Derek Bailey & Evan Parker - The London Concert

Psi 05.01

Few rifts in improvised music have been as lasting as that between Evan Parker and Derek Bailey. The reality that the catalyst of mutual estrangement is decades past raises doubts as to whether either man even remembers its particulars. Their row may have robbed listeners of recent meetings, but consolation lies in several concerts the duo recorded before their split. As Parker succinctly puts it in the notes to The London Concert: “when I resigned as a director of Incus Records in 1987, I took with me the tapes and the rights in all my recordings for that label. Since we had recorded two duo albums, we agreed to take one each.”

Martin Davidson’s notes expertly toe the line of neutrality, describing the summary details of the London event in dry, poker-faced prose that leaves his loyalties to both camps unscathed. Parker plays soprano for the first half, tenor for the second. Bailey sticks predominantly to a two-speaker stereo guitar set up enhanced by his customary volume pedals. The exception arises in his solo section of the second half where he straps on a custom-built 19-string acoustic, a spindly contraption that sounds like a fork-tined zither.

Recording clarity remains quite clean and close for much of the duration with Bailey’s shimmering tonal icicles well-preserved alongside Parker’s striated lineaments. Bailey’s ability to shape sound collages that are at once brusque and spiny and yet oddly lyrical fits with his partners’ similarly penetrating temperament. Parker isn’t one to mince notes or tones either. His sharply suspirating soprano sorties draw blood just as easily as Bailey’s taloned plectrum. Tenor proves just as petulant. Parker voices percussive reed stutters and trills that match the unstable angularity of Bailey’s own fervently-percolating patterns.

Playing it straight or orthodox simply isn’t a viable option, though the Parker’s elongated tones toward the middle of the segment marked “Part I” hint at the outlines of parabolic melody. Bailey answers with ricocheting echoes that whir with the voltage of livewire electricity. The brittle fracas reaches an apex as the pair burrow into the figurative innards of their respective implements, Parker breathing acidic recycling gusts and Bailey abrading his strings and frets with hard-pecking gesticulations. Parker’s supreme level of embouchure control is often such that slaps to the forehead in awed disbelief are frequent. His “Second Half” solo salvo deploys with enough force to punch pneumatic holes in the ceiling tiles of Wigmore Hall and leaves the impression that attendees were brushing heavy layers of plaster dust off their pates by the end of the performance.

Despite the hard-won congruence of their respective vernaculars, it’s also evident that interpersonal tension was cardinal tinder for the creative spark. There’s deep listening going on, but neither man seems willing to cede too much of in the way of sympathetic niceties. And so they barrel forward together, tumbling and tangling in a tandem that remains engrossing from start to finish even as it eschews easy exposition.

Also of note in the all too finite Bailey-Parker folio is Arch Duo, a Berkeley studio date taped in October of 1980 that is a notch below this one, but still stocked with plenty of bracing tête-à-tête. I haven’t yet heard Compatibles, the Incus duo recording in Bailey’s possession taped ten years after its sibling. If it’s even close to on par with this earlier outing I’m putting it onto my shortlist of “must procures.”

~ Derek Taylor