The Moment's Energy Evan Parker Electro Acoustic Ensemble

• 1The Moment's Energy - I09:30
• 2The Moment's Energy - II09:46
• 3The Moment's Energy - III09:34
• 4The Moment's Energy - IV04:20
• 5The Moment's Energy - V09:23
• 6The Moment's Energy - VI08:12
• 7The Moment's Energy - VII11:14
• 8Incandescent Clouds05:05
• Total Runtime01:07:04

Info for The Moment's Energy

The fifth ECM disc from Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble whose pioneering work has effectively established a model for a new kind of improvising chamber orchestra, creating fresh colours from the blending and contrasting of acoustic instruments and live electronics. The latest edition of the group adds some new members – two Americans, Ned Rothenberg and Peter Evans, both well-known to followers of improvised music, and a Japanese musician, Ko Ishikawa – and expands the horizons still further. With more acoustic instruments in the mix, the group now embraces both the ancient and the modern: Ko, for instance, plays exclusively the shō, the archaic bamboo mouth organ, which sounds thoroughly futuristic when processed by the Ensemble’s sonic scientists. Similarly, the borders between improvisation and composition are dissolved in this music: “The Moment’s Energy” features an extended new work commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

The fifth album by Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble adds new members – Peter Evans, Ned Rothenberg, Ko Ishikawa – to the group, and explores dimensions of complexity and fresh sound-colour combinations inside the broad structure provided by its band-leader. As Richard Barrett has noted, the E-AE is effectively a new kind of chamber orchestra. In shaping and directing music for it, Parker puts his improvisational skills in the service of new composition – and, indeed, the music created for the present disc contributed to his receiving a Hamlyn Foundation Award for composition in 2008.

“The Moment’s Energy” features an extended work commissioned from Evan Parker by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and was recorded at the Lawrence Batley Theatre in November 2007. Although it incorporates ‘live’ material, it is not primarily a live album, but then the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, with its ‘processing’ of improvised music, has been challenging notions of what ‘live’ means from the beginning of its history. Since “Memory/Vision” in 2002, furthermore, Parker’s albums with the E-AE have utilized, in varying ratio, both concert recordings and location recordings made under controlled ‘studio’ conditions. The electronic interventions in the music being both unpredictable and unrepeatable, ‘alternate takes’ in this context offer a wealth of radically different choices. On the present recording, only “Incandescent Clouds” , and Part IV of “The Moment’s Energy” are from the Huddersfield concert, the majority of the music being drawn from sessions in the days leading up to it.

The Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, a sextet on “Toward The Margins” (1996), has been growing steadily in size since the group’s inception. The current 14-piece group is also the most international version of the band, with members from the UK (including the Uganda-born Wachsmann), the US, Japan, Spain and Italy. Its distinguished line-up includes improvisers, composers, and sonic scientists – all of them well-known to followers of creative music.

This new release from the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble blurs the boundaries between conventional and electronic sounds. Yet, when one hears Peter Evans’ trumpet rich and almost classical in tone or Ned Rothenberg’s bass clarinet in all its doom-saying glory unaccompanied by any other instrument, it sounds completely contextual. Huge swathes and swirls of processed material likewise appear simultaneously unworldly but familiar, as if half-remembered from a dream. (Duncan Heining, Jazzwise)

This commission for the 2007 Huddersfiled Contemporary Music Festival shows him brilliantly orchestrating the unexpected, his whirlwind improvisations thriving beside the bleeps. Spiky piano and bass duel in the shadows, and sparse trumpet glimmers in a mist of scrapes. (Mike Hobart, Financial Times)

Evan Parker, soprano saxophone
Peter Evans, trumpet, piccolo trumpet
Ko Ishikawa, shô
Ned Rothenberg, clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi
Philipp Wachsmann, violin, live electronics
Agustí Fernández, piano, prepared piano
Barry Guy, double bass
Paul Lytton, percussion, live electronics
Lawrence Casserley, signal processing instrument
Joel Ryan, sample and signal processing
Walter Prati, computer processing
Richard Barrett, live electronics
Paul Obermayer, live electronics
Marco Vecchi, sound projection

Recorded November 2007 at Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield
Engineered by Steve Lowe
Mixed February 2008 at New Gateway Studios, London by Steve Lowe, Steve Lake and Evan
Produced by Steve Lake

Evan Parker
was born in Bristol in 1944 and began to play the saxophone at the age of 14. Initially he played alto and was an admirer of Paul Desmond; 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". In 1962 he went to Birmingham University to study botany but a trip to New York, where he heard the Cecil Taylor trio (with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray), prompted a change of mind. What he heard was "music of a strength and intensity to mark me for life ... l came back with my academic ambitions in tatters and a desperate dream of a life playing that kind of music - 'free jazz' they called it then."

Parker stayed in Birmingham for a time, often playing with pianist Howard Riley. In 1966 he moved to London, became a frequent visitor to the Little Theatre Club, centre of the city's emerging free jazz scene, and was soon invited by drummer John Stevens to join the innovative Spontaneous Music Ensemble which was experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation. Parker's first issued recording was SME's 1968 Karyobin, with a line-up of Parker, Stevens, Derek Bailey, Dave Holland and Kenny Wheeler. Parker remained in SME through various fluctuating line-ups - at one point it comprised a duo of Stevens and himself - but the late 1960s also saw him involved in a number of other fruitful associations.

He began a long-standing partnership with guitarist Bailey, with whom he formed the Music Improvisation Company and, in 1970, co-founded Incus Records. (Tony Oxley, in whose sextet Parker was then playing, was a third co-founder; Parker left Incus in the mid-1980s.) Another important connection was with the bassist Peter Kowald who introduced Parker to the German free jazz scene. This led to him playing on Peter Brötzmann's 1968 Machine Gun, Manfred Schoof's 1969 European Echoes and, in 1970, joining pianist Alex von Schlippenbach and percussionist Paul Lovens in the former's trio, of which he is still a member: their recordings include Pakistani Pomade, Three Nails Left, Detto Fra Di Noi, Elf Bagatellen and Physics.

Parker pursued other European links, too, playing in the Pierre Favre Quartet (with Kowald and Swiss pianist Irene Schweizer) and in the Dutch Instant Composers Pool of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink. The different approaches to free jazz he encountered proved both a challenging and a rewarding experience. He later recalled that the German musicians favoured a "robust, energy-based thing, not to do with delicacy or detailed listening but to do with a kind of spirit-raising, a shamanistic intensity. And l had to find a way of surviving in the heat of that atmosphere ... But after a while those contexts became more interchangeable and more people were involved in the interactions, so all kinds of hybrid musics came out, all kinds of combinations of styles."

A vital catalyst for these interactions were the large ensembles in which Parker participated in the 1970s: Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO) and occasional big bands led by Kenny Wheeler. In the late 70s Parker also worked for a time in Wheeler's small group, recording Around Six and, in 1980, he formed his own trio with Guy and LJCO percussionist Paul Lytton (with whom he had already been working in a duo for nearly a decade). This group, together with the Schlippenbach trio, remains one of Parker's top musical priorities: their recordings include Tracks, Atlanta, Imaginary Values, Breaths and Heartbeats, The Redwood Sessions and At the Vortex. In 1980, Parker directed an Improvisers Symposium in Pisa and, in 1981, he organised a special project at London's Actual Festival. By the end of the 1980s he had played in most European countries and had made various tours to the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. ln 1990, following the death of Chris McGregor, he was instrumental in organising various tributes to the pianist and his fellow Blue Notes; these included two discs by the Dedication Orchestra, Spirits Rejoice and lxesa. For more information visit: http://evanparker.com

Booklet for The Moment's Energy