The album embodies the joyous exuberance of collective invention and the intellectual rigour of spontaneous form.
Jazz in Britain JIB-89-S-CD & JIB-89-S-DL
Evan Parker- tenor and soprano saxophones; Paul Rogers – bass; Louis Moholo – drums
Recorded at the Vortex 5th September 1992
Ego, but.. / U-begot / Tebugo
On 17 November 1961, John Coltrane performed at the Granada Cinema, Walthamstow, in north-east London as part of Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic tour. The programme also featured Dizzy Gillespie and his quintet. For the young Evan Parker, who attended the concert, Coltrane’s appearance proved an event of lasting significance. Decades later, Parker returned to the same venue—by then repurposed—to record Walthamstow Moon (’61 Revisited) (Byrd Records, 2017) with guitarist John Russell and bassist John Edwards, a deliberate act of homage to that formative evening.
Parker has never sought to emulate Coltrane stylistically, yet the example of Coltrane’s radical extension of jazz language—exemplified by the Coltrane–McCoyTyner–Eric Dolphy — Reggie Workman–Elvin Jones quintet—had a profound effect on his musical outlook. Coltrane’s integration of modal structures, polyrhythms, and extended harmonic exploration embodied a decisive “break with tradition,” a notion that would later underpin much of Parker’s own practice in free improvisation. Equally, Parker must have been aware of the severe critical backlash that greeted Coltrane’s 1961 UK performances. The reception of Coltrane’s work by sections of the British press was infamously hostile: Benny Green, writing in The Observer, described the performance as “the low-water mark of jazz in this country,” while Bob Dawbarn, in Melody Maker, confessed himself “baffled, bothered, and bewildered.” Such derision, typifying the period’s unease with avant-garde expression, reportedly discouraged Coltrane from returning to the UK thereafter.
For Parker, however, such controversy was instructive rather than discouraging. He pursued an aesthetic trajectory that departed almost entirely from the mainstream jazz idiom, seeking instead a form of music grounded in real-time creation, timbral exploration, and structural openness. Now in his eighties, Parker stands as one of the central figures in European free improvisation—a musician who has expanded the parameters of the saxophone and developed a personal idiom of remarkable complexity, coherence, and intensity.
The present recording, captured by Andy Isham on a Marantz cassette from a single stereo mike at a front-row position at the old Vortex Club in London, documents Parker in 1992, accompanied by Paul Rogers (double bass) and Louis Moholo (drums). The recording raises perennial questions about the ontology of improvised music. Some purist commentators have argued that improvisation should remain ephemeral and unrecorded, claiming that the act of preservation undermines its spontaneity. Yet, as this document demonstrates, recording can illuminate rather than diminish the act of creation, revealing the dynamics of interaction and the cumulative logic of improvisation.
Paul Rogers’s contribution here is particularly striking. To describe him merely as a virtuoso is to understate both his technical and conceptual command. His sound is vast, resonant, and deeply rooted in the physicality of the instrument. The tonal depth and harmonic foundation of the performance derive largely from Rogers’s expansive range and his sensitivity to the ensemble texture. Louis Moholo, a drummer of immense stature within both South African and European contexts, contributes with characteristic elasticity: his playing balances moments of percussive force with passages of restraint and acute responsiveness. Whereas with ensembles such as the Brotherhood of Breath he projected visceral rhythmic power, here he shapes the music through understated pulse and tonal colour.
What emerges is music of chamber-like intimacy. Parker and Rogers engage in continuous dialogue, their interactions punctuated and framed by Moholo’s contrapuntal interventions. On “Tebugo,” exchanges between Parker and Rogers ascend through successive climaxes of intensity, while “U-begot” exemplifies the trio’s shared attentiveness and vitality. Rogers’s bass work here is elegant and devoid of rhetorical gesture; Parker’s ebullient playing moves between terse, elliptical phrasing and extended, impassioned bursts. Rogers’s solo in “Tebugo,” alternating between pizzicato and arco, modulates seamlessly into Parker’s entry in a moment of fierce expressive coherence. At times, the sources of sound are indistinguishable—a quality central to the trio’s collective identity and a hallmark of Parker’s ideal of unified improvisational texture.
Andy Isham, who recorded the session, has written that “I’d go as far as to say this is my favourite Evan Parker album.” It might equally be considered a summit of Paul Rogers’s recorded work. The album embodies the joyous exuberance of collective invention and the intellectual rigour of spontaneous form. If it is true, as some purists contend, that jazz and improvised music should be transient and unrecorded, then the existence of this music offers the necessary counterargument. Without it, we would be deprived of a vital instance of musical imagination at its zenith—an artefact that, while preserving the ephemeral, nonetheless affirms the enduring vitality of improvised creation.
