Evan Parker Quartet - All Knavery and Collusion

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Recorded pre-COVID in the summer of 2019, “All Knavery and Collusion” still exhibits the existential weight of the global pandemic that would follow six-months later. Titles for four of the program’s seven pieces borrow from Daniel Defoe’s novel Journal of the Plague Year and there’s an air of portentousness to the music given the slightly bitter aftertaste attendant with Evan Parker’s professed skepticism on the public import of scientifically-based precautionary measures. Pause certainly seems warranted regarding that misguided perspective, but the merits of the music remain uncompromised and every bit as bracing as one would expect from the caliber of the participants.

The album also carries more than a passing resemblance to a jazz venture in its surface trappings: quartet instrumentation conventional to the idiom, composer credits affixed to tunes, etc. It being a Parker project, these are mostly red herrings, although one of the tracks, “The Alchemy of John Edwards,” steals flagrantly from Ornette Coleman’s similarly titled ode to bassist Scott LaFaro. Edwards and drummer Paul Lytton are longtime Parker associates and each brings his usual instrumental brilliance to the proceedings. It’s here where the stated quartet configuration comes cleanly into focus while still retaining fealty to the free improvisation framework comprises the players’ shared credo.

Pianist Alexander Hawkins is the younger and more recent collaborator, but his rapport with Parker feels even more pronounced and intuitive in the intimate, free improvisation-tooled settings. Penultimate in positioning and the longest excursion by a multiple of three, “The Weather Set in Hot,” weds the leader’s fluttering reed flurries with rippling cross-hand clusters. Edwards and Lytton shade and patrol the edges, but the central thrust of the performance putters along on the swirling central patterns of tenor and piano, the former finding mid-piece purchase for one of Parker’s signature fractal-esque forays into self-perpetuating circular breathing. It’s an exercise as familiar as family at this point, but still one that never feels rote.

https://dustedmagazine.tumblr.com/post/647104824740102144/evan-parker-quartet-all-knavery-and-collusion

(5020675000162)

SKU 5020675000162
Barcode # 5020675000162
Brand Cadillac Music

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