By Dan Sorrells
I won't spend much time describing the sound of May Spring Last A Lifetime. It is a searching, bursting 53 minute duet of tenor saxophones, one of which is played by Evan Parker, recorded in pristine clarity in Ramsgate. It may be worth noting that, at 81, Parker's had a long enough recording career that this isn't the first (or even fifth) tenor duet put to tape, Parker having spared with other tenors wielded by the likes of Anthony Braxton, Joe McPhee, John Tchicai, Hans Koch, and Urs Leimgruber. Here, his partner is Tom Challenger (quite a surname given the context!), a significantly younger musician who is a familiar face on the London scene, playing with musicians like Olie Brice and Kit Downes and in groups like Brass Mask. Challenger is an admirable match for Parker, and both players stick closely to each other through gradual turns of technique and dynamics. Above all, there is space for things to develop.
In the five or so years between Challenger and Parker's first meeting and the recording of May Spring Last A Lifetime, the two developed an informal process where they would meet with their tenors, pausing between bouts of playing to talk about their instruments and the music they were making. In the extended and wonderful conversation in the liner notes between Challenger, Parker, and False Walls label head CJ Mitchell, Challenger says that what felt significant about their duo was that, having "no goal of performance" for so many years, it felt like practice. Parker points out that "practice" is a "complicated" word, and what concerns the two is not practice in the sense of repetitively mastering the "how" of playing the instrument, but rather in approaching the "how" of playing together. Challenger characterizes this practice as the "joint activity" of "discover[ing] that you're not in control," "playing something when you're not really sure of what you're doing" and trying "to figure out what the hell that is."
As the conversation winds on, something possibly controversial is revealed: May Spring Last A Lifetime is not a single take of a herculean imaginative feat. It captures a typical meeting between the two, but has the pauses, the conversations, the breaks to change reeds removed. And not only are these gaps omitted, but Challenger has then rearranged the musical pieces. In an era where the perennial debate about the legitimacy or authenticity of recordings of improvised music has largely receded, and where there are more recordings than any one lifetime could survey, I'll admit to still bristling at this revelation. (For his part, Parker also seemed skeptical at first—or at the very least, like such an idea simply wouldn't have occurred to him). As I read on, Challenger's explanation was compelling, so much so that I think the choice becomes one of the most interesting things about May Spring Last A Lifetime. It stipulates that, yes, of course fidelity to a long-since-evaporated musical event is out of the question. But what if that's somehow more true to our experience?
Put plainly, Challenger says that the "purest perception" he has of recording with Parker, "of that event, is my memory." Only in the first order experience of the music in the moment that it happened can one be said to (maybe) have some sort of undiluted access. Even that is as evanescent as the notes themselves, immediately mediated. Everything after each vanishing instant is memory: inevitably shuffled, reordered, rendered diffuse. "The cool thing is that you can just change that perception in your head," says Challenger. This is how we engage with our memory. To alter the order of the music "isn't so problematic, because actually, when I think of it, I think of that memory, [and] I'm still reordering it all the time."
Sitting here, listening to a recording released long after the players vibrated the air in a room half the world away, I wonder what it is about Challenger's reconstruction that even caused the question of authenticity to enter my mind. Was it because I had a romanticized assumption about what I was hearing, and then the illusion was shattered? Do I really value something more about continuity or stamina than I do the actual engagement and creativity reflected in the music? Am I imposing some condition of purity on this document to assuage the guilt of having to encounter the music in this form? "You had to be there." But I wasn't. Is there something about Challenger reordering the pieces but concealing their seams that exhumes some dusty old bugbear, that maybe we haven't assimilated the troubles with recordings of free improvisation so much as repressed them?
It occurs to me that I've already encountered a version of all of this—and with Parker, to boot. Many years ago, I attended a performance of Parker, Nate Wooley, and Joe Morris that was later released as Ninth Square on Clean Feed. When I put that CD on, I recognize none of the music despite being mere feet from the players as it happened. My memories of the event have more to do with the setting and a sort of charged air of anticipation than with any kind of musical content. Ninth Squarehas six tracks—much like the six segments Challenger arranged into May Spring Last A Lifetime —and while several run one into the next, I couldn't possibly tell you whether those tracks accurately represented any portion of the two sets that were played that evening. What Challenger asks us to recognize is that these ambiguities and distortions are true for the people who make the music, too. We are all forced into reencounters that render things differently and newly. For all of us who weren't with Parker and Challenger in the Arco Barco studio, we're invited through Challenger's edits to partially occupy the perspective of one of the music's creators as they also turn it over in their mind.
Thinking about May Spring Last A Lifetime sent me to the bookshelf, where I pulled down David Grubbs' Records Ruin the Landscape,which delightfully mucks about in the same quagmire . I'm ruminating about these questions here because now, in a world awash in recordings of improvised music, a world where many listeners engage more frequently and more deeply with recordings than with live performance, there are very few albums that seem to dare us to contemplate how we engage with this music. The pleasures of sharing in what Parker and Challenger created together have little to do with chronological integrity. They are also not limited to those conveyed by physical presence. You don’t need to be aware of any of what I’ve discussed to partake in them. And if the way we encounter the music on May Spring Last A Lifetime is not quite true-to-life, it remains true to the spirit in which it was created, and—just as in Challenger's memory—the journey of two tenor saxophones becomes a contoured and nuanced surface and not merely the straight line between a start and a stop.
