Parker and this Swiss improvising wind quartet first joined forces in 2000 for a three-day session in a disused water cistern above Zürich. The results were September Duos with Parker and clarinetist Peter A. Schmid (Creative Works CW 1036) and a two-CD set by the full quintet, September Winds (Creative Works CW 1038/39). Their reunion occurred two years later – again in September, as it happened – in the similarly resonant acoustic of the Kirche Erlenbach. It’s an unusual context for Parker: the only immediate precedent I know of is the quartet with Parker, Julian Arguëlles, Stan Sulzmann and Ray Warleigh assembled for Gavin Bryars’ piece “Alaric I or II” on After the Requiem. Alder Brook thus stands apart from much else that he has recorded: it’s one of the most sheerly pretty albums in the Parker canon.

These are remarkably coherent, balanced improvisations. The September Winds ensemble plays with a purity of tone that sounds alternately “classical” and “jazz” (one thinks of Desmond or Konitz) but rarely touches on the more abrasive and alien soundworlds of extended technique that often characterize free improvisation. Tempos are as a rule moderate to very slow, the initial premises are unfolded with care, and new material is introduced only by mutual agreement. There’s never any sense of information overload, even in an episode of twittering-bird improv like “Fletri,” where all five players move to the highest-pitched instruments in their arsenals. When on “Pinot Gris,” the disc’s feistiest track, the players all pile on at once, it’s so orderly it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Mingus’s Blues and Roots.

As is virtually de rigeur on a Parker album, there’s a big spotlit circular-breathing soprano extravaganza: a four-minute solo feature at the start of “Z’blau wunder us Jenins.” It sticks out like a sore thumb, so different is it from the rest of Alder Brook. At this point, hoping for Parker to vary his soprano solo approach is like hoping for the music of the spheres to change: it’s a perfectly nice solo, but it could easily have been spliced in from Conic Sections (rec. 1989) and no-one’d know the difference. (Perhaps one can only fruitfully approach Parker solo performances nowadays in the frame of mind of a gallery-goer revisiting the same painting at intervals of several years, or a tourist returning to a familiar landscape to renew contact every so often.) Seekers after new developments in Parkeriana will brighten, however, at the news of his brief turn on Alder Brook on the “tubax,” a novel contrabass saxophone invented by Benedikt Eppelsheim. Parker whips it out on “Cinghiali” for a duet with Schmid’s bass clarinet, and the results aren’t bad, in a ponderous monsters-wading-in-primordial-ooze fashion.

This is music for fans of dulcet, point-to-point improvisation rather than the ornery, swashbuckling kind; on those terms it’s a remarkably satisfying disc, though it needs to be digested piecemeal rather than all at once, given its very generous running-time. It lacks the challenge of Parker’s best work, admittedly, and maybe it’s time for the group to try working in an acoustically drier environment, which would accentuate rather than cushion the differences between instruments. But this is nonetheless a pleasing and effective disc, an immersive meditative soundspace created by means of a complex and unusually harmonious process of improvisation.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, March 2004