Evan Parker
Monoceros

When I was little, I really wanted to learn to play the saxophone.

In my golden childhood spent in the second half of the '80s, the sax for me meant the relaxing and familiar sound that I instinctively associated with tunes, movies, and cartoon themes dear to me.
Nothing came of it, partly due to a very funny and optimistic father who kept telling me: "If you play the saxophone, you’ll get pulmonary emphysema".

I didn’t learn to play any instrument for years. Then, during that horrible period full of pimples and hormonal storms (for which some people have the nerve to feel nostalgic once grown up) called adolescence, there was another revelation: the guitar. Unfortunately, very few get through the ages of 14-15 without wanting to pick up a guitar and become a scrappy provincial rocker; I fell in love with this overly popular instrument among pimple-faced high schoolers, also thanks to Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall (for the record, I obviously didn’t get emphysema, but I did get tendinitis).

Great loves, however, are not easily forgotten and eventually resurface. Sometimes, all it takes is randomly listening to a record like this one.
Parker, for those who don’t know him, is an English saxophonist born in Bristol, class of 1944. He took his first steps into the world of jazz inspired mainly by Paul Desmond and Cool Jazz, but soon realized his true nature was different. His technique, very innovative and distinctive, is characterized by the use of "circular breathing" (a technique used by wind instrument musicians that requires great coordination and involves producing a long, uninterrupted sound while breathing through the nose and simultaneously blowing into the instrument the stored air) and by the use of very fast patterns interlocked in repetition and combined in such a way as to often give the impression that there are two or three saxophonists. But no, it’s always just him blowing like mad into that sax.

In 1968, he played on that cornerstone of European Jazz, "Machine Gun" by Brotzmann. From there on, an impressive series of great records followed, of which "Monoceros" (1978) is undoubtedly one of the most representative for the strength of the improvisations and the timbral variety he manages to imprint on each track.

Every time I listen to it again, I feel the urge to hang up the guitar, buy a sax, and stoically challenge pulmonary emphysema.