Friday 24 September 2010

whitstable solo


Saxophonist Evan Parker just happens to be a local. I’ve been listening to his recently released disc whitstable solo, recorded in the church of St Peters in that town just up the A299 from Faversham. It’s an extraordinary performance beautifully captured. My uncle, so it happens, was a recording engineer himself and in the early sixties with minimal miking made an atmospheric record of a church choir in outer Melbourne. In these contexts the building itself is ‘played’ as an instrument. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be at Parker's performance, but Harry Gilonis was, and he has contributed a poem ‘written only whilst listening to the music recorded on that night’. ‘a breath of air’ remarkably takes its stanza structure and rhyme scheme from Arnaut Daniel, the Occitan poet.

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