Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton at Suoni Per Il Popolo
Montreal's annual freedom music festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo is a month-long celebration of all that is great in music. One of the highlights of this year’s festival was the British trio Parker, Guy and Lytton....
This year, I missed most of Montreal's brilliant freedom-music festival Suoni Per Il Popolo, due to an unexpected series of holidays both in and out of the country. But I was lucky enough to make it back to Montreal in time to catch Evan Parker with Barry Guy and Paul Lytton and what a show it was. The British free-improv trio featuring the acclaimed cutting edge saxophone player Evan Parker, extraordinary bassist Barry Guy and drummer Paul Lytton was really something.
Though Parker is an amazing saxophonist, I found him a bit drowned out this night and so had a hard time appreciating his unique style and as a trio the group sounded a bit old fashioned in a style reminiscent of Coltrane at his free-flying heights. He really shone when Lytton and Guy took a step back and let him stand out and show off his unique extended technique and melodic/harmonic sensibility.
The same went for Guy - he stole the show at the beginning of the second set when he returned alone and performed a bass solo that was the finest moment of the night, covering a slew of extended techniques involving mallets, various wooden sticks and hands flying madly all over that bass.
Lytton performed a fairly nice solo as well but I found his playing while the trio was in full swing a little too dense considering the mixing situation to appreciate as it was contributing to not being able to discern any of the individual subtleties of Guy and Parker's playing, but that may be more the fault of the mixing engineer - if there even was one, really - it felt like a fairly acostic set altough Barry Guy must have had some reinforcement.
Overall it was an incredible night of free-improv although it would have been nice to hear more dynamics to allow each player more time in the spotlight.
Suoni is an annual month-long festival and it picks up where the other festivals shamefully leave off - despite its international reputation the Montreal Jazz Festival is a pathetic joke except to those with infinite supplies of cash and Suoni really helps the city recover its dignity in this regard, but beyond free jazz Suoni also features psyche, noise, electronic and other forms of experimental music.
Photo by Andy Newcombe, http://www.flickr.com/people/92523880@N00/, courtesy of Creative Commons
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