"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.

Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time. Parker's first solo recordings, made in 1974, were reissued on the Saxophone Solos CD in 1995; more recent examples are Conic Sections and Process and Reality, on the latter of which he does, for the first time, experiment with multi-tracking. Heard alone on stage, few would disagree with writer Steve Lake that "There is, still, nothing else in music - jazz or otherwise - that remotely resembles an Evan Parker solo concert."

While free improvisation has been Parker's main area of activity over the last three decades, he has also found time for other musical pursuits: he has played in 'popular' contexts with Annette Peacock, Scott Walker and the Charlie Watts big band; he has performed notated pieces by Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman and Frederic Rzewski; he has written knowledgeably about various ethnic musics in Resonance magazine. A relatively new field of interest for Parker is improvising with live electronics, a dialogue he first documented on the 1990 Hall of Mirrors CD with Walter Prati. Later experiments with electronics in the context of larger ensembles have included the Synergetics - Phonomanie III project at Ullrichsberg in 1993 and concerts by the new EP2 (Evan Parker Electronic Project) in Berlin, Nancy and at the 1995 Stockholm Electronic Music Festival where Parker's regular trio improvised with real-time electronics processed by Prati, Marco Vecchi and Phillip Wachsmann. "Each of the acoustic instrumentalists has an electronic 'shadow' who tracks him and feeds a modified version of his output back to the real-time flow of the music."

The late 80s and 90s brought Parker the chance to play with some of his early heroes. He worked with Cecil Taylor in small and large groups, played with Coltrane percussionist Rashied Ali, recorded with Paul Bley: he also played a solo set as support to Ornette Coleman when Skies of America received its UK premiere in 1988. The same period found Parker renewing his acquaintance with American colleagues such as Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and George Lewis, with all of whom he had played in the 1970s (often in the context of London's Company festivals). His 1993 duo concert with Braxton moved John Fordham in The Guardian to raptures over "saxophone improvisation of an intensity, virtuosity, drama and balance to tax the memory for comparison".

Parker's 50th birthday in 1994 brought celebratory concerts in several cities, including London, New York and Chicago. The London performance, featuring the Parker and Schlippenbach trios, was issued on a highly-acclaimed two-CD set, while participants at the American concerts included various old friends as well as more recent collaborators in Borah Bergman and Joe Lovano. The NYC radio station WKCR marked the occasion by playing five days of Parker recordings. 1994 also saw the publication of the Evan Parker Discography, compiled by ltalian writer Francesco Martinelli, plus chapters on Parker in books on contemporary musics by John Corbett and Graham Lock.

Parker's future plans involve exploring further possibilities in electronics and the development of his solo music. They also depend to a large degree on continuity of the trios, of the large ensembles, of his more occasional yet still long-standing associations with that pool of musicians to whose work he remains attracted. This attraction, he explained to Coda's Laurence Svirchev, is attributable to "the personal quality of an individual voice". The players to whom he is drawn "have a language which is coherent, that is, you know who the participants are. At the same time, their language is flexible enough that they can make sense of playing with each other ... l like people who can do that, who have an intensity of purpose." "

"Paul Lytton (born 8 March 1947, London) is an English free jazz percussionist.

Lytton began on drums at age 16. He played jazz in London in the late 1960s while taking lessons on the tabla from P.R. Desai. In 1969 he began experimenting with free improvisational music, working in a duo with saxophonist Evan Parker. After adding bassist Barry Guy, the ensemble became the Evan Parker Trio. He and Parker continued to work together into the 2000s; more recent releases include trio releases with Marilyn Crispell in 1996 (Natives and Aliens) and 1999 (After Appleby).

A founding member of the London Musicians Collective, Lytton worked extensively on the London free improvisation scene in the 1970s, and aided Paul Lovens in the foundation of the Aachen Musicians' Cooperative in 1976.

Lytton has toured North America and Japan both solo and with improvisational ensembles. In 1999, he toured with Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler, and recorded with Vandermark on English Suites. Lytton also collaborated with Jeffrey Morgan (alto & tenor saxophone), with whom he recorded the CD "Terra Incognita" Live in Cologne, Germany.

He played also on White Noise's pioneer electronic pop music album An Electric Storm in 1969."

"Richard Barrett (Swansea, 1959) is internationally active as composer and performer, and also teaches at the Institute of Sonology in Den Haag. In December 2020 he was appointed to a new professorship in Research in Creative Music at the University of Leiden. His work encompasses a range from free improvisation to intricately-notated scores, and from acoustic chamber music to innovative uses of digital technology. Current projects include a major new cycle of works for the ELISION Ensemble, with whom Richard Barrett has been working regularly since 1990, and for the Chicago-based Fonema Consort. Ongoing performative collaborations include with Paul Obermayer (in FURT), Evan Parker, and several other improvising ensembles such as SKEIN (with Achim Kaufmann, Frank Gratkowski, Wilbert de Joode and others) and Colophony (with Jon Rose and Meinrad Kneer). Richard Barrett's principal composition teacher was Peter Wiegold, and he currently resides in Belgrade. His work as composer and performer is documented on over forty CDs, including seven discs devoted to his compositions and nine by FURT. In October 2020 he set up the digital label STRANGE STRINGS together with harpist Milana Zarić. His book Music of Possibility was published by Vision Edition in 2019."

"After graduating from the Birmingham Conservatoire's BMus(Hons) Jazz course with first class honours, I received a scholarship to study on the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program at the New School University, New York City. During my time living in New York I performed with ensembles including The Duke Ellington Orchestra at Birdland, The Coltrane ensemble and the Rene Marie Big Band at Town Hall, and with Matt Brewer and Tommy Crane at The Knitting Factory.

I am now working as a freelance Jazz musician/composer/arranger/recording artist (Trumpet/Double Bass) Since 2005 I have been lecturing in Jazz at the Birmingham Conservatoire senior and junior departments, I also have a roles as director of the National Youth Jazz Wales, tutor for National Youth Jazz Orchestra of Scotland/National Youth Jazz Collective, music for youth mentor and improvisation clinician for Wales Music Teachers Federation.

I am also the artistic co-director of Harmonic Festival, producing and promoting two successful and adventurous jazz festivals in Birmingham in recent years.

I have featured in a number of performances aired on BBC Radio's Jazz on Three including live concerts with Alex Hawkins, Peter Evans, Paul Dunmall, Elliott Sharpe and a number of radio and televised concerts with the WDR Radio Big Band, Koln. I was a featured in Jazzwise magazine's 'Taking Off' interview. Recent musical highlights include performing Gil Evans Sketches of Spain with the Birmingham Conservatoire Jazz Orchestra and playing Trumpet for Evan Parker's 70th birthday celebration, Kings Place.

Some of the most prominent artists I have performed and recorded with include:

Claudia Quintet, Food with Thomas Stronen/Iain Ballamy, Bill Frissell, Paul Dunmall, Peter Evans, Jon Irabagon, Hans Koller, Dan Weiss, Matt Brewer, Michael Gibbs, Thomas Morgan, John Hollenbeck, Mark Dresser, Victor Bailey, Drew Gress, Ben Monder, Phil Woods, Claudio Roditi, Jeff Williams, Chris Speed, Matt Mitchell, Evan Parker, Jakob Bro, Elliott Sharpe, Vince Mendoza, Peter Erskine, Django Bates, Steve Swallow, Chris Potter, John O'gallagher, Gerald Clayton, John Clayton, Dave Liebman, Dave Holland and Norma Winstone.

For the past twelve months, I have also been a Jazzlines/Jerwood Foundation fellow, hosted at Town Hall-Symphony Hall Birmingham. This has allowed me to compose a new work written for octet and eight-voice choir - 'Far Reaching Dreams of Mortal Souls' - based on speeches and associated works of iconic figures through history. This will premiere in October, where I will perform alongside Julian Arguelles, Paul Clarvis, Hans Koller, Michael Janisch, James Allsop, Jim Rattigan plus choir.

I hold honorary membership (Hons BC) to the Birmingham Conservatoire in recognition of services to music."

"Mark Nauseef (born June 11, 1953), in Cortland, New York, is a drummer and percussionist who has enjoyed a varied career, ranging from rock music during the 1970s with his time as a member of the Ian Gillan Band and, temporarily, Thin Lizzy, to a wide range of musical styles in more recent times, playing with many notable musicians from all over the world.

Nauseef briefly toured the United Kingdom in 1972 as tour member of The Velvet Underground before joining Elf, fronted by Ronnie James Dio, in early 1975, but the group disbanded shortly afterwards. Accompanied by Elf keyboardist Mickey Lee Soule, Nauseef joined ex-Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan in his new jazz fusion group, simply named the Ian Gillan Band. After three albums, Gillan broke the group up in 1978. Nauseef stood in for Thin Lizzy drummer Brian Downey for two international tours, then joined Gary Moore's short-lived band G-Force.

During the 1980s, Nauseef moved away from rock music towards a wide range of styles, including Javanese and Balinese gamelan, as well as music of Indian and Ghanaian origin. He has released several solo albums and worked with many other musicians in an array of different projects.

Nauseef has performed and/or recorded with such artists as Joachim Kühn, Gary Moore, Jack Bruce, Bill Laswell, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Trilok Gurtu, Steve Swallow, L. Shankar, Hamza El Din, The Velvet Underground, Joëlle Léandre, Ikue Mori, Ronnie James Dio, Markus Stockhausen, Kyai Kunbul (Javanese Gamelan), Andy Summers, Tony Oxley, Tomasz Stanko, Kenny Wheeler, Edward Vesala's "Sound and Fury", Thelma Houston, David Torn, The Ladzekpo Brothers (Ghanaian music and dance), Charlie Mariano, The Gamelan Orchestra of Saba (Balinese Gamelan), Kudsi Erguner, Philip Lynott, George Lewis, Evan Parker and Lou Harrison. Throughout most of these projects Nauseef has collaborated with Walter Quintus.

Nauseef attended the California Institute of the Arts where he studied Javanese Gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat, Balinese Gamelan with I Nyoman Wenten, North Indian Pakhawaj drumming with Pandit Taranath Rao, North Indian music theory with Pandit Amiya Dasgupta, Ghanaian drumming and dance with Kobla and Alfred Ladzekpo, Dzidzorgbe Lawluvi and C.K. Ganyo, and 20th Century Western percussion techniques and hand drumming with John Bergamo. He also studied frame drum techniques of the Middle East, India and the Caucasus with Glen Velez. It was also at CalArts that Nauseef began a very creative and productive relationship, which continues to this day, with musical "alter ego", guitarist Miroslav Tadic. Together, they have composed, recorded and produced a wide range of music in situations from duo to large ensembles with musicians from around the world.-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nauseef)
11/20/2024

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"Composer / musician / producer - piano, organ, voice, electronics,Sound/Text/Image Real-Time Composer, Doctor of Philosophy In Fine Arts in Musical Performance and Interpretation, University of Gothenburg, 2013

Cooperation with musicians/composers including Emil Strandberg, Paal Nilssen-Love, Sverrir Gudjonsson, Johan Berthling, Evan Parker, Sven-Åke Johansson, Chris Cutler, Mats Persson, Sofia Jernberg, Carl-Axel Dominique, Mats Gustafsson, Nina de Heney and Raymond Strid. Music Inside the Language was winner of Contemporary Sound in 2011 of the Journal Contemporary Music. Music and visual arts, including Bo Samuelsson, Katarina Eismann, Inger Arvidsson. Music and dance, including Jukka Korpi, Ingrid Olterman, Bo Arenander, Anne Külper. Music and Drama including Fredrik Nyberg, Magnus Florin, Magnus Jacobsson, Willy Kyrklund, Karl Dunér, Rolf Skoglund, Peter Oskarson, Stina Ekblad and Jörgen Gassilewski.

Sten Sandell was awarded the Royal Academy of Music's Jazz Award in 2012 with the motivation: "The pianist Sten Sandell is one of Swedish improvised music's most brilliant, captivating and independent voices. His musical activities are characterized by a strong artistic integrity, and he has with great consistency developed a characteristic aesthetic attitude that inspires countless musicians. " "

"Adam Linson (born 1975 in Los Angeles) is active internationally as a double bassist, improvisor, and composer, who performs acoustically and with live electronics, solo and in a wide variety of ensembles. He can be heard on several critically acclaimed albums, which also feature the real-time interactive computer music systems that he designs and develops. He is also a scholar whose interdisciplinary research on improvisation uniquely combines the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology. His publications focus on perception, cognition, and interaction, and span a range of topics in philosophy, cognitive science, music psychology, and artificial intelligence/robotics.

He recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, conducting interdisciplinary research on the common cognitive basis of improvisation across domains. In 2014-15, he was a Research Associate at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music, where he was formerly a CMPCP Visiting Fellow. He completed his PhD (Open University, UK) using artificial intelligence and robotics to investigate cognition in collaborative improvisation, funded by the Centre for Research in Computing. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Music/Sound (Bard College), and a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, where he also studied composed and improvised music under George Lewis and classical double bass under Bertram Turetzky. His extensive experience as a software engineer and GNU/Linux specialist ranges from large-scale distributed architectures to embedded systems.

Linson's sustained involvement with interactive computer music is documented on albums with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in 2004 (ECM); solo double bass and electronics in 2006 (psi); a 2007 duet with Lawrence Casserley, released in 2009 (psi); the John Butcher Group in 2008 (WoW); and a January 2008 recording, released in 2011 (psi), with Axel Dörner, Paul Lytton, and Rudi Mahall, collectively known as Systems Quartet. In February 2012, the premier performance of his piece Looms (for improvisors and 16-channel spherical diffusion) was given with Evan Parker on soprano saxophone and Linson on double bass, at the Electric Spring festival in Huddersfield (UK).

Notable acoustic guest performances include concerts in Paris and Brussels as part of the Evan Parker Trio with Paul Lytton, and in Berlin with the Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio featuring Parker and Paul Lovens. In addition to collaborations with numerous improvisors in groups of various sizes, he has performed in duets with Richard Barrett, Tom Blancarte, Lawrence Casserley, Peter Evans, Owen Green, Aleks Kolkowski, Okkyung Lee, Rudi Mahall, Jon Rose, John Russell, Joel Ryan, and Nate Wooley.

From 1999-2009 he was based in Berlin, Germany, where he began many continuing musical collaborations with distinguished improvisors. In 2004 and 2008, he was an artist-in-residence at the Studio voor Elektro-Instrumentale Muziek (STEIM), Amsterdam. His compositions for chamber ensembles and contemporary dance productions have been performed in Europe and North America, and his performances and recordings have been broadcast on US and international radio, including BBC Radio 3 (UK) and SWR (Germany).

Selected past festival performances include the Glasgow Jazz Festival (2015), with Evan Parker & the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra; GIOfest VII, Glasgow (2014), with the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, the London Jazz Festival (2013) with John Russell's Quaqua Ensemble; Banlieues Bleues, Paris (2012) in a sextet with Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Mark Nauseef, Matt Wright, and Toma Gouband; Freedom of the City, London (2011) in a duet with Lawrence Casserley, an octet with Evan Parker, and with the London Improvisors Orchestra; the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) with the LFO Orchestra (2010), the John Butcher Group (2008), and solo double bass and electronics (2006); the Guelph Jazz Festival (Canada, 2010) on solo double bass and electronics; the London Jazz Festival (2009) with Lawrence Casserley; the Total Music Meeting in Berlin (2008) in a quartet with Evan Parker, Peter Evans, and Richard Barrett, and a quintet with Fred van Hove, John Edwards, Louis Moholo-Moholo, and Tomek Choloniewski; and the MusikTriennale in Cologne (2007), with the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble.

Linson is currently based in the UK."