Healing vibrations

>> Neo-jazzbos William Parker and Matthew Shipp are just what the doctor ordered

by BOSS SAMBOSA

"People come to our shows to be healed," says legendary avant-jazz bassist William Parker from his Lower East Side NYC apartment. "That's part of the reason I've never had any inclination to play pop music. You see, scientifically, pop music doesn't vibrate enough to do your body any good. I'm talking about the vibration of sound and how your nervous system reacts to it, the medicinal effect. When Coleman Hawkins hit a note, the sound vibrated, you felt it inside."

Parker has been a fixture in New York's free-jazz scene since the '70s. An obsessive performer, a constant collaborator, an ingenious composer and a relentless innovator, Parker walks his bass through a maze of raw, tonal, flowing grooves, and he does it all for his audience. Joined by comparatively younger but equally prolific pianist Matthew Shipp, Parker will be making an appearance at Casa del Popolo's Primo Festivale, and Montrealers can be certain the vibrations will be right.

"I moved to New York in 1984 from Wilmington, Delaware," says Shipp. "And I knew even before I got there that I wanted to work with William."

"I met Matthew on the street in 1984," Parker remembers, "and he had this strange energy to him. I felt a good vibration right away. He was on rollerskates or something, and he just handed me this tape, and we began playing together immediately."

Since then, both Parker and Shipp have grown into veritable giants on the new-jazz circuit. And both share a disdain for the world of "straight jazz."

"I was at Tower Records the other day," says Shipp, "looking at the sales sheet in the jazz section, and it was all Miles Davis. The whole top 25 was Miles. Miles is good and everything, but c'mon, there's more to jazz than that."

"These straight jazz types," adds Parker, "are like, 'I'm really into Sonny Rollins,' or whatever, and everything has got to be Sonny Rollins, or they won't listen to it."

The closed-minded world of old-school jazz snobbery has pushed the pair into the underground, into more general avant-garde clubs like NYC's Tonic as opposed to the highbrow jazz-only joints in Greenwich Village.

"I really like the audiences in those [avant-garde] clubs," says Parker. "They come early, in the cold, they listen, and they're young. Genre doesn't really matter to them. They're faithful to a club and to a spirit, and if you can show them beauty and innovation, by playing with all your heart, they'll be healed."

"Jazz is dying," says Shipp. "I mean, I was up at your Montreal jazz fest, and it was okay, but it felt like I was in a jazz supermarket."

Prisms and labyrinths

It's the desperate lack of calculation, the pure, free-form innovation that allows these two to launch off of jazz into textural sonic glory. Parker credits visualization as helping him exceed the conventions of his instrument. "The string is a band of light, the bow is a prism. When you put white light through a prism you get colour. And that's what the sound is. And I'm only really interested in the sound, not the notes. I'm interested in the colour and the shapes."

"William doesn't want to separate sound from approach. He is a modern-day archetype of every '60s avant-garde player, existing now in 21st century, with a figure that really embodies the spontaneous composer."

"I like the idea of a maze," replies Parker. "I play with Matthew, and these obstacles appear unpredictably, and we just play in there."

It's almost intimidating to this music critic how profound and articulate and capable the two of them are at describing music. According to Parker though, the two of them don't discuss what they do very much. That inspires the old cheesy question, Do they communicate through music?

"At times, playing with Matthew is like having a conversation. But other times, I play by not directly responding to what he plays. You may be most together playing with some musicians by not playing together with them."

"We use language like everybody else," says Shipp with a laugh. "But we talk about sports and people and stuff more than music."

"Music is an extension of life," finishes Parker. "Music is another form of life. There's life as we know it, and then there's musical life, which is another species. When we play we become conduits for that life, and we just want to give it to the people. Life is hard, people need to be healed."

At Casa del Popolo on Friday and Saturday, June 22-23, 9pm, $15