Creativity Quote by Evan Parker

Parker’s line reads like a mission statement for a musician who treats the saxophone less as a vehicle for “songs” and more as an engine for discovery. The repeated “looking” isn’t indecision; it’s a discipline. He frames the instrument as a “resource,” a word that quietly rejects the romantic myth of inspiration. This is work: extraction, refinement, expansion.

The key verb is “exploit,” which can sound ruthless, even industrial. In Parker’s hands it signals a refusal to be polite with tradition. The subtext is a critique of how instruments get culturally fenced in: the saxophone as jazz signifier, as rock garnish, as a particular kind of masculinity, as a predetermined tone. Parker’s free improvisation career is built on breaking those fences through techniques that turn breath into architecture - multiphonics, circular breathing, split tones, rapid-fire harmonics that make one horn behave like several at once. When he says he wants the “fullest range…be known,” he’s not just talking about notes. He’s talking about what counts as legitimate sound.

Context matters: postwar European improvisation often positioned itself both in conversation with African American jazz innovation and in resistance to becoming a museum of imported styles. Parker’s phrasing claims agency without claiming ownership. The saxophone’s “unique set of possibilities” becomes an ethical stance: listen harder, assume less, let the instrument argue back. It’s a democratic idea of virtuosity - not domination for its own sake, but a widening of the audible world.