It’s traditional for bassists to provide the ballast in standard jazz ensembles, but for 30 years bassist William Parker has been doing something more—he’s been providing the ballast, keel and rudder for virtually an entire jazz movement.

With his roots in the 1960s avant-garde —Parker studied with Jimmy Garrison and Wilbur Ware, of the John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk groups, respectively—Parker went on to the New York City loft scene of the 1970s, and then spent the 1980s working with the Cecil Taylor Unit. Since then he’s led a number of critically acclaimed groups—his 2005 CD Sound Unity (Aum Fidelity) even showed up on Amazon’s “Top 100 Editor’s Picks”—and has found time to sit in with everyone from polyrhythmic drummer Rashied Ali to roving improviser John Zorn. He is, according to the Village Voice, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.”

Virtuosity aside, however, Parker’s spirit is perhaps even more important than his impeccable jazz credentials. Offering a vision of jazz as a music that can encompass everything from political revolution to spiritual transcendence, Parker has become a touchstone in the new music scene, lending his talents to literally hundreds of albums, and bringing his gentle, bear-like presence to perhaps thousands of performances.

This Friday and Saturday, Parker will bring both his virtuosity and his spirit to Hallwalls for two nights of performances with the 30-piece Buffalo Orchestra—a one-time-only assemblage of local musicians recruited specifically for this event. Ranging from established players like Rey Scott, John Bacon and Greg Piontek to dozens of younger players, the ensemble has spent the past week in a series of intensive nightly workshops with Parker in preparation for the concerts.

According to Hallwalls, Parker arrived with some charts written out, but—not surprisingly—he has been approaching the residency and performances in his usual improvisational mode, making decisions on the spur of the moment based on the abilities and the instrumentation of the players involved. With 30 musicians—as well as local theater and dance groups like Skeletons in the Closet—both evenings promise the sort of transitory joy that is jazz at its best and most elusive. Other than that, though, it’s hard to make predictions. “There’s no such thing as music police,” Parker has been quoted as saying. “Everything is valid.”

—edward batchelder

William Parker interview conducted by Hallwalls’ Music Director Steve Baczkowski, March 1, 2006:

I’ve read that you feel that playing with young musicians in community-based residencies, like the one you’re doing in Buffalo, is among your most satisfying work.

“Well, I think that the development of music revolves around playing music, in different forms and fashions. The ‘younger musician’ usually does—or, in the way it was done previously, the young musicians would do—an apprenticeship with an older musician, or maybe with several older musicians. Like Coltrane played with Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, while simultaneously developing his own work. It’s an exchange of just seeing how other people put their ideas together and also the possibilities of where the music can go.

“You know, I played with Don Cherry and he had one system of putting the music together using no written music. Don would sing everything out and you’d have to pick it up. And then I worked with Cecil Taylor, who would dictate parts and you’d write them down and then you’d have the freedom to interpret them they way you wanted. Roscoe Mitchell had another system of notating the music and conveying it to the musician. David S. Ware, Peter Brötzmann, all these musicians have a different system of improvisation.

“When you’re able to play with more musicians of that caliber you eventually learn the possibilities and then you put your own music together in a way that may be similar, or in a whole other way that is familiar to you, coming out of your own person, because there are many ways that the music can be put together. There are ways that are still open. The bottom line is, we learn to develop the music by playing the music. That’s important, so every playing situation is valuable.”

The last time you were in Buffalo I was talking to you a little bit about some of the abuses of power that have been happening in the local government, compromising the quality of life of our citizens. It stuck in my mind that your initial response was, “Sounds like Buffalo needs some healing” and you played the flute that was hanging around your neck. Could you talk about what you see as the role of the artist in combating these kinds of things and comment on your idea about the Tone World?

“Well I mean if you can imagine, in one sense, Ascension happening 24/7. Where you have your Ascension room where you can open the door and you just cut right in to Ascension. That’s the roll of the music. That Ascension is going to have to be there for people to step into, stay as long as they want, and be uplifted, be healed, be given strength to move forward, and carry on the next day, and the next day and the next. In doing that we’re hopefully stepping out of our mundane lives and going up to another level, a level not of words but of sound and tone. We’re given a different set of information that’s not so literal but really very intuitive, and then when the sound stops and goes into silence, all that we’ve learned is kept until the next time we enter that Sound World. Then we learn some more…and we learn some more…and we learn some more. It becomes an endless process; the more we do it the more we discover just a little bit more about life, why we’re here, why this whole idea of sound, silence, color and movement exists.”

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