Alan Silva / Evan Parker / Roger Turner

Event information

Alan Silva is perhaps best known for his inventive contributions to seminal free jazz recordings by Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sunny Murray and his two LPs as a leader of the Celestrial Communication Orchestra for BYG/Actuel. Resident in Paris since 1970, Silva has remained a key player in the European Free Music scene. Since the early nineties he has primarily played electronic keyboards notably in the Tradition Trio with Johannes Bauer and British drummer Roger Turner who joins Silva for both nights of this residency. On the first night Silva will play both Bass and Keyboards in a trio with Evan Parker and Turner and on the second night the two will form a quartet with Pat Thomas on Piano and Electronics and Steve Williamson on saxophones.

ALAN SILVA / keyboards, double bass

Alan Silva grew up in Harlem, playing piano and drums. He studied with James P. Johnson, Scott Joplin and later trumpet with Donald Byrd and musicology at Columbia with Alan Lomax before picking up the bass. A participant in the 'October Revolution' and a key member of the Jazz Composers Guild with Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon, Silva has performed with most of the greats of free jazz including Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Sunny Murray, Archie Shepp, Dave Burrell, Jimmy Lyons, Francois Tusques, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Bill Dixon, Franz Koglmann, Andrew Hill and Alexander von Schlippenbach.

He has been resident in paris since 1970 and has issued several LPs as a leader including the two with the Celestrial Communication Orchestra for BYG Actuel. In the late 80s/early 90s he has primarily focussed on the synthesiser as an instrument and his wildly creative approach to it has continued his legacy of unimpeded creativity and imagination.

"Some of silva’s comping is outrageous: simultaneously correct and crazy. Trombonist bauer supplies the dark, weighty notes for the bottom end. Turner’s agility on percussion is legendary: he locks with Silva into a feisty, supermodern, helter-skelter groove." - Hi-Fi News on The Tradition Trio

Silva's association with Roger Turner goes back to their first meeting in Paris at the institut art culture perception (IACP) after Turner was invited to give two week-long workshops there by didier petit in 1984 and 1985. They've worked together since including U.S. and European tours with The Tradition Trio (with Johannes Bauer) and also with trumpeter Roy Campbell and as a duo.

ROGER TURNER / drums, percussion

Roger Turner is applauded for his precision and speed since he entered the London improvising scene in the 1970s. His restricted drum kit is extended by found objects to create a sound comparable to no other. He’s played with Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Otomo Yoshihide, Shelley Hirsch, Joëlle Léandre, Keith Rowe...

“Turner [used] brushes to create a wild spattering and scattering of sound from cymbal and snare, with sudden explosions from tom and kick drums. At times in this early passage he sounded like rain on a caravan roof, at others like a tool box in the back of a moving van” - Molloy Woodcraft, The Guardian

EVAN PARKER / saxophones

Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
"ln The Human Province, Elias Canetti writes "lt is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough." In Evan Parker's music, thought and breath are continuous, each the instrument and measure of the other." Stuart Broomer, Coda 1995
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.