William Parker

In the early '90s, the direct musical heirs of Taylor, Ayler, and Coleman were mostly ignored by New York jazz critics, who found more to like about the hard bop revivalists who dominated major-label recording. Hence, the public visibility of musicians devoted to an "energy music" aesthetic was minimal. Despite its low profile, however, that strain of free jazz was kept alive by a fairly large group of Lower East Side musicians, many of whom gathered around the music's pre-eminent bassist, William Parker. Parker was the scene's major catalyst for musical activity. With his wife, dancer Patricia Nicholson, and other downtown free players such as drummer Jackson Krall and pianist Mark Hennen, Parker founded the Improvisers Collective, an organization that presented free jazz in combination with other types of spontaneous performance. Beginning in 1994 (and continuing in one form or another as of this writing), the collective produced a well-received series of concerts and festivals that featured some of the city's finest free improvisers -- saxophonists Marco Eneidi, Sabir Mateen, and Daniel Carter, trumpeter Lewis Barnes, and pianist Cooper-Moore, to name a few. Parker was the fulcrum of the collective; he played in nearly all of its various ad hoc groups, and led the Collective's enormous big band, which later recorded under Parker's name as the Little Huey Creative Music Ensemble. As a bassist, Parker is possessed of a formidable technique, albeit an unconventional one. Unlike a great many jazz bassists, Parker was not formally trained as a classical player, though he did study with three of the finest jazz players of the '60s, Jimmy Garrison, Richard Davis, and Wilbur Ware. Consequently, Parker's style is based on a tradition of self-expression and experimentation....