Evan Parker/ Ray Warleigh/ John Edwards/ Tony Marsh
London, Vortex, 22 September 2009

It’s possible to catch a gig by Evan Parker at the Vortex every month thanks to his long-running residency at the club, usually on a Thursday towards the end of the month, which sees him in collaboration with an ever-changing roll call of some of the most compelling improvisers around, frequently musicians with whom he is unfamiliar. Tonight he’s on familiar ground though, both with regular collaborators John Edwards and Marsh and guest Ray Warleigh. He introduces them as “old friends”.

Although the Parker/Edwards/Marsh trio is a solid working unit you won’t have heard them on any recordings since Parker, no doubt wisely, reserves such opportunities for more unusual and/or less readily convened projects such as his Electro-Acoustic or Trans-Atlantic Art Ensembles. Tonight’s show comes hard on the heels of an October residency at The Stone in New York, for which Parker packed twenty concerts, with a shifting roster of collaborators including Bill Laswell and Milford Graves, into sixteen days. A gig like this, which allowed Parker to relax into (in his words) a “less demanding” setting, must have been particularly welcome. The appearance of Warleigh as a guest allowed Parker to take a back seat part of the time, and he sat out altogether at the start of the second set, for which Warleigh switched from alto sax to flute. (Warleigh then attempted to sit out the rest of the set, but Parker handed him his alto saying “oh no…”, making everyone smile.)  Parker, as usual on relatively straightforward dates such as this, played tenor sax exclusively. Anyone here for his trademark flurries of circular breathing on alto would be severely disappointed.

Both Edwards and Ray Warleigh have issued superb solo CDs recently (Warleigh’s “Rue Victor Massé”, Edwards’ “Volume”), so despite their essential differences (Warleigh exhibiting an authoritative directness in contrast to Edwards’s exhaustive inventiveness), I had high hopes for this gig. I was to be somewhat disappointed, for reasons that I’ve perhaps already made obvious: although none of these excellent musicians are ever less than compelling (Edwards was, in fact, on particularly fine, pugnacious form) the sense that they were playing well within their comfort zones was unavoidable and doubtless. For an infrequent gig goer, perhaps a visitor to the capital or someone new to the music, this wouldn’t be a problem; it’s a hard-won comfort after all, and it’s safe to say that anything these guys play is worth hearing.

My main misgiving was that although the presence of Warleigh should have elicited from Marsh and Edwards something other than the expected, particularly during his flute trio feature, this evidently wasn’t going to happen. In duet Marsh and Warleigh have produced music of considerable subtlety, but Marsh seems less responsive to Warleigh with Edwards around, and Edwards does little to vary his own attack. It was nice, though, to hear Parker limit himself to a somewhat gruff take on the Coltrane legacy, generally restricting his phrases to the span of a ?normal’ breath, in order to complement Warleigh’s more lyrical alto which faintly, though soulfully echoed rhythm and blues.

The two saxophonists played together particularly well in the second half of the second set, which was altogether more urgent than was the first, culminating in a knotty sax dialogue before a fierce quartet section. It left this listener, even on this relatively disappointing night, happy that I live close enough to these musician’s ?local’ venue to be able to take events of this quality almost for granted.

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