Evan Parker/Mark Nauseef/Toma Gouband: As The Wind
Author: Philip Clark
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Musicians: |
Toma Gouband (lithophones) |
Label: |
Psi Records |
Magazine Review Date: |
March/2017 |
Catalogue Number: |
16.01 |
RecordDate: |
September 2012 |
These days, Evan Parker's tenor playing can, when he chooses, unashamedly invoke the smouldering heat of Sonny Rollins or Pharoah Sanders, while his soprano remains forever a feral beast – my shorthand way of telling you that this record doesn't contain a single note of jazz, but is a remarkably fine document. So impressed, in fact, was Parker with the tapes that he asked Mark Nauseef if they might be released under his own name, despite this being the percussionist's gig. The record's allure is largely down to its unique instrumental palette. Nauseef builds his arsenal of percussion sounds around a tintinnabulous array of metal objects, while Toma Gouband's lithophones – resonant slabs of stone arranged into non-standard scales and hit with mallets or clanked together – add to the sense of a harmony being generated from the earth up; Parker couldn't play jazz here even if he wanted to, because this music is organised differently. The title track sets out the trio's stall with an extended ritual, Parker's discursive lines unfurling over a matrix of pulses and the hint of rhythmic regularity that opens the fourth piece, ‘Make Noise Enough’, soon disperses as the urgency of the sounds requires rhythms to bend in sympathy. I get why Parker rates this record so highly – and hearing him building lines on soprano, rather than defaulting to too much circular breathing, is refreshing.
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