William Parker, Sound Sage
A bracing interview, ushering in a new album and a Lifetime Achievement Award
Earth, water, air, fire — at different points in my lived experience with sound, I have associated each of these elements with the musical outflow of William Parker. At root, of course, he’s a bassist of unshakable authority, especially within the avant-garde that he helped define and anchor over roughly half a century. But Parker is also a composer of prolific imagination, a bandleader of generous conviction, and a multi-instrumental omnivore: the sort of accomplished autodidact who can create persuasive vibrations on assorted woodwinds and percussion as well as strings.
This Friday, AUM Fidelity will release a pair of albums that underscore Parker’s capacious creative profile. Cereal Music is his first spoken-word album, featuring his own verse nestled in a soundscape designed by a longtime colleague, Ellen Christi. Then there’s Heart Trio, the mesmerizing self-titled debut of a cooperative featuring Hamid Drake on frame drum and trap kit, Cooper-Moore on ashimba and homemade harp, and Parker on doson ngoni, shakuhachi, bass dudek, F-sharp Serbian flute, and a Ney flute handmade by the late Donald Rafael Garrett.
All this week, Parker is being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Vision Festival, an acknowledgment both seemingly redundant and sorely overdue. Parker has been an essential fixture of the festival since it was established by his wife, the dancer-choreographer Patricia Nicholson, in 1996. (I’ve attended more than a dozen editions, not as often these days as I’d like. My first Vision Festival review ran in the Village Voice 20 years ago, when Marshall Allen was celebrating his 80th.)
A year and a half ago, Heart Trio performed a concert at the Painted Bride Art Center in West Philly, presented by Ars Nova Workshop. I had the privilege of conducting a pre-concert interview with Parker, which was illuminating, and a blast. With the Vision Festival and a new album upon us, I’m now honored to share it with you.
If you support The Gig as a paid subscriber, you’ll soon receive a separate post with audio of the full half-hour interview. It’s the best way to experience this conversation, by far. In case you need more persuading, here’s a one-minute excerpt, where Parker stresses the importance of “listening on a subconscious level.”
Special thanks to Mark Christman and Beau Gordon of Ars Nova Workshop for making this happen. I also want to acknowledge Matt Merewitz of Fully Altered Media for the timely nudge, and L. David Hinton for the sublime photographs.
A Conversation with William Parker
Ars Nova Workshop / Painted Bride Art Center — Sept. 23, 2022
Nate Chinen: I’m so pleased to be sitting here with William Parker in West Philadelphia, at the Painted Bride Art Center. Cooper-Moore has inserted the very first question I’m going to ask you. Here we go…
Cooper-Moore [off mic, shouting from the wings]: You blaming me?!?
NC: It's called a citation! It’s a citation. Cooper-Moore said you have to begin with a question, which is, “Mr. Parker, what is your issue with jazz writers?” [laughter] If ever there was a trap laid by a musician for a journalist, I think this is probably it.
William Parker: Well, you know the phrase “innocent till proven guilty?” OK. So, every writer who writes about the music is innocent until proven guilty, in my book. Well, look at it this way. I’m a Black nationalist. A lot of people don’t know that. And so I get the whole thing of the jazz world, and owning the music, and the plantation system, and you’re working for an institution.
We always long for: Where are the Black people? Now, when we come to Philadelphia, there’s actually Black people. We played two nights ago at a cemetery, and some Black people came to the cemetery, but all in all, you get the feeling that whoever supports you are the Black people. Whoever supports you, and is intelligent, and caring about what you do, are the people you support. So that’s a loaded question, and I’m going to take the load off of it. So every writer that I deal with is, again, innocent until, you know, until they write something.
NC: [laughs]
WP: But until then, everyone’s equal. We have to work together. I’ve always said that the writers are like the midwives. They help to bring the music to the audience and give the audience a guide to be enthusiastic about it. To say, “Go out and hear this band, and go hear this,” and really try to help us gain an audience. It should never be a personal thing or an ego trip. I used to play with Cecil Taylor for a number of years, and he would always say, “If the writers wish they could do their job the way we do our job.” And that’s: we practice, and we really work at what we do. So if the writers work at what they do, they’ll do a good job. That’s my answer to that question.
NC: All right, I’ll take that. I want to mention that you have a new release, an archival recording called Universal Tonality. It was recorded 20 years ago in New York City with a range of collaborators including Philadelphia’s own Dave Burrell. But the root of that phrase, “universal tonality,” I understand that also can be traced here to Philadelphia. Is that right?
WP: Yes, it can. I was doing a concert, I don't know when, at the Philadelphia Natural History Museum. Oh, you have an Afro-American Museum here too? OK, so it was a cross between the Natural History and the Afro-American Museum. And maybe some of you were there, it was with Harold Smith, who actually used to live in Philadelphia, and Andrew Cyrille, Joe McPhee, myself, Steve Turre. And we had a bunch of didgeridoo players from all over the place. And we had Wausi, who was a Cherokee indigenous person with his dance troupe and singers. I had the thought of: OK, if you’re a kid, you come to the playground, and some kids can really play good. Whether it’s marbles, whether it’s laughter, whether it’s climbing. You don’t have to set a plan. You don’t have to have a score. You can just jump in and play, and have a very good time, as long as everyone is up on their toes of what they're doing. And so the idea of having musicians from different cultures come in and play, without saying anything, but meeting at the point of sound vibration, which is music, which turns into tone.
So, in that concert, we did what we were doing. The didgeridoo players came in and out. Wausi and the Cherokee dancers and singers came in and out perfectly, without saying a word. Nobody conducting, nobody telling anybody what to do. So it was the first glimpse or proof that it could work. Because I think one of the strongest concepts of music is to not tell people what to do, and to let everyone — what they do is to be themselves. I mean, when I first played with Derek Bailey, the first couple of minutes, I said, “Man, we gonna play some tunes or something?” And he said he didn’t play tunes anymore. I said, “What about that Wes Montgomery thing?” I was joking.
So then I said, OK, to play with Derek Bailey, what I have to do is totally be myself, and he had to totally be himself, and we were moving tracks like parallel togetherness. So we were listening by not consciously listening, but listening on a subconscious level. So it was a different way of relating musically. And I think in a high level of music, you’re always listening on a subconscious level. If you listen on a conscious level, you’ll get a conscious result. If you listen on a subconscious level, you’ll get a superhuman result. And so that’s kind of what we’re going for. So I said, well, OK, universal tonality. You’re talking about sound transformed in the tone. Tone leads you to the tone world. Tone world is your subconscious, and you can go further, deeper into yourself, and have the kineticism of music. So you have imagination equals activation equals creativity equals flow of energy. And this works on all art. So, that’s kind of how the theory is about it. Not so much controlling people, but letting them be in a situation where they can be themselves.
NC: Yeah. Now, did the phrase occur to you soon after you had this experience? Or was it more of a feeling and an understanding you had that you then later applied a terminology to?
WP: Well, in 1973, in the South Bronx, we had a group called the Universal Lamps. And that was the first idea of universal, and lamp was about light. We had Bill Lowe, trombone player in that, and Hassan Dawkins, and a clarinet player, Trent Powell, and drummer Freddie J. Williams. You might have heard of some of these people, but not all of them. But that was sort of the embryo of this idea of universal and light. And then, one of my teachers, when I was learning the Bronx Mystery Systems, was a guy named — we called him Celestial Lighthouse. He was like a Sun Ra-type character, also known as Windmill. And he would just walk around the Bronx talking about philosophy and talking about music. So you put all these things together, little bits and pieces, and then you realize that a lot of things that come to you have come to you when you were very young, that you maybe have forgotten about. And they’ve come to you from the inside, and out. So again, we’re talking about the idea of the heart, the soul, all that stuff is inside. And so you get a lot of information by going inside and coming out. And that’s kind of the school of thought that it comes from.
NC: That is beautiful. Now I should point out that “universal tonality” is also a title that Cisco Bradley used for a biography of you; I saw a copy over at the merch table there. There’s a lot of rich detail in this book. And it makes me think that, you know, we all have our pandemic memories, right? And maybe there were, there were one or two musical encounters that you had during that long, dark period of almost nothing. And for me, one of those rare moments was a book-release celebration with you and Cisco and Joe McPhee, up in Beacon, New York, at the Howland Cultural Center.
WP: You were there?
NC: I was there, and when I tell you that I needed that music and conversation in that moment, that is no exaggeration. But I wanted to ask whether you’ve seen any interesting result out of that book being out in the world. So many of your thoughts and some of your backstory being more readily available now — has anything come of that for you?
WP: Well, not that I know of. I mean, because the passing of information sometimes doesn’t get to me. Since then, I’ve got three books in the can which further go into the music. I can’t say that I’m more well known, or anything particular has happened. I can say that during the pandemic, I was in Vermont and I began doing paintings.
NC: Mmhmm.
WP: I painted about 50 paintings. I had painted before; when Jimmy Carter became president, around that time I started painting. But as soon as they came out with the vaccine, I stopped. I mean, they said “We have a vaccine now,” and I stopped. I didn’t even finish what was unfinished. So I said, “Wow, what is that about?” I didn’t know what it was about. The thing is that you begin to learn and live with so many things you don’t know about. Because you don’t need to know about everything. Knowing about things, it doesn’t help the world in a large capacity. But those that can know things get inside things, you know — but if you don’t know something, I tell my students, don’t worry about it. Just continue to live and see what comes next. Don’t get frustrated and bang your head against the wall because you don’t know how to fly.
NC: Well, it strikes me that, going back to universal tonality for a second, there’s a certain power in a kind of directed unknowing, right? It’s one thing to know things; it’s another thing to not know things, but there can be a certain sort of energy in an unknowing that is intentional. Does that make any sense?
WP: Well, you know, it all depends on our personalities. Some people say, “I don’t want to know anything.”
NC: Right.
WP: “Because knowing things makes me nervous and jittery. It gives me responsibility. And I’d rather not have responsibility.”
NC: Ignorance is bliss.
WP: Yeah. There’s that kind of thing. And then there’s the idea that in this ignorance, all the knowledge is there. All the knowledge and information is locked in this ignorance, but it’s hard to maintain this ignorance. Or that ignorance is not ignorance; ignorance could be supreme knowledge. So it’s a thin line between this kind of thing and knowing something. When I was coming up, I’d get a record and… I remember one day I bought this record by a piano player on ESP-Disk, Lowell Davidson. And I paid 88 cents for this record, because at that time they were selling all the ESP records for 88 cents, whether it was mono or stereo or whatever. But anyway, records I liked so much, I only listened to once. Because I didn’t want to spoil my experience by listening to it again. And I just put it on the side, and I wouldn’t listen to it. And I had a bunch of records like that, you know. And that Lowell Davidson record was one, because I didn’t want to spoil my experience by trying to think. Then later on I was able to shut my thinking off and it became part of my being, knowing what to think about and what not to think about, and then it became very natural. It wasn’t a strain. It was just part of me.
NC: Time is racing by here, so I want to be sure to talk about this ensemble. It’s called Heart Trio, and includes two of the musicians I think I’ve seen you with more than anyone else, in so many different combinations. But could we start with the name? What is behind your choice of title, Heart Trio?
WP: It was chosen for me, when we did the gig at the Vision Festival this year. I think it was called, just our names. And so someone said, “Why don’t you call it the Heart Trio?” We had a trio before with our fourth member, Mr. Daniel Carter, called the Organic Trio or Quartet — because again, it was all organic. It’s just called Heart Trio because everything is coming from our hearts and through us. We’re not pre-thinking anything. And we’re really trying to get down to the essence of the sounds and the idea that we were playing stuff from inside of us. The instruments that Cooper-Moore is playing today, he made all his instruments. And then Hamid is playing the frame drum and percussion. I’m playing some of my flutes here, overtone flutes. We stopped in New York and dropped off a whole bunch of instruments from the cemetery last night. So there’s a lot more things we play. We also had DoYeon Kim from Korea playing with us last night. And she’ll play with us in the future. And we might also have some other people playing with us.
NC: So all of this is the light travel version.
WP: Yeah, yeah, because the van was packed with stuff. We couldn’t get any more stuff in there, with three people.
NC: Can you tell us the earliest memory you have of making music with Cooper-Moore?
WP: I met Cooper-Moore around 1973. I played with a guy named Moudon Slaughter, who was an alto saxophone player from Chicago. His father was a guy named Donald Slaughter. And Moudon came to New York and we did some rehearsing with, at that time, Gene Ashton, and that’s when I met him. He was living at 501 Canal Street. At that time, there were these schools. It was the New York musicians — not too many of them actually born in New York, but they were based in New York. Then you had the St. Louis musicians coming to New York, the Los Angeles musicians, the Chicago musicians. Then you had a lot of musicians who came down from Boston, and David S. Ware, he’s from New Jersey; Cooper-Moore, who’s from Virginia, William Hooker, who’s from Connecticut. But they came down and, you know, Alan Braufman, Ellen Christi, they all lived at 501 Canal Street, but it was a different school of thought. They were very hardcore, but they were also well trained and thoughtful in what they were doing. So that’s when I first played with Cooper-Moore. Then later on, I played with him in early versions of the David S. Ware Quartet, and also a thing they just released with Alan Braufman. We did something at the WBAI music store, and that was just released as a recording.
NC: Now, you mentioned Chicago a moment ago. That brings me to amid Drake — just such a deep connection that the two of you have. And most people think about it as bass and drums, but there’s so much more that the two of you do together. What would you characterize as the central quality in your interaction?
WP: Well, the whole thing is like, music as a form of prayer, ritual. Music as going back to the fundamental, the blues, the folk, stretching to space, and urban as well as country sounds, and turning rhythms around inside themselves. Breathing together, because I think we first played together with Peter Brötzmann, in a quartet called Die Like a Dog. We hooked up because we were able to play any rhythm: slow against fast, fast against slow, numbered rhythms. Playing all kinds of melodies and motifs versus vocal rhythms, drum utterances versus drum conversations. The bass as a drum. The drum as a bass.
NC: Mmhmm.
WP: All of these things just were able to hook up, because when you play with a lot of people, they think, “OK, I have to play fast, you have to play fast.” I’m saying, “Well, you can play fast, I’m gonna play slow. You can play 6/8, I can play vocal utterances. You can play 4/4, and I can play 6/8.” So all possibilities were there, and I could do it with Hamid, and that’s the connection. And everybody I played with in music that had a deep connection, you could do that with. There was no lock-in — you know, like, Walter Perkins, Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, Muhammad Ali. You name all the drummers, you could always do that. ‘Cause that’s the idea of being able to have total freedom to play music and rhythms from all around the world. From outer space, from inner space. And rhythms that come from, you can change the rhythm second to second, which is something very difficult to do if you don’t want to do it. But to move it, keep the sound percolating and vibrating.
NC: A handful of words you just mentioned in that answer sort of rang in my head. You said “prayer,” you said “the blues,” you said “outer space.” All of these words lead me to my next question. Today is John Coltrane’s birthday. There’s a quote that is often circulated, where he said, “I want to be a force for good.” It occurs to me that this is something you’ve really held close to your heart as well, in your example — not only as an artist and musician, but also as a mentor and an activist and someone who builds community. So I wanted to ask what that idea means to you, and what Coltrane, through that idea, means to you.
WP: Well, the idea is, you want to have everybody shining brightly, because it’s better for me, it’s better for them, if we’re all burning brightly, without burning anything down. When you close your eyes, you can’t see anything, but when the light comes, you can follow that. And so music is inspiration. The idea is you want to inspire people to be themselves and hopefully to be the best self that they can be — and that’s what you play music for, to uplift and inspire people. That’s it in a nutshell. And that’s what all the great musicians have done. They’ve inspired us to shine, to hopefully shine brightly. And that’s the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the writers, the photographers. You know, the moms, the dads, the gardeners — anybody we meet. You know, when Don Cherry was around, we’d be hanging out on the corner and Don Cherry would come by. Sometimes he’d be in roller skates, sometimes he’d be dressed with a cap with a propeller on top. And then we start talking and: Boom, you’re automatically uplifted. You know, Dennis Charles was that way. There’s certain people who had a magic touch. And in uplifting, you hear a certain sound that somebody plays and it automatically puts you in a different headspace. And that’s all it’s about, if you can get there. You practice, you do whatever you need to do to get in that headspace, and that’s so important.
Nate – this is such a wonderful interview with William you did; thank you for posting today!
There is a lot to take in here, Nate, not the least of which is how important Mr. Parker has been to the Black Creative Community for so many years. One section caught me – "Some people say, “I don’t want to know anything. Because knowing things makes me nervous and jittery. It gives me responsibility. And I’d rather not have responsibility.” Therein lies one of the sources of the mess our nation and the world is in.