Tabling The Elements

Sitting for pictures in the cluttered, ivy-walled courtyard of a Covent Garden pub, picnic tables tumbled in winter disuse, Evan Parker suggests a concept for a TV series. "Not How Do They Do That?, but Why Do They Do That?, he chuckles. Brainwhirl: Anthea Turner bursts in on Michael Portillo to ask about his motivations for sitting in office; Anneka Rice points the mic and the finger at Rupert Murdoch; Jeremy Paxman confronts the Shell boardroom. The thought os such a programme revealing lack of reasoning and motivation, or simple greed, appeals mightily to Evan's sense of the value of personal dignity, the importance of individuals to find and work through their own ideals for living and expression.

Having passed his 50th birthday last year (the event marked by a London concert and double CD release on Leo Records), the saxophonist has truly earned the dread appendage of 'veteran'. Since parting company, not altogether amicably, with Incus Records, the label he formed in 1969 with Derek Bailey, he has been granted new freedoms as a roaming freelance player: the last 18 months alone have witnessed a generous handful of good-to-great CDs: The Fire's Tale with American pianist Borah Bergman on Soul Note; the (relatively) contemplative Imaginary Values with regular compadres Barry Guy and Paul Lytton, and last year's chewy Obliquities duos with Guy, both on the latter's Maya imprint; Time Will Tell with Paul Bley and Barre Phillips, amazingly his first appearance on ECM. 1995 also saw the reissue of the monumental 1975 Saxophone Solos set on Chronoscope, and Three Other Stories, a collection of unreleased, otherworldly duets with Paul Lytton from 1971-74 on Emanem which bears witness to Parker's quiver of extraordinary homemade instruments: mouthpieces, hosepipes, the dopplerphone, the lyttonophone...

Not even Evan will deny that the freshness and surprise of those early larks has been suppressed, or at least isn't so readily on show now. "That is the strange thing, the way time speeds up; but all of those [early] things are still very current for me. Especially when you listen back and hear that in some ways you were doing more adventurous things, you were taking more risks, your attitude was looser. Once you discover that you can do anything, nobody can stop you taking any line you want. That is a kind of artistic freedom that comes with your decision to risk living that kind of life. Then you start asking: 'What are the things that particularly interest me among all these things that I know I can do; which are the things I would really like to focus on?'"

It's this kind of obsession with the minutiae of sound - the player's own sound - that can make the improvised world inhabited by Parker and his ilk somewhat forbidding for new listeners, even younger ears for whom the detuned noises popularised by Sonic Youth, Public Enemy and Aphex Twin aren't a problem. ("I'm not crazy about young people," Parker will later claim.) Yet is's possible in Parker's conversation to detect an awareness of audience response becoming part of his method. "There's no point in doing things if you're not looking for a social response, which I think every performer is, whether they admit it or not. And the other factor that would have contributed to the changes, which can be described as tighter focus, would be to do with: Who are we doing thus for? What is the context that this is understood and perceived in, and how can be sharpen that sense of relevance to that context?"