Since last week’s column mentioning La Doña’s new single (the video dropped last week too) I’ve been thinking about the ways that murals both bear witness
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Cisco Bradley
12 February 2021
Bassist, composer, and scene-maker William Parker has a colossal figure in creative music since the 1970s, particularly as a musician who has defined the sound of New York beyond the mainstream. His range is astonishing, but so is his focus. His recorded output is vast, particularly lately.
Shying away from dealing with it all is understandable. Parker’s recordings as a leader exceed 100 albums, with sideman work particularly with Cecil Taylor, Charles Gayle, David S. Ware, and Matthew Shipp easily tripling that figure. How can we begin to grasp it all, particularly when the music ranges from modern jazz to free improvisation, from string quartet to vocal art songs?
A tangle of connections fosters the bounty of William Parker’s career. The bassist who’s released a 10-album set called
Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World that features more than a dozen musicians is New York’s free-jazz caretaker, a performer who frequently forges symbiosis on and off the bandstand. And he’s been doing it for almost 50 years. “It’s the sound community of William Parker,” said vocalist Lisa Sokolov, who first met the bassist in the mid-1970s and appears on the Aum Fidelity box set. “If it wasn’t for William, a whole lot of us would be in really sad shape.