The exemplary free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker shows no signs of slowing down, and quite the opposite considering his three-concert series at Cafe OTO back in April as he celebrated his 80th birthday, while the four-disc set of solo improvisations The Heraclitean Two-Step, etc. – which besides his half-hour-long embouchure workouts includes a 120-page booklet of commentaries and interviews plus some of his own writings and visual art – is due out in compendious fashion at the end of this month.
That Cafe OTO residency featured a host of collaborators old and new, from the married duo of Alexander von Schlippenbach and Aki Takase to John Edwards, Mark Sanders, and his longtime trio partners Barry Guy and Paul Lytton to Pat Thomas, Hannah Marshall, Ned Rothenberg and his Trance Map mainstay Matthew Wright. As if to cement their reputation for riotous live performances, Parker and Wright recently helmed the release of the album Marconi’s Drift by Transatlantic Trance Map, which captured a simultaneous livecast between seven musicians in Kent and six musicians at Roulette in downtown Brooklyn, with the likes of Parker, Wright, the trumpeter Peter Evans, Marshall and Thomas crossing wires with such luminaries as the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, violist Mat Maneri and drummer and electronic practitioner Ikue Mori, with Rothenberg on the clarinet, bass clarinet and shakuhachi.
Their new album Horizons Held Close on the other hand is the first time that Parker and Wright have teamed up as Trance Map unfettered since their self-titled 2011 debut. Comprised of the two long twenty-five minute pieces ‘Ulaanbadrakh’ and ‘Bayankhongor’, which reference Mongolian provinces, on Horizons Held Close the soprano saxophone of Parker sounds like a series of bird whistles and duck calls as Wright on turntables and live processing catches hold of them in mid-air and sets about repurposing them with an eerie sympathy which is hard to fully trust.
After the more watchful ‘Ulaanbadrakh’, on ‘Bayankhongor’ the dynamic between the duo becomes increasingly frantic, with Wright chasing Parker’s fowl and more fluttering bird species from the waterside or up from the steppe with its grasslands and shrub. And on the heels of this lengthy and elaborate, sometimes sinuous and sometimes arduous headlong rush, Parker’s soprano detaches itself and surveys the scene with a certain mournfulness as Horizons Held Close fulfils that fragile amber hue.
