Evan Parker
Evan Parker, regarded by many critics as one of the most important saxophonists of the post-Coltrane era, was one of the very first musicians to record for ECM, appearing in 1970 on the label’s fifth release with the Music Improvisation Company, a pioneering project bringing electronics and improvisation together. Since then Parker has been recognized as one of the great innovators of free improvised music. Both highly specialized as a player and musically adventurous, Parker has brought his signature sounds to ECM recordings with artists from Paul Bley to Roscoe Mitchell and from Gavin Bryars to Kenny Wheeler.
Parker was born in Bristol in 1944 and took up the saxophone at the age of 14. Initially he played alto and was an admirer of Paul Desmond, but by 1960 he had switched to tenor and soprano, following the example of John Coltrane, a major influence who, he would later say, determined "my [...]
Evan Parker, regarded by many critics as one of the most important saxophonists of the post-Coltrane era, was one of the very first musicians to record for ECM, appearing in 1970 on the label’s fifth release with the Music Improvisation Company, a pioneering project bringing electronics and improvisation together. Since then Parker has been recognized as one of the great innovators of free improvised music. Both highly specialized as a player and musically adventurous, Parker has brought his signature sounds to ECM recordings with artists from Paul Bley to Roscoe Mitchell and from Gavin Bryars to Kenny Wheeler.
Parker was born in Bristol in 1944 and took up the saxophone at the age of 14. Initially he played alto and was an admirer of Paul Desmond, but by 1960 he had switched to tenor and soprano, following the example of John Coltrane, a major influence who, he would later say, determined "my choice of everything".
Parker formed his trail-blazing Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real-time signal processing in an improvising context, and the stages of the band’s evolution has been documented on ECM albums including Toward The Margins, Drawn Inward, Memory/Vision, The Eleventh Hour, and The Moment’s Energy, all of which received extremely positive press worldwide.
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