Evan Parker

Featuring: Okkyung Lee, George Lewis, Ned Rothenberg, Ikue Mori, Sam Pluta, Peter Evans

Victo 40th Anniversary Super Sale. "Seven presents a compact, slimmed down, lean version of Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. The expansive, texturally rich music of the septet brings to mind the edgy feel of early free improvisation. Parker's compositional method is simple: "My art of composition consists in choosing the right people and asking them to improvise. The resulting music arises from this sequence of decisions and these are the right people".

It is worth noting that in early free improvisation - say from the period of Topography of the Lungs (Incus 1, July 1970) onward - much of the tension in the music - which is the push-and-pull between known and unknown, cohesion and dissolution - was due to the players' courageous ongoing expansion of instrumental language. But players have pushed language to its virtual tipping point; so that what once sounded outrageous and demanding of innovative responses is now heard as commonplace. So presently, it seems, formal expansions - such as we hear in the collusion of logic differentials in this music - may be more the way forward. It all adds up to exceptionally stimulating music for the listener, at the center of which is an edginess we've long associated with classically great free improvisation."-Henry Kuntz