Politics & Power Quote by Evan Parker

Parker’s sentence is a small masterclass in how musicians talk when they’re trying not to mythologize themselves, even as the myth creeps in anyway. He doesn’t say “I discovered” or “we unearthed.” He routes the story through institutions and intermediaries: the National Sound Archive, a named staffer, a director. It’s bureaucratic language doing cultural work, turning what could be a romantic tale of lost music into a chain of custody.

That’s the subtext: in improvising scenes like Parker’s, history often survives not because anyone planned a legacy, but because a few obsessed people inside quiet institutions decide it matters. “There’s a character” is affectionate and telling. Paul Wilson isn’t presented as an authority figure; he’s a personality, a type every music culture knows - the archivist-as-true-believer, the person whose “special interest” becomes a kind of moral force. Parker’s choice of phrase credits fandom and vigilance, not celebrity.

The context here is the fragile afterlife of recorded sound, especially in fringe or experimental music where documentation is spotty and narratives get built from scraps. By mentioning “the existence of these tapes,” Parker emphasizes how close cultural memory comes to simply not existing. The tapes aren’t just artifacts; they’re permission slips for a history to be told, reissued, debated, and reabsorbed.

It’s also a subtle redistribution of authorship. Parker, a towering improviser, shifts attention to the infrastructure that makes listening possible later. The real drama isn’t the performance - it’s that someone bothered to remember where the box was.