Evan Parker Quotes

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

Whenever I'm making songs, I am pretty much, quote unquote, freestyling them into existence.

I couldn't find a way to write music with numbers and rules and schedules. So I tried to forget the academic idea of music and started to see if it was possible to do creative work, taking in all the influences I wanted to keep.

I just go where the guitar takes me.

I play patterns. I'll make up a pattern and just play it.

When I tried to play something and screwed up, I'd hear some other note that would come into play. Then I started trying different things to find the beauty in it.

I'm always trying out new stuff onstage. That's where I do all my writing.

It is the most delightful thing that ever happens to me, when I hear something coming out of my guitar and out of my mouth that wasn't there before.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

Improvisation, if you play it at the top of your intelligence, leads to a kind of truth that people find really accessible.

I don't think you can have a calculated approach towards learning music.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

I work a lot of things out on stage nowadays rather than writing them in big blocks.

I like to tinkle at my piano when I'm working out a new song - I just put my fingers down and see what comes out.

Its very sort of spontaneous and organic, not a preconceived sort of jamming. Now we record everything, cause sometimes you'll forget, you know, 'what was that thing again?' So we record everything.

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

Most of the time, particularly with this record, 'The Light of the Sun,' I really just been standing in front of a microphone and blacking out musically, you know. I'd come back a couple hours later and there's six songs from beginning to end, you know? I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know how I'm going to say it.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

Triple tonguing? It was sort of invented. It wasn't in the script. It was something that I came up with.

One thing will lead to another and somebody will come up with a riff or a line or something we build from.

Music is a lot more like solving an intricate puzzle with moments of pure, random creative bliss... whereas painting is much more purely random creative bliss with moments of problem solving.