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This review is part of the Musings Collection - see the index here.
Evan Parker & Richard Nunns: Rangigua
(Leo: CDLR314)
Evan Parker (saxophones), Richard Nunns (taonga puoro)
Evan Parker has a long history of documenting duets with unusual partners. Often, as here, the music is exploratory, and sometimes the results are tantalisingly half-formed. Parker, despite his distinctive sound, is a legendarily flexible player, changing strategies depending on the approach of his current partner, an attitude which probably accounts for the unusually high success rate these discs seem to exhibit.
Nunns is a practitioner of Taonga Puoro, traditional Maori music. It is, as the helpful and beautifully-illustrated liner informs us, played on instruments which have very narrow ranges and many of which are rather resistant to sound-production. They must be played, it seems, with iron resolve and much practice, and the sounds they make are not in the least bit flashy; the pieces here are all fairly short, probably on account of the limited range of each instrument. They are, however, played with great sensitivity to timbre and with a certain element of ritual, both things which must have appealed to the saxophonist.
The first impression is rather startling; Parker, for all his knowledge of some of the world's most forbiddingly alien musics, sounds unsure of what to do with the simple clicking, whistling, knocking and breathing noises which Nunn produces. This isn't simply a musical culture-clash -- more an art-form clash, or a clash of the whole massive structure of Western art with something else.
It certainly throws into relief just how accessible Parker's music actually is, with its attachment to linear melody, its cycling groups of notes and vocalised pitch-bends, its pulsing, flowing rhythms and refined sonorities. "Pukaea Rakau Kauri" makes the point neatly, with Nunn's wooden trumpet braying hollow notes, always the same pitch, each time tongued or dynamically varied in a different way. Around it Parker's tenor works its way up to a spiralling dance.
This piece is one of the nicest, a place where the contrast really works. There are others, too: with the maaire flute, for example, which Nunn overblows to excellent effect, or a jade bullroarer whose revving-engine noise works bizarrely well for the saxophonist. But the delicacy of Nunn's instruments and his reliance on tiny nuances are sometimes trampled by Parker however hard he tries (and he tries, audibly, very hard indeed) to be quiet and sympathetic. It's the percussion instruments which fare badly here; Nunn has none of the rhythmic dynamism Parker is used to, and playing a single sound repeatedly for minutes at a time not only gives little for the reedsman to bounce off but it just gets in the way, mesmerising as it may be in other contexts.
Sometimes, particularly at the beginnings of tracks, Parker can be heard racking his brain for something to play, which is a wonderful sound in itself. It's great to hear a man so well-established still getting himself into these kinds of musically dicey situations. Nunn is clearly a master performer in an extremely odd field of music which probably has to be seen live to be really appreciated, but the mismatch here is regularly entrertaining and just occasionally sublime. Not the most fully-formed music that Mr Parker will release this year, but almost certainly the least expected.