JOHN STEVENS/EVAN PARKER - The Longest Night Vol 2

 

(OG 420)

 

Track listing: 21:25/21:47/22:18/23:12/23:40

 

John Stevens (percussion, cornet and voice), Evan Parker (soprano sax). Recorded at Riverside Studios, London W4 (says the sleeve) or W6 (says me) on 21 December 1976. Released: August 1978. Produced by John Stevens. Sleeve design: Nicolette Amette.

 

I bought Vol 2 first, in September 1978 I think, from 23^rd Precinct Records in Bath Street, Glasgow. If you were coming in from Uddingston on the bus it was the first record shop you hit after leaving Buchanan Street Bus Station, and 23^rd Precinct were really good at getting in records on Ogun, ECM, Black Saint and FMP. Maybe the owner had good contacts.

 

But yes, I bought the second part of The Longest Night first and didn’t fret about not hearing or getting the first part first, so to speak. That was fine because I was fourteen years old and making up my own semi-random library of music, as most teenagers do; you just pick up what you fancy, on the spur of the moment, then work out to your own liking how it all fits together. I wasn’t particularly aware of any critical canons. I bought music that I liked, rather than sternly-packaged lectures (such things did not exist in the late seventies. Even Lenny Kaye’s notes to Nuggets indicated that this music was supposed to be fun, and were informative without bashing you over the cranium with “knowledge”).

 

I even brought The Longest Night Vol 2 to music class at school. You can (a) imagine the general reaction and (b) assume that was why I never had a girlfriend (that assumption was wrong; I was not actually allowed to have girlfriends when I was at school, not that many came running to apply for the vacancy. A lot of them pretended they were in love with me just to wind me up, and if anything that was more hurtful. The one girl I did like was friendly but not interested. Quite right too).

 

Our music teacher, who was a young woman just out of teacher training college called Miss Muir, declared that the music on this record was the strangest she’d ever heard, with the possible exception of Stockhausen (I occasionally, i.e. every twenty years or so, wonder what became of Miss Muir; she had to put up with a lot of nonsense – nothing dodgy, just standard teenage nonsense - from the BOYS in our music class – yes, these classes were gender-divided). I realised that my musical path was likely to become long and lonely.

 

Anyway, WHAT ABOUT THE MUSIC CARLIN well OK. Listened to in sequence, as I have just done, it’s easy to grasp that throughout Vol 1 of The Longest Night, Stevens and Parker were working at re-establishing a fruitful musical relationship with each other, trying things out, seeing what works and extending the latter. I robotically thought of Vol 2 as comprising “The Shorts” as opposed to “The Longs” but in fact it contains three relatively short improvisations on its first side and two rather longer ones on its second.

 

Having established a common improvisatory language on the first volume, the two musicians then set about honing it on the second, and we do get a clearer idea of their basic template – so much so that my hooting classroom “peers” snickered that all the tracks sounded the same. Even the distinguished Max Harrison (or so I thought at the time – I now find it impossible to read A Jazz Retrospect and not imagine it being narrated in the voice of Alan Green), reviewing this record in Melody Maker, came to a similar conclusion.

 

I’d say that only two of these five tracks – the first two - sound roughly the same. In each, Parker begins with a solemn, wailing, almost bluesy tone on his saxophone, and there is even a rough melodic and harmonic structure. Stevens bides his time ticking behind Parker until he leans on one of his two hi-hats and begins to make the music busier, upon which Parker speeds up and we go into the expected pointillistic ululating.

 

This is all very well and good but, presumably in order to avoid getting stuck in an improvisatory rut (and, given the timings of the tracks – the titles indicate the time when each begins – probably after a refreshing coffee or brandy), the duo then alter their tactics; in “22:18” the pace is initially slower and more contemplative, but the music then naturally gains intensity and, particularly when Stevens lays into his for-kids snare drum, becomes very febrile – Parker’s blowing becomes especially garrulous – to a point where we could almost be listening to a mid-sixties Interstellar Space-style old-school free jazz blowout.

 

On side two, “23:12” develops these same dynamics with greater patience but, finally, far severer attack and purpose, though manages to retain a fairly advanced but constant harmonic structure. This performance demonstrates just how good free improvisation can be when it’s done by people who know what they’re doing and have learned all the rules so they know when and how to break them. It climaxes, after a cyclical soprano atop sinister ride cymbal hiss, when Stevens switches to cornet and the two enjoy a good, cathartic howl, culminating in a slightly ironic and melancholy fanfare.

 

Yet the most sublime of these five performances is the fifth and last one. “23:40” is quite different from the other four and is the one that leads you to think that Stevens and Parker have now devised a new way of improvising. It commences with a two-part drone, or possibly pibroch, as Parker’s nagging circular-breathing two-note refrain hovers over Stevens’ very low cornet grunt like a bee getting caught in a pair of bagpipes. As this breaks, Parker’s soprano reaches higher than it has done elsewhere on the record – here is where his playing really begins to resemble birdsong (which makes him a link, missing or overlooked, between Coltrane and Messiaen). At so many points does this improvisation, as Harrison put it, hover deliciously on the verge of non-existence (I think that’s what old Max said, anyway). This is all about atoms, crystallisation and pointillistic peripheries. Once again the improvising works up towards a moderately dynamic climax until, with a final and abrupt unison upward reel of soprano and snare drum, that’s quite enough, our new musical language has now been established, and it’s now the 22^nd of December, after midnight and Christ Evan I’m knackered, think I’ll ring for a cab back to South Ealing. It’s just tremendous listening; those were my thoughts in 1978, and so they remain today.

 

Current availability: Reissued on the 2-CD compilation, Corner To Corner + The Longest Night, incorporating the contents of OG 120, OG 420 and OGCD 005, in 2007, and which was released on download in May 2021.