News: Crowd-funding campaign for biography of jazz musician Evan Parker
Evan Parker’s awareness of jazz was profound, and his own music can be seen as the natural inheritor of the developmental progression that stretches from Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker to John Coltrane and beyond. Evan Parker has become an icon of alternative music and challenging ‘free’ music.
Peter Urpeth has been given permission to go into the attic from free-improvising saxophone player Evan Parker to find relics, letters, and material from Parker’s past. His findings are brought together in the Evan Parker biography entitled The Intensity Of Purpose.
Evan Parker’s awareness of jazz was profound, and his own music can, with all justification, be seen as the natural inheritor of the developmental progression that stretches from Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker to John Coltrane and beyond. Evan Parker has become an icon of alternative music, influencing a new generation of explorative musicians and those who enjoy the sheer physical thrill of free jazz and improvisation.
Since 1962 he would cut a path as the ultimate virtuoso of the jazz saxophone, changing conceptions of what the instrument could do and would be a major part of the development of a new and challenging ‘free’ music that rewrote the rules of jazz.
Urpeth: “This is a book by a fan who knows a great story and just wants to tell it. But I want to tell it in a way that provides supporting information to the intensity of that first hearing. Some history, some connections, some unforeseen episodes; anything that can answer the desire to know more about music, and which proves too that new things don’t come from nowhere.”
If you haven’t heard of Evan Parker or his music, this book might just change your perceptions of what was happening in music from the 1960s to the present day, and will certainly provide new insights for those with an interest in the new and alternative arts scene in Europe and America – and just how closely linked ‘popular’ and alternative music were in that period.