This disc documents a live performance from Boston’s ICA Theater of a five-part suite Parker composed in 1973 in tribute to his tenor saxophonist friend Marvin Nunez. “Uncle Marvin,” as he was known, drowned himself in the East River – Parker arrived too late at the scene to witness anything more than his raincoat floating on the water. Nunez was an explorer, in Parker’s words, of “the world of sub-tone music”: “A world of whispers heralded by vibrations so low and subtle they could not be heard by the naked ear.” The suite opens with an attempt to evoke Nunez’s world of low and quiet sounds via an extended duet between Parker (on shakuhachi) and cellist Shiau-Shu Yu. Part II, “Mountain/Maintain,” draws on the full band to create shifting, hazy textures; the one instrument in sharper focus, Parker’s throbbing marimba, gradually draws the other instruments into its orbit as the music moves towards a pulsing and brightly coloured crescendo. The dark-toned parts I and II then yield to the joyous and swinging big band music of the last three parts. The suite’s structure is thus essentially linear, an upwards movement from the elegiac to the celebratory: the presiding atmosphere of the last three movements is exemplified by Parker’s utopian poetry, given voice by singer Leena Conquest on the title track: “There’s a rainbow in the ghetto and it’s changing everybody into poets guns into trumpets bells of freedom ringing ringing chimes of justice singing singing. . . .” The album ends with “Painter’s Celebration,” a tribute to another friend of Parker’s, the saxophonist Marion Brown.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2002