Toward The Margins

British saxophonist Evan Parker was one of the first musicians to record for ECM, appearing on the label’s fifth album in 1970 as a member of the Music Improvisation Company; his partners in that collective included Stockhausen associate and electronic composer Hugh Davies. Over the past three decades, electronics have been one of Parker’s abiding interests and his collaborations both with improvisers using electronics and with composers of electronic music have been many. In 1992 he formed the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble to explore more fully the potential of live electronics in improvisation, a potential that has grown as the technology has become more sophisticated. The Ensemble pools musicians from the worlds of free improvisation, jazz, contemporary composition and computer music research, with most of its members straddling more than one idiom or area of activity. The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble has toured widely, and its North American debut at the Victoriaville Festival was widely hailed as the event’s highlight: "An orchestral music of panoramic scope, full of spatial detail…cascading layers of morphing transmutations … the electronic manipulations charged the music with a sense of spontaneous discovery" – Cadence, "Ardent … grandly ambitious … broadly sweeping schemes, mating improvised activity with MIDI-fied crosstalk" – Jazz Times