The Moment's Energy
| The Moment's Energy | ||||
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| Studio album by Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble | ||||
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Publication |
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| Label (s) | Edition of Contemporary Music | |||
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Format (s) |
CD |
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Title (number) |
8th |
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running time |
66:55 |
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Location (s) |
Lawrence Batley Theater in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire |
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The Moment's Energy is the fifth music album by the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. It was recorded in November 2007 at the Lawrence Batley Theater, Huddersfield and released on ECM in 2009 .
The album
After Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble , which was formed in the 1990s, had grown to eleven members in the previous project The Eleventh Hour (2005), The Moment's Energy was recorded with a 14-member ensemble. There were also Peter Evans (trumpet), Ned Rothenberg (clarinet, shakuhachi) and the shō player Ko Ishikawa.
The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival commissioned Evan Parker to write a composition for the festival. This 62-minute title piece, divided into seven sections in the form of a suite, “expands the concept of a live recording”; only part of the published musical work was recorded at the Lawrence Batley Theater in Huddersfield ( The Moment's Energy Part IV and the final number Incandescent Clouds ); the rest of the recordings were recorded during the previous rehearsals and post-processed in the studio . In this context, post-production played an important role. According to John Kelman, this creates a new meaning for the concept of composition, whereby what was heard at the concert is not the same as what is finally heard on the record, but still comes from the same conceptual sphere.
Evan Parker himself commented on the way he works in an interview:
- There's a part of me that would love to go in there play for an hour and see what happens, but you enter into a contract with the record company, the promoter, and yourself to try to be on top of things and not just hope for the best. There are still many situations where open, unrestricted improvising is my first choice, and there is a considerable part of The Moment's Energy which is made that way, and those parts are embedded into more formal structuring elements as well. That seems to be the way I work with that band. It doesn't get together enough to just go out there and see what happens. We did it once as an encore in Cologne and it worked fine ... but when you've got the whole concert to play, you need a way of making sure that development and variation happens.
Different combinations of musicians were used in each lower part of the suite in order to bring variation to the different sound surfaces. So in Part 1 Agustí Fernández (piano), Evan Parker (soprano saxophone) and Philipp Wachsmann (violin) have solo parts, in Part 2 Ned Rothenberg's bass clarinet. After the soundscapes of Part 3 , Ko Ishikawa plays the Shō in Part 4 . Part 7 brings the whole ensemble together for the finale; the subsequent Incandescent Clouds electronically summarizes the preceding musically.
The title names The Moment's Energy and Incandescent Clouds come from Father Reason by Rumi and Under The Pot by Robert Graves .
Evan Parker received the 2008 Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composition for the music on The Moment's Energy album .
Track list
- Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble: The Moment's Energy (ECM 2066, ECM 177 4798)
- I 9:29
- II 9:45
- III 9:34
- IV 4:19
- V 9:23
- VI 8:11
- VII 11:14
- Incandescent Clouds 5:05
reception
In All About Jazz, John Kelman praised the “careful balance between acoustic instrumentation and electronics, sampling and processing” and mentions in this context the growth of the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble in terms of its members and its stylistic range of sextets ( Toward the Margins ECM, 1997 ) to a 14-person ensemble, especially with regard to Rothenberg's percussive way of playing, Agustí Fernández playing on the prepared piano and Evan Parker's remarkable playing with circular breathing and its incredible leaps in intervals. As a result, this is “an album both with greater density and greater delimitation”, it is also “one of the most ambitious mixtures of form and freedom as well as of existing and newly invented [sound] textures.” With the collective improvisations , Evans' approach to composition emerged nonetheless "A well-thought-out and structured piece - even if conventional features such as melody and pulse are missing". This work ranges from harsh dissonance and relentless effort to an ethereal atmosphere and sparse timbres. Although The Moment's Energy has a less clear structure compared to Parker's Boustrophedon (ECM, 2008), it is the more remarkable work. "A composition that cannot be played a second time, its careful sound construction in real time and the post-production make it an ambitious attempt of great force and exciting subtlety."
John Fordham said in the Guardian that although the album might be less tailored to jazz fans than Evans' collaboration with Roscoe Mitchell in 2007, new trumpeter Peter Evans brings something of a free Miles Davis sound to the eerie atmosphere of Part IV (the Live recording) and in Part V Agustí Fernández brings a nervousness reminiscent of Cecil Taylor into it. In Part VI Phil Wachsmann and Barry Guy carry out a “fiery debate” over Paul Lytton's intense percussion and the “orchestral resources of the group are realized in Part VII with Parker's soprano saxophone accent in wide brass sounds ”.
Thom Jurek gave the album the second highest rating of four stars in Allmusic and emphasized that it was fascinating to listen to the paths in which Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble had developed over the past 13 years. What immediately noticeable about The Moment's Energy is how strongly the piece is formally constructed. However, that does not mean that there is no improvisation - but the importance of composing in the context of the whole is much more important. Parker's compositional method makes this work more of a modern composition than free or experimental jazz. This is "a great work if you take it as a whole, a musical journey through multidimensional landscapes and sonic shadows in which time is extended."
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Review of Thom Jurek 's album The Moment's Energy on Allmusic (English). Retrieved December 28, 2013.
- ^ A b c Review of John Kelman (2009) in All About Jazz
- ↑ Interview with Evan Parker in Chicago Reader
- ↑ a b Review of John Fordham's album (2009) in The Guardian
- ↑ Album portrait at ECM
- ↑ Discographic information at Discogs