By Stuart Broomer
Evan Parker and Matt Wright have been working together since 2008. Wright
initially contacted Parker to explore his extensive collection of
ethnographic field recordings and it eventually evolved into a duo in which
Parker improvised on saxophone and Wright improvised with turntables and
samples. The two have since added other musicians to the project (their
presence signalled by a “+”), resulting in groups from trios to a sextet,
occasionally including musicians’ materials that were recorded apart from
the core ensemble’s recording.
The process has extended Parker’s long-term exploration of his
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in which acoustic improvising instrumentalists
were paired with electronic musicians, further developing the acoustic
input. The original sextet paired the Parker – Guy – Lytton trio with three
electronic musicians, with Guy’s own doubling with electronic processing
paired with Phil Wachsmann’s viola and processing. That ensemble has been
active as recently as 2019 ( Warszawa, 2019 [Fondacia Sluchaj]),
while it reached its most expansive form in an 18-member version at
Lisbon’s Jazz em Agosto in 2010 (an extended reflection is available here).
Transatlantic Trance Map – Marconi’s Drift (False Walls, 2024) *****
Transatlantic Trance Map might be the most remarkable performance of
improvised music in recent years, if only for the compound “location” of
its performance, 13 musicians on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The
significance of the work is tremendous, both in its realization and its
potential, in a world where travel is increasingly challenged by
environmental and disease concerns. The technical distribution here is
apparent in an early “draft” of the process. Parker and Wright initially
tried a “dry run” in November 2021, with a quintet version still called the
Electro-Acoustic Ensemble interacting with the SPIIC ensemble in Hamburg
directed by Vlatko Kučan. This is available on YouTube.
On December 17, 2022, Parker, playing soprano saxophone, and Wright (laptop
sampling and live processing) gathered a septet at the Hot Tin in
Faversham, England with Peter Evans (trumpets), Pat Thomas (live
electronics), Hannah Marshall (cello), Robert Jarvis (trombone) and Alex
Ward (clarinet, guitar). Meanwhile, a similar sextet of regular Parker
collaborators gathered in New York at Roulette: Ned Rothenberg: (reeds,
shakuhachi); Sam Pluta: (laptop, live electronics); Craig Taborn (piano,
keyboard, live electronics); Ikue Mori (laptop live electronics); Sylvie
Courvoisier (piano, keyboard) and Mat Manieri (viola), most of whom had
played in the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble or its Septet variation, while
between them, the two ensembles reunited the compact supergroup Rocket
Science, consisting of Parker, Evans, Pluta and Taborn.
The most remarkable technological feature consists in the brevity of the
time gap between the two groups: in his notes Wright mentions the work of
the technical directors at Hot Tin and Roulette and that “After a number of
tests we were able to work at high resolution, almost treating each
location as a separate room within a studio, albeit with the slight, but
workable delay of around 65 to 120 milliseconds,” a gap that Wright was
later able to reduce further in mixing while creating a stereo spread that
integrated the two bands.
The most remarkable feature, however, beyond the technology is the musical
achievement. Parker has been expanding both instrumental technique and
applied technology since the late-1960s as well as the breadth of his
musical associations. While the Atlantic may separate these bands, the
connections are dense. One of the features of the extended piece is a
pattern of duets and trios sometimes featuring alike instruments that also
draw in other members to create larger ensemble improvisations. The depth of
musical relationships? Parker and Rothenberg, paired together here, first
recorded as a duo in 1997, while others would be playing together for the
first time.
Rather than attempting a description of a work this dense and rich, I’ll
leave that to individual listeners. This is an amazing achievement,
creative music managing the kind of global event usually reserved for pop
superstars. Like several recent events of significance in the field, the
project acknowledges the assistance of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation.
Trance Map – Horizons Held Close (Relative Pitch, 2024) *****
What could be more different and yet somehow the same? In the same period
as Trance Map’s greatest expansions, Parker and Wright here return to their
original duo form, with Parker playing soprano saxophone and Wright
simultaneously employing turntables, software, sampling and processing,
transforming Parker’s lines and field recordings into an orchestra of the
imagination and strongly referencing his own journey to Mongolia in 2009.
Just as it’s rooted in Wright’s turntables, it seems to mimic the LP,
though available only as download and CD, with the near identical playing
times of two pieces: “Ulaanbadrakh” runs 24:16; “Bayankhongor”, 24:10.
Parker’s intense chirping soprano multiphonics are set amidst an
ever-shifting, recycling soundscape in which Parker own’s complex parts are
multiplied, repeated, transformed, Parker himself interacting with the
variations and the insistent and multiple percussion of Wright’s ever
transforming synthetic orchestra, a reflection and extension of Parker’s
long-expanding universe of mirrored and transforming musical impulses, as
much a communal, collectivist, organic meditation as the globalizing social
vision of Transatlantic Trance Map. It is at once constant, hypnotic yet
ever changing, an ideal that Parker has been pursuing for decades, and
perhaps first fully realized in the solo music of Conic Sections,
recorded in 1989.