The gentle humor of this album's title also speaks to the roaring and multi-charactered improvisations within. There is simply no overestimating the importance of this reissue, indeed of this album. Originally recorded in 1978, it was Evan Parker's 2nd solo saxophone disc, one of a remarkable series of recordings that span his career and serve as a catalog of his melodic and timbral innovations.
Parker threw down the proverbial gauntlet on the first part of this four-section behemoth, creating, in a mammoth twenty-one minute stroke, the blueprint for so much of his ensuing work on circular breathing and the continuous melodies possible because of it. That said, revisiting Monoceros demonstrates a wider registral pallet than would inform later studio and concert recordings. Here, it is almost as if the atomistic and laminar dichotomy Parker would outline in his influential 1980 AMM/SME lecture were presented in sonic premonition, Parker's soprano saxophone embodying an entire orchestra. Upper register melodies, nearly "romantic" in their scope and implied arpeggiated harmonies, while in the lower register, the pointillist atoms provide a kind of melodic foundation, a natural counterpoint to the swirling and shifting tonal centers above. Meanwhile. Repetitions provide anchor and focus, so that when the lower-register points and atoms become fewer in the second half, the music takes on shades of modality. Many years after I first encountered it, this first part is still shocking in its balance of unity and diversity, as much a tone poem for the soprano saxophone as the perfect solo.
There is no convenient or instructive way to describe the rest of the album save, unhelpfully, that the whirlwind elements of "Part 1" are disassembled and reconfigured, offered at various speeds and dynamic levels. Whether in terms of articulation, register or dynamic augmentation or diminution, the following three parts seem more serial in presentation. Topoi emerge and disappear only to resurface later in the disc. If Parts 2 and 4 are somewhat similar, there is very little precedent for the opening pops and squalls of "Part 3," except possibly for the pointillism in the first part. Whatever devices are in play throughout, what emerges is a sense of unleashed power and spontaneity akin to Celine's three-dotted prose at it's finest, or to the best work of the Beat poets. The sound has always been excellent, and this reissue's sonics are full and present. For anyone who has never encountered this landmark of solo improvisation, it will bring endless amounts of pleasure and intrigue to those prepared to listen.
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