Search - Evan Parker, September Winds :: Alder Brook

Evan Parker goes to church

N. Dorward | Toronto, ON Canada | 12/06/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Evan Parker has, by his standards, fallen rather quiet in terms of new releases; this past year there have been only four as a leader, really: _Chicago Tenor Duets_ with Joe McPhee (in fact a belated release of a 1998 session inexplicably left sitting in the can by Okkadisk), _Birds and Blades_ with Barry Guy (Intakt), the new Electronics Ensemble disc on ECM, & this disc, which is his second collaboration with the Swiss wind quartet September Winds. Perhaps Parker is trying to answer the increasing jadedness of music critics & fans who feel that he has released too many discs in recent years while treading water as a player. Whatever the case, _Alder Brook_ doesn't quite answer the skeptics but does offer some interesting & attractive music nonetheless. It was recorded in a church, with an incredibly echoey, flattering acoustic; the results are like an ECM disc in all but label. September Winds avoids the idiosyncratic soundworlds of free-improv "extended technique" for the most part; they are by turns almost classically pure & almost orthodoxly jazzy. Much of this is very slow & meditative--improvised fugues of a high order of responsiveness, though with little of the surface spontaneity of much free music. It's all cushioned by the church's reverb, & it can get a bit ponderous & soggy (one wonders if it's not time for the band to try recording in an acoustically drier environment--their previous disc was recorded in an echoey disused water-cistern in Zurich). But if one's in the mood it's very lovely music that encourages the listener to meditate on it at a similarly unhurried pace.The one big break in the flow, incidentally, is a four-minute Parker soprano solo that kicks off one track. Parker does seem to insist on his turn in the spotlight on group albums, often virtually shouldering aside the other musicians to get in his big solo number. It really sticks out like a sore thumb on this disc, & I wish he'd kept to the more collectivist mode of the rest of the album. As for the solo itself, it's no more or less than an Evan Parker solo--which is to say, technically brilliant, harmonically static, & interchangeable with countless other such solos he's laid down over the years. At its best his solo music is wonderful stuff (check out his earliest albums in the mode); but as he's settled into routine it can sometimes come to no more than (heresy!) bagpipe music for eggheads.Anyway, this is an unusually pretty--even plush--album in the Parker canon, & fans will want to hear it. To my taste, though, the real winner for Parker this year is the encounter with Joe McPhee, which is far darker & dourer than this disc, & which features in McPhee a player whose own thorny virtuosity offers Parker a more usefully contestatory partner than on _Alder Brook_. _Alder Brook_ is the sound of concord rather than challenge: as always, it's up to the individual listener to decide to which end of that binary he or she leans."