William Parker Interview
Vision Festival (NYC, 2024)
18
Julio, 2024
Interview's Audio
Free Jazz and avant garde pioneer William Parker granted us with an enlightening interview during Vision Festival 2024 at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York where he was honored and was a recipient of the Vision 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award.
In&OutJazz: What does it mean to you Mr. Parker to have received this award as a leader in the free jazz community?
William Parker: Well, I’m very happy that it happened because it will give publicity to not just what I do but what everybody in the community does. We’re lacking press here. The New York Times, The Village Voice and a lot of the other newspapers in America New York have stopped writing about us. And, so you need a liaison or a bridge between the music and the people, and that could be publicity…, that could be newspapers. You just want your name to be out there so people are aware of what you do. And the award helps that, and hopefully other people will be able to present their music as a result of me getting the award.
In&OutJazz: How do you feel about being a leader in the free jazz community?
William Parker: I feel that there are a lot of things to be done and I think you know every musician leads themselves and I do what I do. I think the labels that people put on people are from the outside and you can’t really avoid that but my responsibility as I’m 72 now is to continue to knock down walls, is to continue to present good music, is to continue to open the door and help guide younger musicians so that they can take the place of a lot of musicians who passed away. We lost saxophone player Peter Brötzmann, Kidd Jordan, Charles Gayle in the last years and they can never be replaced but we can try to get musicians to be interested in playing the creative freedom music. Because freedom, free music equals freedom and freedom equals enlightenment and so it continues the idea of a better planet and maybe we can go on for another few years.
In&OutJazz: What does free jazz mean to you? How do you differentiate “free jazz” from “jazz”?
William Parker: Basically you have the freedom to play what you want to play in a situation. Your goal is to make the music sprout wings and fly and in a free jazz or free music, you’re free to use any element that ever existed, any element that you didn’t know about, that you discover in the moment to enhance the music. And so it’s like you don’t have any rules…, the rules are to be, to play the most creative profound music you can play and the only rule is to succeed.
In&OutJazz: Beautiful. Can you tell us a little bit about playing with Cecil Taylor , Milford Graves , and Don Cherry …?
William Parker: All those people were great musicians and what they called progenitors or masters of the music. And again, what they did was allow you to be yourself. I played with Cecil for eleven years, and he never told me what to play once. It was setting up a situation and then allowing us to play.
In&OutJazz: Wasn’t that scary at the beginning for you?
William Parker: No, because I had my training in New York playing with Jemeel Moondoc and Roy Campbell and Billy Bang . And I was really ready for anything when it came to free improvisation.
In&OutJazz: We know that you are one of the best double bassists of all time, and also a prolific artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and also a teacher. What come first for you? Who are you first?
William Parker: What comes first to me is kindness, and giving, and sharing music, and sharing ideas, exchanging gifts with people, helping people to open up their gifts, for them to share them. And whether it’s music, whether it’s dance, whether it’s poetry, whether it’s writing, it doesn’t make any difference whether it’s just talking. You always try to share, get the light turned on, so that we can’t see without light. And once we have light, we can begin to shape our lives in a better way. I mean, it’s almost a hundred degrees today. And we’re still dropping bombs all over the world. And these things, there must be something better for human beings to do than to kill each other. And that’s the message we want to get. It’s we have to stop war, we have to begin to enrich each other’s lives, not try to take each other’s lives. And that’s going to be done if we engulf ourselves in music and art. It changes our lives. It brings peace and harmony in the world.
In&OutJazz: What would you say are one or two of the basic concepts in avant-garde jazz or free jazz?
William Parker: It’s to play like it’s the last time you’re gonna play. Play like every sound you are playing can change the world. You know, and so if you believe that everything you do is important and can change the world, I think that’s more important than what key you’re playing, what rhythm, whatever, you know, what style you’re playing in. It’s how you play and what you do and try to vibrate. Music is water. You want to play and it vibrates and turns to steam when it boils and heats. And that’s when it’s usable. That’s when you open up and go into the tone world. You go into the third world. You go into the world of light and sonic vibration. The world of pure happiness and joy. And that’s the kind of experience you want to make. So how you do it, it doesn’t really make any difference. As long as we do that, because we have to reverse ignorance. We have to reverse hate. We have to reverse this idea of severe, harmful capitalism. And we have to begin to elevate the people from within. They’ve got to elevate themselves so that they can fly. And it’s very important that everyone flies.
