Talk:Evan Parker

Quotation from All Music Guide
I believe that the information you removed from the article about Evan Parker was perfectly legitimate. There was nothing wrong about the information. I suggest putting that piece of information back. --User:Exir_Kamalabadi 09:42, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

I've reverted User:194.145.144.67's edit again, and I've seen the discussion between him/her and User:Exir Kamalabadi on their talk pages. I believe any further discussion about this issue should take place here, on the article's talk page. I am in favour of keeping the quotation, and I don't understand the anon's objection to it. It's properly sourced and is not even particularly controversial. In fact, it's pretty neutral and factual. Enough said. --Richardrj talkemail 13:53, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Jurek is widely disliked in the jazz community for his verbosity, know-nothingness & habit of giving top ratings to virtually everything he reviews (a 4 out of 5 stars rating is low for Jurek). All that said, the passage quoted from him is neither inaccurate nor especially controversial, so the deletion seems wrongheaded to me. I would be more sympathetic to the anonymous deleter if he/she actually replaced the quotation with another that described Parker's solo performances in at least as much detail. --ND 19:06, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Leaving aside the fact that Parker is only very tangentially a jazz musician, I'm not sure whether the term "jazz community" is of much use to us - surely there are as many opinions as there are jazz aficionados. I'm not familiar with Jurek's writings on jazz, but I have read a fair bit by him on experimental/avant-garde music, and have found much to admire - his review of Swans' Soundtracks for the Blind, here, is simply one of the best reviews of an album I've ever read.  You might find it verbose, but one person's verbosity is another's eloquence, and that review spoke to me very eloquently indeed about an album I love.  Glad you agree with me on the question of the Parker passage, though. --Richardrj talkemail 20:08, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Parker's music is by & large not jazz but grew out of the music, & the community of Parker listeners is still drawn largely from the jazz community who probably followed the same path. (I'd be very surprised to hear that there was a large number of Parker fans out there with no interest in jazz.) -- Jurek may well be more knowledgeable about pop & rock musics! That's really his field, not jazz. --ND 20:31, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * if you want a good capsule description of an Evan Parker solo performance try p. 195 of Larry Kart's Jazz in Search of Itself: "Using circular breathing, in which air is constantly taken in and expelled to produce a continuous stream of sound, he skirled out countless overtones and then placed one or more of these elliptical lines in contrary motion to the others. Then, as if that weren't enough, he concluded by juggling entire blocks of overtones -- as though the soprano had been transformed into a kind of atomic calliope and Parker were slamming out chords in its bass and treble registers." --ND 20:37, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Please stop removing the quote from the Evan Parker article. --Richardrj talkemail 16:17, 4 December 2006 (UTC) 10:50, 1 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid the claim that the quotation is 'imprecise' won't wash, either. It is a completely accurate transcription of the original article's wording. Guy Hatton 12:45, 4 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The quote itself is not imprecise, its content IS, lke so much of Mr Jureks writing for AMG.I'll continue removing the quote as I know Paker's work well and that quote is hogwash. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.145.144.67 (talk)


 * The anon has now at least stated his/her objection to the quotation - that "there are not 3 registers of the instrument". I think he/she means that it is incorrect to write 'instrument' in the singular, since Parker plays both soprano and tenor sax.  If this is indeed the objection, it seems specious to me, since Jurek is referring to the instrument in a general sense.  Or is it actually incorrect to say that a sax has three registers?  I know nothing about the sax and would appreciate being enlightened.  --Richardrj talkemail 16:22, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

"Or is it actually incorrect to say that a sax has three registers?" At last, someone asks the killer question. Each 'type' of sax (Baritone, Tenor, etc) has a given register. Extended techniques make playing beyond these 'given' registers possible. To speak of three registers is nonsense. There is a wikipedia entry on saxophones by the way.

The question of 'how many registers does a musical instrument have' is difficult to answer helpfully. Any instrument could be said to have any number of registers depending on how precisely you like to divide up its pitch range (eg, you'll often hear Miles Davis described as playing mostly in the trumpet's 'middle register', so logically it must also have high and low registers too in this view). On a more technical level, I believe that most reed instruments have distinct low and high registers with specific fingerings required to move from one to the other (I'm a guitarist, so this is not my specialist field). Maybe this is the basis of anon's objection - that the saxophone has only two registers? Guy Hatton 16:48, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

...though it appears he believes that the saxophone only has one register. That can be exceeded. Presumably without thereby creating an extra register. I find that a pretty untenable position, but I'd welcome comment from a saxophonist on this. Guy Hatton 16:52, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I can advise you to look here for a start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxophone and see the sax image on the right with the phrase underneath. If Jurek was referring to the idea of "upper register" etc of a given horn, three is again irrelevant as (particularly with a player like Parker) the 'registers' he will use should then be referred to as extreme upper and lower registers, in fact he is simply going beyond the register of the given horn into, and even beyond, registers of other horns, this means that a number of registers is impossible to define and will depend on the technical ability of the player (in EP's case, enormous). So, Jureks quote is wrong whichever way you look at it.

The following (admitedly long) quote is from EP himself, explaining his technique it comes from this site http://efi.group.shef.ac.uk/fulltext/demotu.html " In testing my limits of duration I worked on two techniques which have given a particular character to what I now feel free to call my style. Using an up/down motion of the tongue, rather than the standard technique of tu-ku using throat attack, I developed a double tonguing which was faster and more flexible and capable of use over a wider dynamic range. This technique made rapid successions of notes of very short durations possible. I think I hear this technique in the music of Charlie Parker, Pharaoh Saunders, Wayne Shorter and Jan Garbarek. To extend durations beyond a breath length I worked on circular breathing technique in which a small reserve of air in the cheeks is pushed through the instrument while the diaphragm is used to breath in through the nose. I had heard Roland Kirk use this technique and recordings of folk music from Africa and the Middle East were an inspiration. I worked on the reed's ability to sustain a lower pitch while articulating selected overtones combining the method for overtone selection which I learnt from the best book ever written on saxophone technique, Sigurd Rascher's "Top Tones for Saxophone", with a sense of possibilities gained by listening to Steve Lacy. I worked on sustaining overtones and interjecting lower notes which is basically the same technique with different timing. I haven't worked much with singing into the instrument because unlike the trombone or dijeridu, I don't like the sound it makes very much, it makes me think of kazoo or comb-and-paper and I only do it unconsciously or in extremis. (Although every so often I'll hear something by Dewey Redman that makes me feel lazy for having that attitude.) As a young man in 1960 I was filled with excitement at the prospect of hearing Coltrane's original Atlantic recording of "My Favorite Things" after reading a review in Downbeat that described part of the solo sounding like two lines at once. Coltrane subsequently developed those ideas further, arguably more on the tenor than on the soprano. Given the extra physical effort needed to fill the tenor with air this was remarkable. I gained confidence in the possibilities of repetition after working with John Tchicai at one of those SWF Baden-Baden meetings organised by Joachim Berendt. Listening to the drum music from various African cultures on records, especially the wonderful work published by Ocora and thinking about polyrhythms I started to work on patterns of fingering in which the left and right hands worked in different superimposed rhythms. To some extent this overlapped with work on broken air columns (so called cross-fingerings) and thoughts on how to apply the fundamentals of Bartolozzi's pioneering work "New Sounds for Woodwind" to the saxophone. At a certain point I had a flash of insight the force of which I still find difficult to communicate: that the saxophone can just as well be seen as a closed tube that can be opened in various ways as an open tube that can be closed in various ways. Although this thought may sound obvious I suspect it has been one of the most important keys to my development. Since Sigurd Rascher showed in 1951 that all the major and minor scales could be played as overtones of the five lowest tones on the instrument the view of the saxophone has been transformed. Speaking of extended technique in general, multiphonics, altissimo register, micro-tonal tunings can all be seen as part of the same study. As Rascher said in 1961, "..the student who realises that mind (concept) and body (embouchure, fingering) must work together, will in due course succeed. We underestimate, too often, the power of the active mind."


 * Quotes are not wrong, they simply are. That said, primary published saxophone fingering charts that include altissimo fingerings cover more than three octaves and less than four - three complete octaves. &brvbar; Reisio 18:09, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Of course a quote can be wrong; the idea of this site being to offer factual information if someone uses a quote which is demonstrated to be inaccurate, its wrong.

Pop Music???
I am not sure about the rest of the musicians listed in the "Pop Music" section of this article, but Mr. Parker's work with Spring Hee Jack is hardly what I could define as pop music. Though they emerged as a drum'n bass artist, their recordings with Parker are much more in the vein of his free improv music than it is in traditional drum'n bass (a music genre which still can be hardly classified as "pop"). Though his playing is a little more subdued than a typical Evan Parker outing, the music is nonetheless eons away from being "pop".

I propose that that the Pop music section be reconsidered and possibly revamped by someone more articulate and knowledgable than I in order to clear up any sort of misunderstanding that this heading may cause. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.187.196.88 (talk) 07:14, 28 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I see your point, though certainly some of the collaborations detailed in this section could plausibly be described as forays into the pop-music world. I do wonder about whether the statement that he "has also increasingly become interested in electronics, usually through inviting collaborators … to electronically process his playing in real time" properly belongs here, either, since many other musicians far removed from the pop-music field have done this sort of thing (e.g., William O. "Bill" Smith, Terry Riley, or Pierre Boulez). It looks like there may have been some confusion on the part of an editor between live-electronic music in general, and the specific genre of electronica, even if one name mentioned here (Phil Wachsmann) does happen to be associated with that genre. Unfortunately I, too, feel less knowledgable about the redlinked names than I would like, in order to be able to reliably sort out this problem.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 21:38, 28 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I took some of the text about electronics out of the pop music section. SethTisue (talk) 01:35, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Why no discography?
Why does this article not have a discography? Such a section could include his album The Snake Decides which, as you can see, has its own page on Wikipedia. I am not familiar with Parker's work, so cannot create such a section. HairyWombat (talk) 15:57, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Basically, because no-one has bothered to make one. As for why that is, it's because his discography is enormous, and the 'external links' section already links to a comprehensive one.   --Richardrj talkemail 20:16, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough. I have therefore added a "See also" section containing a link to the The Snake Decides page. The link deserves to be in there somewhere. HairyWombat (talk) 01:37, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Dead external links to Allmusic website – January 2011
Since Allmusic have changed the syntax of their URLs, 1 link(s) used in the article do not work anymore and can't be migrated automatically. Please use the search option on http://www.allmusic.com to find the new location of the linked Allmusic article(s) and fix the link(s) accordingly, prefereably by using the Allmusic template. If a new location cannot be found, the link(s) should be removed. This applies to the following external links: --CactusBot (talk) 10:32, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
 * http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=Asnm1z81a8yv3