Creativity Quote by Evan Parker

Parker’s line lands like a polite refusal to join a long-standing jazz habit: treating instruments as ventriloquists for the human voice. He’s pushing back on the idea that the highest compliment you can pay a saxophone is to make it “sing” like a person. For an improviser obsessed with airflow, multiphonics, and the raw physics of sound, that’s not modesty about what instruments can do; it’s a boundary-setting move. The voice already owns the territory of literal speech and sung emotion. Why chase it?

The subtext is aesthetic and political. In free improvisation, “expressive” often gets coded as “vocal,” as if authenticity requires audible traces of the body’s most familiar instrument. Parker flips that: authenticity can be machine-like, alien, pure vibration. His saxophone doesn’t need to borrow human inflection to feel alive; it can build its own grammar from overtones, circular breathing, and unstable timbres that no larynx could safely produce. That’s a claim for instrumental autonomy, but also for a different kind of intimacy: not confessional, not narrative, more like close listening as physical contact.

Context matters. Coming out of the UK’s post-60s improvising scene, Parker is wary of easy sentiment and inherited hierarchies. The wit in “perfectly adequately” is deliberate understatement: he’s puncturing a romantic cliché without grandstanding. The result is a manifesto in miniature: let the voice be the voice, and let instruments speak in the strange, specific ways only they can.