Time & Perspective Quote by Evan Parker

Memory here arrives the way improvised music does: tentative, revised mid-phrase, circling its own cadence until it finds a landing. Evan Parker isn’t delivering a neat origin story so much as reenacting the conditions he’s describing. The repetitions and hedges ("in the sense", "certainly", "perhaps") aren’t verbal clutter; they’re a musician’s way of being honest about how scenes actually form - not with press-release clarity, but through felt shifts in permission.

The "freer approach" signals a particular moment in postwar British and European improvisation, when players were testing how far they could move away from inherited jazz grammar without losing intensity or coherence. Parker frames that change less as ideology than as a shared problem everyone was "dealing with". That word matters: freedom isn’t posed as liberation-lite, it’s labor. You don’t just exit structure; you negotiate new ones in real time, socially as much as musically.

Then comes "Peter", almost certainly Peter Brötzmann, whose arrival functions as a catalyst. Parker’s careful calibration - "one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact" - suggests how networks of influence get mythologized, and how wary he is of turning a complex emergence into a single spark. Still, he lets the myth stand in a controlled way: "pivotal moment". The final move, "documented there", is the archival wink. Improvised art is famously ephemeral; Parker points to a trace that proves the turning point happened, while acknowledging that the real event was a change in collective appetite - a summer when "free" stopped being an idea and became a practice.