that he would do because he is specialised. That is the same reason that FMP gave for not wanting to put that tape out. It has existed a s a production for a while before I put it out. At one stage I was thinking of h aving two labels. One called Psi for the free stuff and one called Phi for the s tuff that I love but was not especially close to what I am associated with mysel f personally. I will carry on doing those things. There are several more project s like that. It works fine for Martin this way, because it is not confusing the image of his label. It is a model of a good working relationship. He is fantasti cally equipped technically. He knows computers much better than I do. He knows t he various ways of mastering, mixing, restoring old tapes. All these things he i s very adept at. And he is very together on the logistics side of things, moving things around, numbers - just a perfect complement, all the things that I'm not much good at he is great at. Somehow we have worked out an understanding that m akes sense to him. Notional profit sharing and that kind of thing. AAJ: I was going to ask about the Dudek ar, it is an obvious anomaly, not least feature yourself, and it is more in the you are saying that it is not going to album. Of the seven releases on Psi so f because it is the only one that doesn't jazz tradition than one might expect. So be a one-off?

EP: Definitely not. I have got so much Kenny Wheeler material that sooner or lat er we will have to come to the end of the project [to make a CD that Kenny Wheel er is happy with] and we will have to put something out. And I have just embarke d on what could be an even more complicated project, which is to make a Ray Warl eigh record that he is happy with. We have quite a lot of stuff recorded already and we will probably need to go back into the studio and do a bit more. I don't play on it; I am just in the box, listening and trying to say some helpful thin gs, making a fool of myself most of the time. The producer's role is a very diff icult one. I'd rather not speak about too many other things, but there is a whol e chain of possibilities there. In fact, there's a trio with Kenny, Stan Sulzman n and John Parricelli that actually grew out of one of the Kenny recording dates , and they have done a record for another record label, in between. There are ot her things in discussion, but I don't want to say anything indiscrete.

AAJ: So far, there has been a balance between new stuff and reissues, particular ly Incus stuff. Would the expectation be that eventually all of your old Incus s tuff would come out on Psi? EP: Yes. The place where I see massive potential for significant difference from the original is an obscure thing called Circadian Rhythms [This was originally released on LP as Incus 33. It was recorded in 1978 at the London Musicians? Col lective and features Paul Lytton, David Toop, Max Eastly, Paul Burwell, Annabel Nicholson, Hugh Davies, Paul Lovens and Parker.] There is hours, hours, hours of material. Lots of it needs careful restoration because it was recorded at quite conservative levels, partly because the engineer kept falling asleep. But it is the kind of material that I think could repay some careful work with Pro Tools and a lot of re-editing. So I'm quite looking forward to that. But when will the time ever come up when I can do that? There is about thirteen hours of that. AAJ: How much of that would you envisage emerging? EP: Until I actually start to blow the dust off the boxes and to poke around, I can't say. But even if it were just transformed into one seventy-nine minute ful l-to-the-brim CD, it would be a very different experience in terms of coming clo ser to the feel of the original event than two twenty minute LP sides where you have to jump up and turn the thing over. But it could very well be two CDs. I do n't know. It would be out on a limb somewhere. It wasn't the best selling Incus record of all time, by some margin. But I don't think it was quite the worst eit her. (I won't say what that was.) Yes, most of that will come out. When I left I ncus, we agreed that my copyrights and recordings were mine to do what I like wi th, and that the projects that were neither Derek's nor mine would revert to the leaders of the dates, effectively as tapes that had been licensed to us. So I a m gradually reassembling a corpus of work. I like to do that. It seems a good ti me to be working on that kind of thing. And Psi is a perfect vehicle for that. A nd I must also do more recordings of the kind that people would expect me to do. I can say one because I'm going to talk to Martin about this later this afterno on. I would like to do a London Improvisers Orchestra improvisations-only record . That would probably be three or four improvisations from three or four differe nt Sundays over the last three or however many years it is. They have all been r ecorded and I would like a CD that was just the pure improvisations. Martin migh t say that should be on Emanem or he might say, "OK". We'll see. There are thing s like that. On down from there - starting at the big end of the scale, right do wn to solo projects of people I feel are more than ready for a solo record. I th ink this afternoon I might deliver enough material for a two CD set on the free zone at the Appleby festival last year with Sylvia Hallett, Philipp Wachsmann, N eil Metcalfe, John Rangecroft, Marcio Mattos, John Edwards, Mark Sanders and mys elf. That should be nice. Recorded by Chris Trent, the Sun Ra expert. That is pr etty much ready to go. Then there is material from Japan, the tour I did there w ith Paul Lytton, Lawrence Casserley and Joel Ryan. All those concerts were recor ded. Then there is a great quartet from a year later, also in Japan, with Otomo [Yoshihide], Sachiko M and Ichikawa Ko. I would like very much to bring one set of those two sets out. We did two sets at a place called Pit Inn in Shinjuku. Th e second set was about an hour long and I was very happy with that. I love the s ound of the sho. Ichikawa Ko is an excellent exponent of that. Then there is a b unch of studio trio things that Steve Beresford produced in the dark period betw een the end of Incus - the down period, as it were - that I recorded for myself with the intention of starting something, but they just languished for a bit. Bu t they are good. What else? There is plenty of stuff, I can assure you, but of c ourse, the stakes are higher now. For me, the things have to make a space for th emselves. There has to be a need for them. Not just, "Well here's a tape so ther efore there is a CD." AAJ: I wanted to ask about that. You are infamous for the number of CDs you rele ase. Does Psi come with a special seal of approval, what you see as the best ava

ilable? EP: People might make that assumption, but the fact is that you can make just as bad a mistake when you think you are doing absolutely the right thing as you ca n when you just make a mistake. These things take a little bit of time to shake down. There probably will be Psi records that, with the benefit of hindsight, yo u might say, "Well, there wasn't really a need for that because of X, Y or Z." B ut you go into a project with some sort of clear idea about why it makes sense. AAJ: What about the name, Psi? You have made comments about the psi phenomenon a nd all of that. And about the golden ratio. Psi is a whole mass of things. EP: Yes, yes. It is a core belief of mine that group improvisation works partly because there are intuitive and telepathic understandings between the players. A t its best, there are psi phenomena at work. But then the other stuff - the rati os, the mathematical symbols - it makes a nice kind of feel. I am interested in all those things, and I wanted something different. That is why it's Psi. AAJ: Could you say a bit more about the psi phenomena in group playing. I know t hat, at one level, it is not accessible to being talked about... EP: You know that thing that people sometimes say, "That was so good, it could h ave been composed." Well I've given up saying "Thank you" to that now. My respon se to that is, "It was." "Composed" only means "put together". We put it togethe r. It sounded put together; it was put together. AAJ: Put together as we watched? EP: Well, no. Yes and no. If all there was was the time that the performance had happened and the time in which it was perceived, on the clock, measuring about the same duration, you wouldn't make any sense of it and we wouldn't have been a ble to do it. The reason we were able to do it is that we carry a lot of informa tion with us from other times and places, and so did you the listener. And the m ore you get into the music, the more specific that kind of knowledge you bring w ith you. And we play to that; of course we play to that. We play to the informed listener. We don't play to the person who's tumbled in for the first time. We'r e not looking to make it easy. There are plenty of people out there playing musi c like that. People who drift into these darker corners where we operate are int erested in pulling people with them. We want listeners to do half the work. That is often used as a criticism of the music, but I think it's a fairly superficia l criticism. I'm not sure what improvised music with a touch of popularism would sound like. Tricky? AAJ: Does that notion of the psi phenomenon apply mainly to established groupings? Would it be more applicable to the trio with Barry Guy a nd Paul Lytton because you have a common history? EP: I wouldn't say there was a hard and fast rule, but activity which is not rewarded - even if you are dealin g behaviourist levels of psychology - or, in this case let's say rewarding, does n't get reinforced. So there is probably a good reason why some groups stay toge ther and some groups don't. Now, you're probably right in saying that intuitive or psi-like activities play a huge part in that reinforcement. The desire to car ry on playing is to do, in a very simple way, with whether you feel an understan ding with other people. Even at the conscious level, if you send out cues, you a re looking for a response. You send it round the group, you send out a little si gnal. The other night, [at the Vortex] Mark especially was sending a lot of stuf f across. It is almost like a secondary level of activity inside the music; ther e is the flow of the three-way or four-way thing, but inside that you can have o ne-on-one specific messages being sent. The direction changes. "If you listen to me saying this, we two can make those two come this way." That is not even espe cially at the psi level or even the unconscious level or the intuitive level. Th at is just about trust among the players, that everybody is intending well by wh at they do. That is another very important factor for me. So there are a lot of

layers of givens or what should be givens before you get to the really finest la yers of intuition and psi. When those givens are there and the above-ground mate rials are clear, then it is almost as if you dug the soil, applied the compost, got the fertiliser in place, OK now something can really grow. Or in the old Ara bic dictum, "Trust in God but first tether your camel." There is a lot of tether ing of camels that needs to be done. Then having done that, you can trust in God . Allow those otherworldly functions to come in. AAJ: When you are playing solo, you are not interacting with anyone else, but is there any sense of possession, of it being out of your hands? EP: Absolutely. But if you start to talk like th at, you get a very poor reputation. "God plays through me." That type of thing. Except, the fact is that if you are not in conscious control of what is going on and you don't have a plan that you follow, then there must be some explanation for why things happen the way they happen. And they must therefore be beyond you r conscious decision-making. I think you can hear the switches. I have talked a lot about left and right brain levels of consciousness. I think they are importa nt. Steve Lake talks about the higher magic sometimes not being there. I think w hat he means is that sometimes I don?t get from the left-brain to the right brai n, probably. So you hear somebody working but that is about it on a duff night o r in a duff room. AAJ: While it was in progress, would you be conscious of it no t getting to that level or would it be after you heard it back? EP: By definition, if you are thinking that way, you are not in right brain. So, yes, there are times when you are thinking that. When you are more aware of tha t mantra - "Higher magic, where are you?" They are like prayers, prayers to be r eleased from the burden of knowing what you are doing, in that critical way. Bec ause it doesn't help to be critically aware of what you are doing while you are doing it. It doesn't help. You have to get to a state where you are at one with the work, not judging it. AAJ: When that happens, are you still in real time? Are you conscious of duratio n and so forth? EP: (Laughs.) I used to be very good at duration but I've lost it a bit lately. AAJ: The state you are talking about would seem to imply that you do go into a s tate beyond consciousness of real time. EP: Except that there are little anchors, as it were, which, although the soul i s suspended above the bed there is that silver thread that keeps it tied to the body. It is a bit like that in the playing. Certain things do remind you. One of them is the state of my bottom lip, which after a certain time will always need a bit of a break, especially in solo playing. And there seems to be another par t of your brain that is simply watching. Not necessarily interfering but watchin g. And it knows its job is to say, "Time. Time, gentlemen." That is pretty much all it does. And it is all right if that is all it does. It just says, "Time up. Take a break." It is not really saying, "Oh this is going terribly. When the fu ck is something going to happen? What is this shit about? How many times have yo u done this before? Are you still happy with this rubbish?" There is a guy that does that, but he is not terribly helpful. What you have to try and do is get hi m out of the way quite quickly. AAJ: It sounds like a Tom & Jerry cartoon, with the demon on the shoulder? EP: It's worse than that ... and funnier probably!

Evan Parker interviewed by Martin Davidson - 1997 April.

This first appeared in Opprobrium 4, and is reproduced here with permission. All rights remain with the interviewee, interviewer and magazine. MD: Did you come from a musical background at all? E.P: Not really. My mum liked Fats Waller and played a bit of piano, and my dad liked to sing in the church choir especially. My mum played me things like 'The Viper Drag' and 'Alligator Crawl'. MD: You grew up in London, did you? E.P: No, I grew up in Bristol to the age of nine, and then out by Heathrow Airpo rt from nine onwards. It's not really London, it's the western wastelands - grav el pits. The reason they built the airport in the first place was because there was nothing there. M.D: How did you come to take up saxophone? E.P: I was encouraged to listen to jazz by a guy in the year above me at school. He was already having saxophone lessons, so he knew that there weren't insurmou ntable problems. You buy a saxophone and you go to the teacher. Very easy. So he 'd already done all that, and he knew where you went to buy one, and where you w ent for lessons. So I just did what he'd done - went to the same shop that he'd gone to in Tottenham Court Road. I bought a real ancient alto - Adolphe Sax, it was called (but it wasn't the original Adolphe Sax)! I went for lessons about te n minutes walk from here in Whitton with a man called Jimmy Knott who was a fant astic man - a communist, vegetarian, politically active, pacifist - all kinds of things that I hadn't even read about in my house. So he wasn't just teaching me the saxophone, there was a lot more going on. He was teaching me all kinds of a ttitudes I suppose - questioning. M.D: This was when you were a teenager. E.P: Yes. I started having lessons when I was fourteen, and went for about four years. And then I went to university and couldn't go for lessons any more. Other wise, I would have carried on just for the sheer pleasure of the man's company. He was a wonderful man. He had a very eclectic approach to it. It wasn't specifi cally a jazz approach that he was teaching. He knew about that and he could teac h you that but he also wanted you to be aware of classical music. So he transcri bed bits of Tchaikowsky or bits of Paul Desmond. It was all like a musical probl em. M.D: How did you start to perform in public? E.P: The first group I was in never gave a concert. I had a school friend, Peter Smiles, who started on clarinet then switched to baritone. We went for lessons together some of the time. He was much better than I was. We tried to play like the Mulligan and Desmond record and stuff from the various Mulligan Quartets wit h Chet Baker, Bob Brookmeyer and Art Farmer. He died in a road accident when he was sixteen. I still think of him. After that I got to play with some of the slightly older friends who had got me listening to jazz in the first place. We started a jazz club in the old tennis c lub in Staines [west of London], and used to play warm-up sets for the professio nal bands we invited. I find it hard to remember quite what style we played. Then I went to university and first was in a group under the pianist's name, and then in a group with a different pianist under my name. My first experience of the more difficult side of the business! We were in the inter-university band co mpetition and all that. Then one summer vacation I stayed in Birmingham and had a regular gig with Howard Riley in a Saturday afternoon drinking club Then it sl

owly segued into the meeting with John Stevens and all that followed. M.D: So how did you get into free improvisation? E.P: In a very strange way, I suppose. I was playing like, or doing my very best to play like John Coltrane, and copying those records from the very early sixti es. Then a friend of a friend whose name was Gavin Owen asked me to do some musi c for a film, that was based on part of the story of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradb ury, because he was recommended by the other friend, David Chaston. They were bo th students at the Royal College of Art. And so the job was to play music of the future because it was set in two thousand and something. Quite why I thought th at music of the future would be freely improvised Perhaps I thought that the only w ay for me practically to achieve a sense of mysterious futuristic quality was to simply play intuitively and go where the spirit led. I so much enjoyed the acti vity that from then on I thought I'd look out for other people who were interest ed in playing that way, and see if, instead of it being a kind of imagination of the future, it would be what you did now. Since if you can imagine it now and d o it now, why is it futuristic? M.D: Were other people involved in that recording? E.P: Yes. The bass player who is unfortunately dead now - he died very young - w as called Walter Hafendon. He finally became a PhD in minerals engineering, and went to live in a remote spot in Canada extracting some kind of metal from some kind of rock, which is what he was good at in addition to being a very good bass player. Once he got the doctorate, he went looking for a job. He was a very dri ven character in that way. He was able to keep up his studies and play at the sa me time. M.D: It was just the two of you? E.P: Just the two of us as I remember. M.D: This was in London? E.P: No, we made the recordings in Birmingham. And then - this is quite a well w orn story now in a way - I have told it in several different contexts, or differ ent bits of it in different contexts - not only did it introduce me to the activ ity, but strangely enough (in the complicated way the world works) it also intro duced me to the key person that I needed to meet, because that film was then sho wn at the diploma show at the end of the course, for Gavin Owen's graduation. At that show everybody meets everybody - the students invite their friends and peo ple they have collaborated with. At the same time, Geoff Rigden, the painter, wa s also coming to the end of his studies there, and somehow he knew John Stevens. So John was there to see Geoff Rigden's show and see what else was happening. A good friend of Gavin Owen's was Alfreda Benge, who has been living with Robert Wyatt for a good long while now. At that time she was a film maker too. Now she is a painter - it's all very complicated. So she knew John Stevens, and she knew the music that I had done for Gavin's film, because she was in the film departm ent, so she had seen him put the thing together. She told John that he might fin d the music for this film interesting. And then John came over, and we were intr oduced and we started to talk about enthusiasms. At that point it was still pret ty rare to meet anybody who was enthusiastic in a musicianly way, if I can put i t like that, about current developments in the front end of modern jazz. There w as a feeling this has gone too far. That was the general feeling from what you c ould call the modern jazz establishment, not just in America but also here in a way. John was a pretty rare exception to that, so it was nice to talk to someone about Milford Graves and Sunny Murray, Edward Blackwell and Billy Higgins and t heir relative stylistic distinctive markings and this and that - blah blah blah - the way you do. John was always good at blah blah blah - excellent in fact - a

nd he was also always very welcoming to new faces, which is also pretty rare in the scene. He said he was starting a club in the next few weeks, and that was th e very beginning of the Little Theatre Club [in 1966]. Then I went down to sit i n at the Little Theatre Club. John's original idea was that he could hook me up with a nice rhythm section of Chris Cambridge [bass] and Laurie Allen [drums] a ready made group for me. It was fantastic and helpful, which I think he contin ued to be all the way through - he had huge amounts of energy for everything, an ything connected with music, playing, other musicians. M.D: Did that group happen? E.P: It certainly played once or twice, but at the same time it was almost like John was using that to audition me. Then we started playing together. Trevor [Wa tts] went away for a summer holiday, quite a long one, so he needed someone to p lay every week or every night - I can't remember which it was. I suddenly jumped in to the deep end really, and we started by playing tunes and stuff and ended by playing free. I don't know how that happened, but it did. Then there were all those convoluted comings and goings with various versions of what you could cal l the second phase of SME [Spontaneous Music Ensemble]. That was a very, very fo rtunate set of coincidences connected with that film. M.D: What do you actually mean by the second phase of the SME? E.P: If you think of the first phase as represented reasonably well by the recor d CHALLENGE, and then the second phase I suppose would start, on record at least , with KARYOBIN. But now we have to say it starts with SUMMER 1967 - your invest igations. But I think there was a period before that where the music was constantly changi ng, and the personnel was somewhat fluid as well. I get the impression it was wo rking as a grouping rather than a group, often there would be sub-groups playing . I remember coming back from Germany - I'd been away for the first time with [Pet er] Brtzmann - I'd been away for ten days, and John sat me down very seriously an d brought me up to date with what had been going on in those ten days. And there was quite some question as whether he could let me go away for such long period s. How could I possibly stay in touch with the music? "We have done this, we hav e done this and we have done this, and I have been working with XYZ." Very inten se. Very good. M.D: How did you get involved with Brtzmann? E.P: We went to Berlin with SME. A woman came to London - Nele Hertling - she la ter became, or perhaps she already was, the director of the Academie der Kunst i n Berlin. I suppose it was that famous swinging London, and so they needed a pro gramme that reflected that, and they chose SME to play in a kind of 'This is Lon don Now' kind of presentation. I think that's where I met Brtzmann. If it isn't, it's where I met Jost Gebers certainly, and Jost spoke to me of Brtzmann. Technically the first time I played with him was at the Baden Baden SudWestFunk [SWF] meeting, where I was very lucky, by the skin of my teeth really, because J ohn Tchicai decided to take a holiday and not to work over the Christmas. At tha t point there was the determination to go wherever necessary whenever necessary in order to play. So Kowald had come to London in that period that you had docum ented [SUMMER 1967], and when he went home he said: "I'll try and set some thing s up". Then he said to me: "Come, I can't say for sure, but if there's a space i n the car, it looks like there might be a possibility for you - I'm really worki ng on it". At that time he was living in Antwerp. So when we got to Antwerp that night Kowald said: "Yes, it's on. Come down to Baden Baden with us and meet eve

rybody." That was also very important, meeting Brtzmann and a lot of people - Don Cherry, Albert Mangelsdorf, Jeanne Lee, Marion Brown. Also Barre Phillips, who had already been in London. The history of my relationships with all these peopl e - each one is a slightly different story, and different dates - to unravel it all and get it in the right sequence is quite complicated. Quite difficult. M.D: In the early months of 1968, you were on two records, namely KARYOBIN and M ACHINE GUN, which seem to represent the extremes of what was happening in free i mprovisation at the time. How did you relate to these? In a way that was a baptism of fire to what I take to be one of the fundamental problems, which is to adapt your voice to the requirements of the group, but wit hout losing a sense of identity and control over what you are doing and coherenc e in the whole thing. To have attempted it in two such diverse contexts so early on probably was a very useful experience. Later, I did think that it was a bit schizophrenic. For me there was then a kind of conscious effort to try and beef up the general approach to atomistic playing so that it would not lose its way i n those more robust contexts with Mr Bennink and Mr Brtzmann. You had to do somet hing to be heard. Apart from the stylistic niceties, there was the sheer physica l problem of playing at a much louder level. There were one or two technical pro blems to be solved, and one or two aesthetic problems to be solved. M.D: Did you find playing with the SME restrictive at all? It sort of comes acro ss that you are being restrained, shall we say. E.P: Are you sure that's not with the benefit of hindsight, looking at what came later? M.D: Maybe. E.P: I didn't feel particularly restrained. I felt a lot of what John was talkin g about, or the kind of method, such as there was one, was based on several quit e simple rules, which is that if you can't hear somebody else you are playing to o loud, and if what you are doing does not, at regular intervals, make reference to what you are hearing other people do, you might as well not be playing in th e group. I mean I've put it in my own language, but those were maybe the two mos t important lessons that John wanted people to learn when they played with SME. And so there was what you can call a compositional aesthetic which required musi cians to work with those two kind of rules or ideals in mind. There were other equivalent kind of implicit rules going on in the Brtzmann group , and then later on in the [Alex] Schlippenbach group, and ICP. Each one of thes e of these contexts was a kind of - not hermetic - but rather inward looking app roaches. Of course, if you're there as an individual you have to bring something to it, but you also have to understand what you have come into. So that was the challenge. I'm not really sure I ever solved the ICP challenge, in a way, I'm n ot sure many people have at the deepest levels, because it is so much tied up wi th the dynamics of Mengelberg/Bennink, that in a way everything else is a kind o f icing on the cake. The real cake is Mengelberg/Bennink - one slice of each. M.D: You went on to play in a couple of other groups shortly after this period Tony Oxley's and the Music Improvisation Company. Do you have any comments on t hose? Oxley was in a sense somewhere in between John Stevens and Brtzmann. E.P: Yes. In one sense that, and in one sense somewhere in between Mark I SME an d Mark II SME. You could look at it that way too. It's hard to characterise exac tly what Tony was about as a bandleader in that period. He certainly chose good people, and organised things in his own particular way, and created a band with a flavour that was distinct from anything else that was going on at that time. M aybe, because he was also playing at Ronnie [Scott]'s, he couldn't follow the th ing quite as rigorously as it would have required to have those bands work more

often and tour. We didn't really do very much with Tony's groups. We did occasio nal gigs out of town, and I think we did play in Berlin once. There were a few t hings like that, but it had more the flavour of an occasional ensemble, which is I suppose more common today. Back then, we were always thinking about regular g roups. M'D: How did the Musical Improvisation Company come about? E.P: That came out of some rehearsals - I think that it started with some rehear sals between Derek [Bailey] and me just as a duo. Maybe at the same time, Derek might have been having duo rehearsals with Jamie [Muir] - I'm not sure about tha t. We certainly did some rehearsing with the three of us, but I can't remember t he first public performances. There was a kind of proto-Music Improvisation Comp any where Gavin Bryars played. He just got back from his period in America where he studied with Cage and all of that, and was somehow trying to reconcile the i dea of improvisation and chance operations - a very difficult one. So we did a f ew concerts which were partly about free improvisation and partly about these Ca ge and Cage-follower style chance operation things. I think Hugh Davies might have been involved also at some stage in one of those concerts where we were playing chance operations stuff - I don't remember. But s omehow it settled down to be first a quartet with Hugh, and then Hugh recommende d Christine Jeffrey, or said it might be very interesting to see what would happ en if we asked this woman with an extraordinary voice to join in. And that reall y was quite settled for a while, but again that band didn't get much work. We we nt to Berlin once, and did a few gigs out of town. We had one famous tour of art colleges, where I got an Arts Council grant, which in some ways was a precursor to the thinking behind the Contemporary Music Netw ork. That started because a character called Keith Winter, who knew me through H oward Riley, was very keen that I should get some money from the Arts Council. I n those days I was still very heatedly representing improvisation as something d istinct from composition. Now I realise what I really meant was notation, but in those days I might have confused the two things. So I said: "I'm not involved i n notational stuff, so I don't see how I can meet the criteria." So he said: "Yo u tell me how money would be useful to you, or how your situation could be impro ved, and let me think of a way that it can be assisted by us - that's our job." It's amazing to think of an arts bureaucrat saying that kind of thing to you - t hese days it just would not happen. "Fill in the forms and we'll let you know" w ould be the approach these days. So I told Keith Winter that I would very much like to do more gigs with my curre nt main enthusiasm, which was Music Improvisation Company. This was a collective group, but in a way was co-led by Derek and me. It was pretty close to being a collective group. I can't remember how Hugh came into it, for example. Maybe it was Jamie's idea. And then Christine was Hugh's idea. So I said: "We'd just like to work more. The problem is that none of these places can afford to pay us wha t we feel we should get paid." He said: "Okay, that's easy, leave it with me and I'll come up with a scheme." He called back very quickly and said: "Look I'll g ive you this much money and you can subsidise concerts. You find some concerts a nd add this money to what they can afford to pay you and turn it into a tour." And that is how we did a tour of arts schools, because we felt at that time ther e was an affinity with students - that was our best chance of finding an audienc e - people that were used to the idea of abstraction in broader terms, and happy with modernity in art and experimentation and all of that. And I think it was t rue. All kinds of good things came out of that. And in fact, half of the money I kept back and wanted to use to start a record l abel. I was moving towards that and Derek and Tony said they were also intereste d. Tony said: "Don't put your own money into it, I've got a guy with plenty of m oney!" This was Michael Walters. He met him in Ronnie's after hours, and been ta lking about the same idea. In the end, I didn't put my own money into it - Micha el put the money up for the first record, and we started Incus like that.

M.D: That was the only way of getting your music published, was it? E.P: Well, not really. The actual business side of KARYOBIN was very peculiar as you know - that is a whole other story in itself. There was no real money being made, but there were records coming out. Tony had a few records with CBS, and I sland had done the KARYOBIN thing, and there was every possibility that other th ings would have continued to be offered in that kind of vein, but no sense of se lf-determination or control over our affairs. The sense that this is happening b ecause we want it to happen, rather than this is happening because somebody is k ind enough to allow it to happen, which is a different feeling. M.D: I'm not sure that I, or certain other people, know what you were referring to by the KARYOBIN story. E.P: It's hard for me to be sure what kind of arrangement John Stevens had with Eddie Kramer. Eddie Kramer was at that point working in a well known London stud io, and was busy with his Jimi Hendrix projects, but at the same time was very o pen to all these other fringe activities. It's very easy now to see that there w ere people aware that there was something going on in London. There was a whole mood of anything is possible, a lot of which passed me by completely, because I was so involved in the specifics of what we were involved with - I didn't see th e bigger picture at all really. I couldn't see any connection with Jimi Hendrix or Soft Machine or Pink Floyd or happenings or psychedelia or any of that. I did n't connect that particularly. But there were people that did, and I suppose Edd ie Kramer was one of them. It was a typical John Stevens arrangement in the sense that it was very effectiv e in getting the key thing done, namely to make a record and have it issued, but left in its wake a whole mess of complications about who owns what and who paid for what and who got paid for what, and at this point nobody knows the real sto ry any more, because everybody knows a part of it. I know a part of it, only a p art of it. At the stage when we made the record, there were two inputs into this - one was Steve Winwood who knew of me from Birmingham, and was doing very well at Island, jumping out of the Spencer Davis group and becoming a star in his ow n right, and was listened to by Chris Blackwell. And he said: "Yeah, give this g uy a record." At the same time, John had asked Eddie whether he knew anybody at Island? So it was like we both had input into how can we make this happen. Then we both had input into what we should make happen - should we just do it as a duo or shall we make it something special beyond that in our terms. I remembe r quite clearly the conversation. It was almost like the luxury of window shoppi ng, you know where you say, "What about so-and-so and so-and-so", and so forth? So we had a conversation like that where we arrived at the decision that we woul d really like to invite Kenny [Wheeler], Derek and Dave Holland. That was like a kind of dream team, out of the people that had been involved in the various sub -groupings up to that point, and different people with different histories. And of course you could say well, again with the benefit of hindsight, well it is a bit odd that for example Paul Rutherford was not involved, or Trevor Watts. But there were specific reasons why not at that time, partly because of little falli ngs out, arguments, animosities, mutual disappointments and all the usual stuff. So that's how it arrived at that list of names, and the session I think was ver y successful, but in a way it was a band that as far as I know only played in th at form for the record. I'm not sure there was ever a gig with that specific lin e up. That in a way is testament to John - the madness of John's method - method in his madness, because it worked like a band that had been playing for a long time together - it sounds like it. Then there was the famous Yoko Ono ringing the doorbell, coming to listen to her tapes with Ornette [Coleman] in another part of the studio. Something was wrong with the wiring, and the doorbell made a buzz on the tapes, which we removed us ing the Cedar de-clicker for the CD version. And Yoko listened, and she liked th e stuff, and that's partly how the collaborations with her came about. We did a few things - I think it was just John, Derek, me, Yoko - a couple of gigs at the

old Arts Lab in Drury Lane. Heady times, they were. M.D: To go on forward again a couple of years, how and where did you meet Paul L ytton? E.P: Paul Lytton I met in Birmingham. He was playing with the National Youth Jaz z Orchestra. We had one of our rare SME gigs outside of London as a duo - I don' t know how this gig came about, but that is what we did - we did a few things li ke that. We also did a broadcast opposite the Tubby Hayes Big Band! It seems ver y unlikely now. Paul came over and had a little chat and looked at John's kit, w hich was pretty unusual I suppose - it was all very miniaturised and skeletal not as skeletal as it was to become in the final phase of SME when it was almost not there any more. In fact, I think there was one famous occasion when it was not there - maybe the very last gig - that is so beautifully John Stevens. Was t hat planned or divine assistance? M.D: Actually, it turned out he could not get a lift. E.P: I know, but that's just the mundane explanation. The fact is that it was ae sthetically necessary in a way for the drum set to dematerialise just before the drummer. He couldn't have arranged it better if it had been scripted by his big hero Samuel Becket. Paul Lytton was studying with Tony Oxley, but quite how we decided we would play together, I can't remember to be honest. Very strange. But I know we started ab out 1969 to do that. I guess there was a phase of a lot of playing in the aftern oons in different people's places, trying out different things. That was one we tried out, and we both enjoyed it, and we carried on working at it. We played ev ery week for almost a year before we did a gig. Because he is such a generous person in his dealings with me - he can accommodat e my demands somehow, or my vagaries or lack of clarity, or my over-clarity. I'm always too much in one direction. Mind you, by the same token, he's worse than me in some ways in that regard. He's also an extremist, but a mild mannered extr emist. And I'm sort of outspoken and argumentative, but in the end not quite as adventurous as he is. So when we have come back inside - in our own terms, if no t in anybody else's - it usually has been my idea to say: "Wait a minute - this is too weird now - we've got to" And he says: "Okay, okay." He seems to be happiest with the weirdest shit possible - that's where he seems to really love it. But he can play the normal drums as well if that's what someb ody wants. He plays great normal drum set as you know, so at some point I though this is criminal that no one will ever hear him play the drum set again - he ca rried on practising it even when he wasn't taking the drum set out to gigs, whic h I understand. Practise and playing especially when you want to play free - the connection between the two activities becomes very hard to figure. He never los t his chops in that sense, so that at a certain point I just thought this is cra zy. We're lugging all that stuff around - it's so difficult, and in a lot of the contexts it's too weird for the people. If they see the familiar drum set, it w ill give them some sense that they haven't landed on a foreign planet. And that in a way was a key to our survival through the eighties, that we were able to go back and play in jazz club type places or the fringier jazz clubs or fringier j azz festivals. I don't know - It is all coming round again anyway - you can't es cape from your essential nature - you can only move within certain limits. And n ow the taste for weird is coming around again any way - for very weird as oppose d to just half weird. M.D: Were there any particular reasons for the other instruments and also the us e of cassettes in that duo? E.P: I think we were just trying to do things that nobody had done, and trying t o surprise one another. We used a system of taping everything on a machine that was about the same size as that [portable DAT recorder] but of a much lower fide

lity. You remember the little Sonys that recorded in stereo - the first ones tha t did fantastic things, but with automatic gain control. So you got a very bizar re sense of dynamic range - absolutely the opposite of what we were doing. We us ed to listen back after gigs and after rehearsals - very often in the car - and we would find moments that we thought, "Ah, listen to that five seconds", and wi nd it back and play it and study it, interiorise it. "Wouldn't it be great if th ose kind of things happened more often?" A strange kind of self-absorption reall y - just like looking in the mirror, thinking wouldn't it be great if my nose wa s this shape or something. A strange way to do it, but it worked, it helped, and this way we could talk about things or we could make clear to one another thing s that would be impossible to put into words. You just say: "Look I'm talking ab out those five seconds. That - right - okay!" Or he could do the same thing to m e: "Listen, listen, listen to this. We've never done that before." I don't know where the idea then came to use the little cassette machine [in per formance]. I liked the sense of things moving, so we had the cassette machine on a rope sometimes, swinging back from left to right, or spinning - twist up the rope and let the let the cassette machine play back while it was spinning. We we re very interested in the Doppler effect and all of those kind of things, you kn ow - what happens when you swing this and wave this and oscillate this and so on . It was research I suppose. And all of that stuff has come round again of course now, because now there is t he technology you can do all those things with. There are people, whose musical life is transformation processes and spatial transformations and time sequencing and harmonising. All the things that we were approximating in the crudest kind of way given the limitations of the technology, and budgets as well in our case, and practicality. We were not institution based - we didn't have a studio where we could set stuff up. So everything had to be very portable, and had to be ass embled and disassembled in time to do a gig. I'm happy that it's coming round ag ain, but in this new form working with this newer generation of electronic peopl e and new technology - digital technology for the most part - DSP (digital signa l processing), computers, all of that. I suppose in a way we were just hinting a t or groping for what was to come. The first time round we went as far as we cou ld within the limits of those budgets, those technical restraints and practical restraints, then went back to do some more detailed work on the things that we r eally could control, which were the specifics of our own instruments. And now it has come round again, it's okay we can do more stuff with electronics and trans formations and layerings and all of those things, but we can do it now with real ly high quality sound. M.D: But isn't there a difference between what you were doing then and what you are doing now in that what you were doing then, even if it was technologically c rude shall we say, you were in control of, whereas now other people are controll ing the final product as it were? E.P: I think that on paper that is a more substantial point than in reality. If I turn on a cassette of something we did last week, put the tape recorder on a r ope and spin it, how much in control of the result am I? Perhaps in theory I sho uld know what's on the tape, and I should know how many times I have twisted the rope, but I didn't. The truth is we were very much involved in testing the limi ts of what does it mean to initiate something - what are the longest elements yo u can use in an improvisation and still be improvising? All of those kind of ide as were the opposite of the atomistic thinking in a way. So using a piece of tap e, or using a record player or whatever it was, is the kind of opposite of an at omistic SME style of collective working. It was very conscious in a way both in the duo with Paul and in Music Improvisat ion Company. I saw one of the jobs or the areas we could do useful research woul d be to find out was there a middle ground somewhere between SME and AMM. Becaus e AMM worked very much with layering stuff, and not too much with point to point interaction. SME worked very much with kind of pointillistic interaction, but n ot that was no layering. And somewhere in the middle was another way where both

of those things could happen at the same time. Of course, if you ask people to come in and operate in a way that is dependent o n you feeding them material which they then feedback to you transformed, you can characterise that as being a formally different procedure from one instrument a nd one instrumentalist listening and feeding stuff to another one. But the truth is that they are both involved in rapid kind of feedback loops - it isn't just one feeds and the other eats, then the other one feeds and the other eats - you' re both eating and feeding at the same time, and it is the same with the machine s - that's the whole point. Of course, you're not very far away from the artific ial intelligence debate, because the real distinction is that these silicon chip s don't "know" what the numbers they are processing signify. But it may very wel l be that sometimes our "chips" don't know what the numbers we are processing si gnify either. M.D: When you're playing, particularly improvising, how conscious are you? That' s probably the wrong expression, but is it somewhat like a trance state? Are som e things fairly mechanical? E.P: This is the central mystery to me, really. I'm still not clear how it works , but I have taken to talking about left brain / right brain states of dominance . Once more that a certain number of events per second are being generated by th e group or by individuals, how those streams of events interact to form a sense of a whole - you know a group music as opposed to just some people doing somethi ng at the same time - is very mysterious. I really don't know how it works. All I know is that it does work, and that there's a huge difference between people j ust doing some stuff at the same time and what happens when I improvise with peo ple that are experienced at free improvisation, whether it's with Paul Lytton an d Barry Guy, or whether it's this new combination that I've been very happy work ing with - John Russell, John Edwards and Mark Sanders. I need to play differently in each of the two groups, but I feel totally that I can do whatever I want. Now that's very strange, because the results are partly determined by what the collective need of that specific constellation of persona lities suggests. But at the same time I have the feeling that I'm equally free i n both situations. But there obviously are constraints, but they're not constrai nts that register at a conscious level. There must be a process which means I ph rase this way, or chose notes this way, or choose dynamics or attacks or whateve r it is. Some of that language will overlap, and a certain phase or type of phra se might crop up in both contexts. A lot of it will overlap, but there are cruci al stylistic differences between the two, which are the essence of what makes th at group that and that group that. That interests me very much. I feel that I ha ve a pragmatic grasp of what is required in order to bring about or to be an eff ective participant in each of those situations. But there is no theory to explai n it. I'm very happy that there isn't. Perhaps, there could be, but it would loo k very pretentious written down. I may already have overstepped the mark of what can look reasonable in print - I hope not. M.D: To go back to where we were before, you were talking about Paul Lytton goin g back to his conventional drum set. Did this coincide with Barry Guy being adde d to the group? E.P: No, we'd done a few things before that. In fact on the record called TRACKS , Paul is still playing the old kit - the more elaborate kit with the frame. Als o HOOK, DRIFT & SHUFFLE with George Lewis is frame and not the conventional kit. We started to play as a trio about 1980, I think, although, of course, we knew Barry in other contexts and other groups, and we had played with LJCO [London Ja zz Composers' Orchestra], and we knew Barry from all the other things that he'd been up to. I think the idea of making a trio came after we'd done the INCISION record, the duo record in Berlin for Jost Gebers. That came about in a series of quite angui shed moments in Berlin where there was squabbling inside the LJCO - different fa

ctions of people angry with one another. It was very important for me to show Ba rry that, even if I might appear to be taking a line that was sometimes creating problems inside the band, it was not because of any lack of respect for him as a musician - the opposite. In fact, the best way to make that clear would be to make a duo record. Jost had asked me to do some recording while I was there with the orchestra, maybe a solo thing or something. I said I'd like to do a duo wit h Barry. So once we'd done that it was very obvious we could put the two things together. The fact that Paul had been playing regular drum set inside the LJCO p robably helped us all deal with that transition. The specifics of going back to the regular set involved a gig in Brighton. At th is point Paul had been living in Belgium for a long time, so there was the whole question about how to come over, how to carry a drum set. On this occasion it t urned out that I'd first thought he couldn't do the gig. Then he could do the gi g but he wouldn't have a drum set with him, because he was in England for other reasons. I'd been in the process of asking Tony Marsh to do the gig, then Tony h ad problems, and I'd had to look for a replacement for Tony, and lo-and-behold P aul was in the country anyway, so it's just a question of finding him a drum set . We borrowed Steve Noble's drums, I think, and it worked so easily and it was s o straightforward and it was so clear that it was good for the place we were in, that it kind of breathed some new life into the situation for us. That's carried on for a bit now. But, in a way, we're blurring the edges of that with the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, because now Paul has gone back to the other style of drum set which is more appropriate for that. So it's really staying aw are of all our options, and using the appropriate options in the appropriate con texts. That's all it is - it's not that we ever forgot the other kit or the othe r sound, or the sound of the frame or any of that - it's just that we stopped us ing it for a bit. M.D: You were talking about the LJCO. Do have any problems playing composed musi c in the LJCO or other settings? E.P: I look at it like - if we all did the same thing and had the same approach, this would rapidly deteriorate into the most boring scene imaginable. The most important thing is that there are diversities of approach, and the best way of e nsuring that is to support other peoples ideas as fully as you can, and hope tha t they will do the same thing for your ideas. That's the way the community, such as it is, has continued to be a community, because you know when Barry comes an d plays with me he does his best to work within the scheme that I put forward, a nd when I go to work for him I do the best to make sense of the scheme that he p uts forward. Obviously large group improvisation is one of the hardest things to do - there's just not enough chances to rehearse total free large group improvisation. This is a shame. And if any one person goes to the trouble of organising work for a l arge group on a regular basis then of course they are going to have particular t hings that they want to look into, namely in Barry's case the things that he wri tes and brings - that is the main stuff that we work on. But we are also working on the open elements - the space for improvising - which have always been an im portant factor in Barry's composition. So there is always plenty to engage me. M.D: There is a criticism made of free improvisation that it goes from being slo w and quiet to fast and loud then back to slow and quiet again and so on. E.P: Like Beethoven! M.D: The other group, of course, you have also been involved for a long time is the Schlippenbach Trio. How did that come about? E.P: I'd done a gig with Brtzmann, and Alex had played opposite with his group. A lex said it would be nice to do some playing some time. I can't remember if the first gigs I did with Alex were Globe Unity gigs or trio gigs - I think they wer

e Globe Unity gigs. I was free when he was looking for someone to replace Michel Pilz. I think that was in 1970, and we've stuck together through thick and thin since then. We've been at one another's throats metaphorically and literally at times. Usually it's one guy gets angry with one other guy and the third guy pac ifies the situation - but we've done all the combinations. This is what I like it's still a subject of passion. M.D: How often has that band performed in practice? E.P: We've done tours every year since 1970. In the very early period we worked nearly every month - I was backwards and forwards on that boat all through the y ear. In those days there were no cheap flights, so we got to know those cross-ch annel ferries very well. When I say we, I'm not talking about the royal 'we', I remember memorable trips with Rutherford and different people that were on the s ame schedule. MD: At various times it was a quartet?. E.P: With [Peter] Kowald, yes, and Alan Silva, and was supposed to be with Paul Rogers, but then we had that famous accident, and for some reason that never got followed up on. Perhaps it will at some stage - it should be, I think - it woul d be very nice. Paul is playing great - he always did of course - but he is play ing especially well at the moment, and I think would be very suitable. It's a di fficult gig for a bass player. We recently did two or three concerts with Reggie Workman that worked very well. He found a space for himself immediately. This i s the problem, you know, when groups tighten up as trios, sometimes for a fourth person to come in is really difficult. They have to know exactly how to make th eir own space. Of course with a bass in that situation it is going to be easier than with some other instruments, but nevertheless it's not an easy job, and Reg gie Workman was great, but then you would expect that. M.D: Both that trio and the group with Barry and Paul to some extent seem to ope rate as a free jazz group in that there are times when you stop playing and it b ecomes a bass solo or a piano solo. In a lot of free improvisation groups, every one plays all the time. E.P: I think there's more to it. Also, it's closer to a free jazz aesthetic for more reasons than just that, but that certainly is conscious, intended, maybe ev en ritualised. It's part of the method. Because the saxophone does have a very d ominant kind of voice, I think there are only two ways to go. Either you give th e space You could say that the paradigm would be given by the disintegration of the Coltrane quartet. If you listen to live tapes where McCoy Tyner just stops play ing, the dialogue between drums and saxophone becomes so intense that it's full in itself, it doesn't need anything else, and maybe Jimmy Garrison is simply exh austed - those tempos after a certain point are too demanding. The only instrume nt that can keep up with the saxophone, if you want to work on that energy level , is the drums. So you end up with saxophone and drums, which is what Coltrane d id of course. The other way is to step back from the highest levels of intensity that are possible, and just deal with those simple ways of making sure that eve ry one gets heard and everybody gets to work through the stuff they want to work through. M.D: That's back to the SME as it were. I've seen fairly recent gigs where you h ave played like that. One example being the duo with John Russell. E.P: Yes. In another contexts I will play throughout in a completely collective way, because that other approach is not so appropriate. But there are also kind of hybrid forms where you can say well if we've only got one piece to play or we 're just going to play one set, maybe it's more appropriate that it's collective . If we're playing the Vortex [a London jazz club] with that band, it might be m

ore appropriate if I stop simply because it's that kind of place and people are more used to that. Maybe we can bring people in to a way of listening to the tot al collective stuff by breaking it up into bite sized portions. It's not exactly missionary work, but there's always a sense of being aware of how much does the audience know, and that is usually to do with the place - different places attr act slightly different audiences. M.D: Do you have any feelings about playing in regular groups rather than in ad hoc groups? E.P: Regular groups come about because ad hoc groups like the experience. What d oes this say about ad hoc groups that only play once? Why do they only play once ? Didn't they like it? M.D: What about your solo playing? Do you see this as a completely separate acti vity to these various groups that you play in? E.P: I used to more than I do now. A lot of that material, maybe ten years ago, I would've thought it rude to play in a group context. But now I can hear it som etimes - quite often - and it seems useful, and gives another colour or scope to the total music that any one group has to offer. It has to be done more or less sparingly depending on the specifics of the occasion. I can slip in stuff. Ten years ago I would have been happy to have been able to do it in a solo context. I'm using stuff now that is more developed and more complex than I could do back then, and also using it in group situations. But then, you are dealing with the more layering approach rather than the pointillistic, atomistic. You need an aw areness from the other people that by doing that you're not ignoring them, or yo u're not treating them as a kind of accompaniment. It's important that there be a kind of level of trust inside the group - that people know that your intention s are good, and you are not simply trying to dominate proceedings by playing con tinuously or playing in a very complex continuous way. M.D: Your solo music started off like you were playing in other contexts, but it seems to have become more about the continuous complex aspect. E.P: Yes. It is now. It's feeding off itself, like all of these things do. It lo oks at itself and is disappearing into its own mouth. I have a sense of sometime s banging my head up against the wall, but every so often a brick drops out and I can see some light the other side or even push a hand through. You think that you've come to a kind of limit, and then you have a day where something happens and you realise that's not a limit at all - it's simply that you've worked out h ow to control this or that. It's clear to me that if you can imagine something, you can find a technical way to do it, but if you can't imagine it, whether or not there is a technical solu tion never occurs to you because there's no need to. So it's very necessary to l isten closely to what happens when you try to do things, because usually at the fringes of what you're producing is something that you're not really in control of - that there is a central thing that you are fully in control of, and then a kind of halo of suggested other possibilities which have to come with the centra l thing that you're in control of, whether it's a wisp of breath escaping from t he side of the embouchure, or an overtone that you could push harder, or some ke y noise which you can't escape. There's always something there, and if you're li stening at the fringes of the sound as well as at the centre of the sound, then you can be led to other things and other possibilities. It's a strange way to proceed - I hope there's some sense of progress. What I'm scared about is, because, many of these things are added, it's like a process of adding something to what's already there, especially if it's added in the overt ones, and people are maybe first of all drawn to the loudest thing which is happ ening lower down, and maybe the same thing happens often. But that's a vehicle f or the stuff that doesn't happen very often, and which isn't completely in contr

ol. I had the experience of listening to a sitar player and had the sense that t here were two concerts happening - one was in the normal register of the sitar a nd the other was in the overtones, and he was completely aware of both of these things and was playing two concerts at the same time. I try to work with that a little bit. Also I have deep memories of going to the Daphni wine festival in Gr eece in the early sixties and hearing Greek clarinet playing and lyra. The way t he overtones work in Greek clarinet is fantastic. I know I could give more varied concerts quite easily, but I'm not interested in that. I want to work on this stuff. It's to do with layering stuff that I don't know on top of stuff that I do know. A lot of the time now, that is what it's a bout. So there's an element of it you can say, "I swear I've heard him play that a hundred or a thousand times before." But the truth is: yes and no is the real answer. Yes, you have in the sense that well I've got those same four fingers o n that hand and the same four fingers and thumb on that hand, and the key works the same, and if I want this level of layering to take place I have got to have certain things happening with all of that down there and something in the overto nes. So there aren't that many possibilities. If I need all of the fingers to be at work most of the time, and the overtones to come out on top of that, then ce rtain things have to sound like they've happened before. They have happened befo re, but that's not the point really. It's connected with that idea about what ar e the longest elements and still be free and all of that. Okay, how much are the se things really repeated, or are they just familiar? I find the whole thing too absorbing, and lose the sense of my responsibility to the audience, which has p erhaps never been a strong point of this music. I think there's a problem for the audience, which is also there say in a Cecil T aylor solo performance, in that you get an enormous amount of detail over a long period. How do you see the importance of detail versus the overall? I think the overall comes about as a sense of a sequence of details that have be en taken through a logical or somehow narrative sequence and have come to an end . So the details would be like words in a book, and there has to be some sense o f a story. You might say that in FINNEGAN'S WAKE it's sometimes hard to say what the story is, because there's too much absorption in the words as individual en tities, and maybe it's the same kind of criticism. There should be some kind of narrative, but it may sometimes get a little bogged down in the detail of the wo rds. M.D: You normally practice four hours a day, do you? E.P: Four hours can have gone by in the twinkling of an eye. It might not always be that long, and some days not at all if you are travelling. Also, I might onl y do about half an hour or so in the morning if I know I've got a gig that night . It varies enormously - other days I might do six hours. M.D: Do you find the soprano more rewarding than the tenor? E.P: I practice it more. I don't know if that's because it suits this room bette r, I like the sound of it in the room more, or I like the instrument more, or I like the sound of the soprano solo more. I think I do. The tenor, I don't practi ce so much - I should do. M.D: In both you solo and your group playing, do you think in terms of the whole performance while you are playing, or are you just following your nose as it we re? E.P: There is a sense of overall shape. I mean this is why the endings are endin gs. They're not contrived in that way. Musicians know. Something that I need to have pretty much down with people that I play with, is that people know when a p iece has finished. I hate it if they don't. A fundamental requirement really is that sense of ending, and if there's a sense of ending - working back in a kind of reverse logic - it must because there's a sense of form. It's not exhaustion

after all. There's a sense of something being completed. Then of course it gets quite complicated by the circumstantial requirements of p erformance - you are more or less required to play certain units of time. A set is forty-five minutes; a set could be an hour; a concert performance might requi re that you play half an hour; another concert situation might require that you play twenty minutes. It's not just good enough to occupy the twenty minutes, or to occupy the thirty minutes. You also have to shape the whole so that the sense of completion arrives at the right time as well. And this is also possible in m y experience. In fact that's also a kind of requirement - it's a slightly higher level requirement from players. I'm not sure to what extent I can manage it at every time frame, but a combinati on of very varied concert situations, club situations, and then the recording si tuation does mean that you start to develop a fairly keen sense of duration. It' s like this is a clock that is buried somewhere, but is activated at the right t ime when the sense of winding down or conclusion has to be arrived at. It doesn' t have to be winding down, but somehow there has to a sense of working towards t hat sense of completion. That's a regular occurrence, and in fact sometimes with the trio with Barry and Paul we have to avoid too many slick endings, because i f we want to we can finish on a sixpence kind of thing - "boom" - and the audien ce -"huh". But if you do too many of those in one night then you start to feel a bit like a stripper or something - it is a little bit cheap, unless it happens not just to show that you can do it, but it happens because it is necessary. M.D: Apart from the two trios, what other projects are you involved in now or in the near future? E.P: Many projects. Working with Lawrence Casserley on some stuff with his DSP s ystem. He has the IRCAM workstation and a big mixing desk and system, with which he triggers various parts of the software with one of those drum-pad things. Th e Electro-Acoustic thing which is ongoing at the moment - the record is supposed to come out in about two weeks [now out as TOWARDS THE MARGINS on ECM]. I would like at some point to include Lawrence into the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. I ha ve been talking with Richard Barrett about doing something together. I'm also ta lking with Joel Ryan who works at STEIM. There are many, many things happening a t the moment. I'm very happy with the quartet with John Russell, John Edwards and Mark Sanders . We just did some quartet stuff for Nol Akchot- we being Paul Rogers, Mark Sander s and me. This is Nol Akchot's group, and he wants to carry on with that - that se ems to be working very well. Still carrying on with Alex - we've got a tour comi ng up towards the end of the year. We'd like to do some concerts with the trio p lus Marilyn Crispell, if anybody wants it. It seems to be hard at the moment any way in general to find things. The more you want something to happen, the harder it seems to be to make it happen. Money is tight all round Europe at the moment - Germany is struggling with this monetary convergence criteria, and France the same problem. All a little bit difficult to actually find things, especially at the right level where you would like to pay everybody properly. That's why in a way there's a sense of entrenchment into the London scene, and t he recording scene, where we feel - again this is not the royal 'we', I think I am speaking for other people in the community too - that at least they cannot ta ke this away from us. The way the cultural funding in general works for this mus ic is still hopelessly inadequate for the needs of the community. But there is a sense of, "Okay, the London scene is ours, we control it, we know the places an d we know the audience." Also we know how to record. The CD thing seems to work. I know you said that things were slowing down a little bit - it was not as easy as it was when you first started again, but there's a sense that the economics of that are somehow manageable. It's a strange time in a way, because I've many projects, but a lot of them real ly depend on fairly high profile promotion, just in the sense of travel budgets, hotels, all of that would make them expensive things. There's a hell of a lot o f competition for that kind of work. The freer end has never been very good at t

he competitive professionalism stuff, partly because we have a healthy cynicism about all of that anyway. M.D: The last few years you seem to be doing a lot of recording. E.P: For those reasons, especially to have a feeling of being in control. M.D: Are you likely to start your own label again? E.P: I'm thinking about it all the time. In a way, it's very attractive. I don't know how much longer I can resist the temptation. I'd like to do it. As you kno w, there is no feeling like it. I'm actually a fan of the CD. I know some people don't like the size of it or the sound of it or the packaging or any of that, b ut I like them. I think they're very nice. Even the jewel-box doesn't offend me particularly. Perhaps it's a little thicker than it needs to be. Who was talking about this? It was you, wasn't it, talking about pressings and b eing ashamed with the old LP format? Well Nimbus was a great moment in history f or all the small independents. Suddenly you could get decent pressings again. Bu t that horrible period before Nimbus - ah, the embarrassments of lying to yourse lf about 'perhaps this is good enough', because what was the alternative? You co uldn't get it any better. You'd already spent as much time and energy as you cou ld getting it as good as it was, and it was still hopeless, so it did start to b ecome like masochism in a way. Thank God for the CD I say. But then again, you see, 'there's nowt so queer as folk', because Nol Akchot is pres sing LPs in the Czech Republic. I haven't had a chance to play them yet. Maybe t hey're good, but I really can't see it, especially when the master tapes are dig ital. Some of this nostalgia strikes me as very weird, especially the nostalgia for the LP. M.D: A lot of people say that the current standard of digital sound leaves a lot to be desired. Do you have problems with it at all? E.P: You can hear there is something wrong with the top end, because of the prob lems with the brick-wall filter at the top of the frequency range that is being sampled. I haven't heard the relatively new double sampling rate recorders or 24 -bit stuff. My problems with what happens at the top end are relatively small co mpared with the problems I have with surface noise, ticks and pops. And yet some people talk about the dark velvety silences from vinyl! I've heard all the top record-players - some pretty exotic things costing a hell of a lot of money - an d you still hear ticks and pops and surface noise unless you're deaf. I don't wa nt that additional information. I'd rather there was some slight distortion of t he information I want, rather than a lot of additional information that I don't want. That's the end of it, there's no going back for me. And this whole thing of trying to present the CD as a kind of elitist format, an d the LP as every man's - to get decent sound from an LP you need a system ten t imes more expensive then the same sound from a CD player! It's hopelessly expens ive. I mean, I can understand people liking it as a hobby, but not if you want t o listen to a lot of music as music. I look forward to the next generation, DVD - it will be very nice, just clean up the top end a little bit and it will be go od enough for me. Alex already says there's something wrong with CDs - they soun d better than music really sounds! M.D: Some people say that the early 1970s was a golden age for free improvisatio n. Do you think there's anything in that? It sort of implies that everything els e has been anti-climatic. E.P: I've a n a way. At y - I think ll the same sense of forward movement continuously throughout the whole period i one level, perhaps at the level of words - to go back to that analog we're finding new words all the time, and maybe combining them to te story, but with that enriched language. I don't know what the story

of music is. It's like: suspend rational thought and move into a universe of abs tract symbols where meanings are difficult to ascribe. But a sense of journey is nonetheless achievable - a sense of narrative. For me the golden age is always in the same moment that the music is played - it's now. I'm trying to think what might be the historical factors that would make someone think that way - what w ould they be thinking of in particular that happened then, and either happens in the same way now or does not happen now. I guess it was when the music reached its first maturity. I was trying to put so me thoughts down recently about the comparison with jazz, in that in jazz there were several steps which sort of involved changes of rules. Somehow there isn't a similar thing happening in free improvisation, which does not necessarily mean that it's stagnant. What rules there were seemed to be set up at the beginning and have continued. What about the rule that there are no rules? From the very outset people were ve ry interested to attack this conundrum. "So you mean it's free, but there's a ru le that there are no rules. How free is that?" That kind of questioning, which I think is quite interesting. So people are always looking to test what the truth of this is. "So why can't I use some elements of this but some elements of that ?" Of course you can. You can do whatever you want. That's the great thing about music. It's not like football or something, where you get knocked out of the le ague if you try something that doesn't score goals. You carry on. You can carry on failing brilliantly, especially in the tiny scene here. In the smaller grass roots scene, it's obvious that people do it for its own sake. There must be some personal rewards, regardless of whether there is anything communicated. There m ust be achievement of a kind to hold this thing together. I mean, I know there i s - you know there is - but it's not something that you can sell to people easil y. It's a very difficult proposition also for the listener. You have to be attracte d by the noise it makes, as people have said in other contexts about the English . ("They do not understand music but they love the noise it makes!" to quote Tho mas Beecham.) Maybe that's why there's such a flourishing underground scene for free music here, because it's pitched perfectly for people who do not understand music but who love the sound it makes. Unfortunately it sounds so abrasive some times, otherwise we would be onto a mass market breakthrough. I think there are phases in free music, and it's continuing to develop. Certain things are coming to a kind of maturation right now I'd say - a kind of general awareness of a method. You could say that the SME method was once only understoo d by core members of SME. Now you could say that this is an approach of the whol e scene here. (Let's confine ourselves to the London scene. It's the one I feel most at ease generalising about.) It's almost that membership of that part of th e scene requires that you understand immediately what approach is being taken. W hich tradition are we in? There's now a large community of musicians that know i nstinctively what language we're in, what tradition we're in here. I'd say quite clearly that the quartet with Russell, Edwards and Sanders is in a n SME mode really. It's a kind of extended, fairly robust sort of SME mode for i nstrumentation reasons, but it's continuing that language in a way that I hope i s fresh and different from any other version of that language. That in itself is a kind of nineties development, maybe - I don't know. Maybe it happened in the eighties that there were bands playing that way, but which did not have any spec ific connection with the SME as such. M.D: Is that group coming out on FMP? E.P: Yes, it will be called LONDON AIRLIFT, and I think it sounds good. M.D: I have noticed with some of the younger German musicians - one tends to thi nk of the German scene more in terms of free jazz, more extrovert E.P: That's not true. There's a whole bunch of them that are totally what one co uld call post-SME players, and that explains the whole set of affinities between

John Russell and Stefan Keune to name a recent one, or John Butcher and George Grwe. George Grwe has also worked with Mark Sanders. There's a whole set of connecti ons there which have got nothing to do with the old stereotypes of national styl es. M.D: Are you finding there is a continual stream of new musicians? E.P: Absolutely! Fantastic! I mean look at that guy Tom Chant - he's a young sax ophone player that Eddie [Prevost] is doing some trio stuff with - John Edwards, Eddie and Tom Chant. He's Michael Chant's son - the composer from the old Scrat ch Orchestra scene. He obviously had a kind of liberal upbringing. People always mutter on about where are all the players in their young twenties, kind of thin g. But I think that they are there - it's just taken them a lot longer to break through, to get a chance to play. But also, let's face it, things have moved on and they come to the scene now fro m a whole different set of influences. The post-Henry Cow / Recommended Records / Chris Cutler aesthetic has been a very important magnet for people that have c ome in. The free scene in the biggest sense includes people who don't come from that specific jazz orientation any more, and sometimes they find the whole conne ction with jazz mysterious. They don't see that at all. I think they find it all a bit quaint or hard to see why we bother. I'm finding it difficult to know why we bother at this point, because the retrenchment in the jazz scene towards wha t Steve Lacy calls 'rebop' is, well, the story is complete now. They have rewrit ten history - jazz is a classical music, closed form, and the story is complete now. All we can do is look at variations within that. This whole other attitude fits much better, in some ways with people who are coming out of electronic musi c backgrounds or art rock backgrounds - noise rock. All those other kind of aest hetics seem to fit the attitudes in some ways much better than an attitude that says jazz is a theme and variations form and here's how it is done. "Buy my stud y methods in one thousand parts complete with play-along CDs." M.D: Do you find you have any problems working with young people from these othe r backgrounds rather than a jazz background? E.P: No. It's completely about specifics of the individual. I don't know what Jo hn Edwards' background is at all, but I can't imagine that he thinks of himself as a jazz bass player. I've no problems working with him at all. I was bowled ov er the night I first heard him. I knew of him, of course, through B Shops for th e Poor and seeing him around on the scene, but the night I heard him at Alan Tom linson's club at the Priory Arms where we played solo-solo-solo and then combina tions - Alan, myself and John Edwards - I thought: "Where has this guy come from ? He's making the most enormous sound from an acoustic double bass, the language is very original, but at the same time he knows how to listen and relate." Whet her it's got anything to do with jazz, I really do not know. What this word means is constantly being redefined by different sort of politica l forces that are fighting over the ownership of the right to control the defini tion. It's a very strange word to start with. I am not getting into a fight abou t whether I have got any rights at all to have a say in the definition of the wo rd jazz - it's such a waste of energy. What people can't stop me saying is that I was inspired to play the way I play, and with the people that I play, by certa in people that are indisputably seen as part of the jazz tradition. But they are kind of mavericks I suppose for the most part. It would be peculiar to get into a fight about 'yes this is jazz' when I know that it's towards the margins (as the new record is called). Wherever you say the centre is, we are on the margin of it. Whatever the core definition of the activity is, there is always an attit ude that drifts towards 'can you do this and still be that?' It must be a questi on of temperament to want to be in a place that is not too easy to define, and w here you aren't as clearly bound by the rules of being at the centre of somethin g. The defining is clearly done by the establishment who says that there is classic

al music, there is jazz and there is rock and nothing else? So this area of musi c has to be tagged on to one of those. How do you put it? 'File under improvised music.' I think that is how it should be. There's a whole body of it that should be reco gnised as such, but it gets marginalised. But apparently the whole commercial music business is now struggling with the pr oblems of stylistic fragmentation and sub-cultures within. There's no longer a u niform market for commercial music for young people. They're all so into tribali sms of one kind or another, tribal loyalties and tribal musics in effect. That I find interesting, that the whole thing has kind of imploded. Maybe we're on the verge of a very liberating epoch. M.D: I know that some of the early free improvisation was influenced by traditio nal musics from various parts of the world. E.P: Yes, to some extent. That is made very specific with KARYOBIN, because the Karyobin are the legendary birds said to live in paradise. They are the subject of a piece in Gagaku. M.D: Strangely that is one piece that does not sound like Gagaku. There were oth er things from that period that did. E.P: Yes, less successful in my view because there was a hidden agenda. John [St evens] didn't always reveal his sources. He would just describe what he wanted t o happen, and he would actually be describing a piece of Gagaku, but in such a w ay that people would have to re-invent it. It's quite clever really. Because we were that tight at that point, I knew some of the secrets, so I knew what was go ing on. I do the same sort of thing myself in a way. My current enthusiasm is shakers and rattles in East African music - they produc e the most amazing sounds. Then you can be a victim - when you are known to have an interest in those kind of things, sometimes people can assume an influence t hat is quite specific and they've invented it for themselves. In general I take a lot of inspiration from other traditions of music that have not been touched b y global music management systems. So they're not what is currently called World Music, which to me is like the opposite, and is not interesting at all, and is just packaged exoticisms. But again, it's like the relationship between practice and improvisation. Quite how one thing filters into one other There is a connection. Every player knows that practice is important - quite how you make that connection between listening to something, liking it and being influenced by it, and then how it gets into a so -called free improvisation is hard to The more obvious it is, the less successful i t is, obviously. But the more subliminal it is, the harder it is to detect, so y ou are on a kind of scale there from black to white there, which is very hard to say. I would hope there is never a point where someone could say "Ah well, he's now trying to imitate this or that", because in my own mind I'm not trying to d o that. But I'm sometimes trying to incorporate an idea in a general form that I 've taken from something else. M.D: Do you think in terms of tempo? E.P: I think in terms of density more than tempo - speed and rates of events. Bu t there are moments you could count, and where it would be helpful to be countin g - not counting but to be thinking metrically, even if you are the only one tha t is doing it at that time. Sometimes it can help. And a lot of the solo music h as a kind of pulse, and countable metric aspects if you want to get into that. T hat's interesting - how you generate notions of fast and slow without a recourse to metric structuring? But it happens - you can say this piece is fast, or this piece is slow. It's like working back from the fact that you can generate a sen se of inevitable ending must mean that there is a sense of form. Maybe the fact that you can sense the difference between fast and slow must mean that there are

elements of tempo involved as well. But I think then, as soon as you open that box, you raise the question which is very interesting about multiple senses of s peed. Then you start thinking about layering speeds, and again its the atomistic versus the laminal. M.D: Is there anything else you want to say? E.P: The whole question about golden age, and the sense that while perhaps it ha s all been done now, and the rest is just the tidying up of details - I'm really not sure about that. I hope it's not true because that's like a kind of end of history scenario but written for the music. First of all there is the bigger bat tle, if you like, which is more people becoming familiar with how to listen to t his music. This does require us to continue to represent it and continue to give people an opportunity to familiarise themselves with it. I think the audience i s growing slowly but steadily all the time. That does not mean that meanwhile we have to wait for the audience to catch up, but the fact that some elements of w hat we are doing are only refinements of things we have been doing for twenty-fi ve years - I don't think that matters so much at all. In fact, this is quite a shocking thing to say, but I was in a record shop in To kyo in the jazz department, and at a very low level they were playing something - I think they saw me come in so they put one of my records on. For more than a few seconds, I thought it was TOPOGRAPHY OF THE LUNGS which is twenty-seven year s old, with Derek Bailey and Han Bennink, but it was actually THE REDWOOD SESSIO N WITH Barry Guy and Paul Lytton. There's about a twenty-five year difference be tween the two things. Now, what does that say? It says that some of the general procedures have been operating along the same lines for quite a long time, but t he specifics are of course completely different. But when you turn the volume do wn to an almost subliminal level, your first reaction is that you pick up on the generalities and you need more information to get to specific identification. The generalities of approach continue to be what they were about twenty-five yea rs ago in some contexts, in some kinds of groupings, but the specific details ar e always evolving. It's like the point I was making about the basic patterns bei ng a vehicle for the freer material in the overtones in solo playing. The basic pattern is there, but it's like a vehicle for elaboration and investigation of m ore and more detailed levels of control and investigation, or loss of control or whatever. The good thing about that is the generality - the almost traditional aspects of those generalities that you could make about free music - set up some kind of known context for the listener, and it's like an armature for the elabo rations that are hung on it. In a way, it's a return to a kind of analogue of theme and variations, it you wa nt to look at it like that. It's a rather perverse way of describing it perhaps, but there is something like that going on - the theme is always the same theme, and the variations are those details. The theme is the freedom, the absence of any of the normal fixed points of reference - that's the theme. The variations a re the things that become fixed in the particular situation regardless. That in turn relates to the slightly vexed subject of recordings of free improvi sation and their function. I think it does help people to hear things repeatedly , because then they hear the relation of the detail, the particulars to the gene rality of the proposition. There is such a huge body now of recorded examples of people improvising freely together - if all people were interested in was the g enerality then they would only need five or six such records. But we've people t hat are totally familiar with the general proposition of free improvisation - wh at they are interested in is the specifics, the detail. And there's even a recen t CD (by John Corbett) of improvisation called THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAIL. The d etail continues to reflect refinements of instrumental technique, and technologi cal developments, and will continue to do that. I know that for myself, I'll die before I have penetrated the mysteries of the s oprano saxophone. I could worship it as an object - I could stand it in a shrine in the corner - I'm totally mystified by what it can do. The only limits, as th e great Sigurd Rascher said, are in the imagination of the player not the instru

ment. It's just a question of allowing the instrument to teach you - show you wh at it can do - it can do everything.