Friday June 27 • MUSIC GALLERY PRESENTS
EVAN PARKER TRIO
Part of Suoni per il Toronto

Doors 6pm, concert 7pm (arrive early for a Summer BBQ in the Courtyard)
Tickets: $25 regular, $20 member + senior, $15 student
Available at www.ticketweb.ca

Evan Parker, reeds
Barry Guy, bass
Paul Lytton, percussion

With guest Aaron Lumley, solo bass — in the courtyard @ 7pm (Evan Parker Trio performs @ 8pm)

In affiliation with the Suoni per il Popolo Festival in Montreal, Suoni per il Toronto features some of the best and brightest in creative music from your backyard and around the world. We are very pleased to present the Evan Parker Trio in one of three Canadian appearances, alongside visits to the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and Suoni per il Popolo. Please join us before the show for a free, casual BBQ party in the courtyard of St. George the Martyr Church at 6pm.

Evan Parker
UK saxophonist Evan Parker is one of the true pioneers of European free improvisation. He is recognized as the creator of a new solo saxophone language, extending the techniques and experiments started by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, but taking them away from the rhythmically jazz-related areas and into the realm of abstraction. In particular, his use of circular breathing techniques to create extended, complex and overlapping soundscapes is generally seen as the apex of saxophone virtuosity.

In late 1966, he moved from his native Birmingham to London and began playing in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME) who, at that time, also comprised John Stevens, Kenny Wheeler, Paul Rutherford, Trevor Watts and Derek Bailey. By summer 1967, the SME had been shaken down to just Stevens and Parker, though other musicians played with the duo on an ad hoc basis, such as Barre Phillips and Peter Kowald. It is from this period that the earliest recordings of Evan Parker have so far been released.

Early in 1968, Parker left the SME, though he did play with them on occasions. From this time, he started to work regularly with Derek Bailey in a duo, and in various of Tony Oxley's groups. In 1970, he formed Incus Records with Bailey and Oxley, the hugely influential label that was one of the few ways of getting the music outside of the capital.

While happy to operate in all manner of ad hoc situations, Evan Parker has formed a number of long-term associations that have continued to allow him to grow musically. The first one of these began in 1969 when the Evan Parker/Paul Lytton duo was formed. Their first public performance occurred the following year and, particularly as a result of recent Emanem recordings, has been well documented. At this time, Evan Parker was also supplementing his standard reed instruments (not, of course, played in an especially standard manner) with the shêng, a bullroarer, a poll drum, a voice tube and cassette recordings of previous performances.

By 1980, the duo was replaced with a trio with the addition of Barry Guy. The Evan Parker Trio has achieved particular visibility and popularity among followers of improvised music since around 1994, with the release of Imaginary Values. The trio has featured guests, including Kenny Wheeler and George Lewis. The mid-1990s saw the emergence of the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, formed by enlarging the trio with the sound processing capabilities of Philipp Wachsmann, Walter Prati and Mario Vecchi.

The other long working association also stems from around the same time as the Parker/Lytton duo. In 1968, Parker was a member of the Peter Brötzmann Octet that recorded Machine Gun. Then, around 1971, the Alexander von Schlippenbach trio was formed with Evan Parker on reeds and Paul Lovens on percussion. Partly as a result of these two long-standing associations, Evan Parker has been a consistent member of three of the major large scale groups in improvised music: Globe Unity Orchestra, London Jazz Composers Orchestra, and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. In addition, he has continued to work with an extremely wide variety of musicians, such as Sainkho Namtchylak, Anthony Braxton, Paul Bley, Wolfgang Fuchs and :zoviet*france.

Barry Guy is an innovative double bass player and composer whose creative diversity in the fields of jazz improvisation, solo recitals, chamber and orchestral performance is the outcome both of an unusually varied training and a zest for experimentation. Between the early ‘70s and mid-‘90s, Barry Guy held principal bass position in various orchestras, including the Orchestra of St. John’s Smith Square and the City of London Sinfonia. During these years, he was also active in the European improvised scene. He is founder and Artistic Director of the London Jazz Composers Orchestra for which he has produced several extended works and recordings.

Barry Guy continues to give solo recitals throughout Europe as well as continuing associations with colleagues involved in improvised, baroque and contemporary music, including Maya Homburger, Evan Parker, Marilyn Crispell, Paul Lytton and Mats Gustafsson. The Barry Guy New Orchestra (BGNO), formed in 2000, appears regularly at festivals, and Barry as a director/composer is often invited to work with large ensembles using his own extensive library of composed works.

In Sept. 2008, Barry will return to the Music Gallery to perform in a trio with Maya Homburger and Halifax bass clarinetist, Jeff Reilly.

Paul Lytton played in London throughout the mid-1960s and early ‘70s, and was a founding member of the London Musicians’ Co-op and the Aachen Musicians Cooperative. Has been building his own instruments since 1969, including the “Lyttonophone” played by Evan Parker, and had an exhibition of the equipment in Wuppertal, Germany in 1980. Since 1975, he has lived in Belgium, and founded Po Torch Records in 1976 with Paul Lovens, with whom he has recorded three duo albums. Lytton is perhaps best known as a member of the Evan Parker Trio, but he has appeared with many other groups, most notably the London Jazz Composers' Orchestra and King Übü Örchestrü.

In concert, Lytton is a model of concentration. At a trio concert in Sheffield in 1994 Evan Parker outlined the course the evening might follow, saying that “at some point Paul Lytton may take a solo and then again he might not.” This seemed to imply not just the organic nature that the improvisations would follow, but also the selfless nature of Lytton's contributions.