Images: Sean Kelly - For John Coltrane - Hundred Years Gallery, February 2025
Evan Parker / Peter Urpeth Duet
A unique duet featuring Evan Parker - saxophones, and Peter Urpeth - Performance Poetry
Performances available: The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 / For John Coltrane
To book the duet, please contact Peter Urpeth using the form in the about menu above
Evan Parker is one of the true legends of post-war free jazz and improvisation, a globally-recognised innovator of the saxophone, and a founder and provocateur of a unique musical movement. Evanparker.com
Peter Urpeth is a performance poet and writer, an originator of the ‘fire poetry’ style allied to free jazz and ‘fire music’, who has worked in free improvisation and free jazz for more than forty years as a poet and pianist, and with Evan Parker since the early 1980s.
Our performances are unique in the poetry/music world, offering a dynamic mix of intense poetic and musical exchanges, along with light-hearted and engaging exchanges on aspects of jazz and free jazz history, drawn from the performers’ many years of engagement with the global scene.
The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988 - see link in menu above, or click here
This set features Evan on soprano sax, and Peter’s unique collection of poems dedicated to the writer Kathy Acker, along with shamanic and other poems.
For John Coltrane - features Evan on tenor sax, with Peter’s original poetry improvisations based on ‘Trane pieces. Along with his own original work, Peter performs rare pieces from other poets in the Coltrane sub-genre of jazz poetry that flourished in the late 60s and 70s in the USA, especially among the poets of the Black Arts Movement. Evan improvises on ‘Trane tunes.
some reviews…
UK JAZZ News - reviews The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988
by Geoff Winston, February 2023
Poet Peter Urpeth and saxophonist Evan Parker go back a long way, some 40 years, to when Urpeth joined Parker as pianist in an improvising trio. Their evening at the intimate Hundred Years Gallery celebrated Urpeth’s new book of poems, The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988, which he introduced as an autobiographical collection, written for performance and relating to significant times in his life in Dalston, New York, and the Cairngorms where he now lives.
‘Evan plays, then I read,’ he explained before reciting Scald – A Mouth Rune, a poem riven with the earthily textured imagery which runs through a strand of his works: ‘To you / who soaked a bird corpse / in pine sap /to make a winter lamp’.
Urpeth’s plain-speaking delivery of his richly crafted texts and upbeat anecdotal commentary, alongside Parker’s mesmerising playing on soprano sax held the audience’s rapt attention throughout
Many poems were reflective, formulated on long walks in Cairngorms, as he came to terms with the death in 1997 of American writer Kathy Acker, whom he got to know when she was living in London. Their friendship took in the Makeshift Club which he ran in Dalston in the ’80s, the subject of his second reading, Quixote in Dalston, ‘that scene of dykes and bois / and art jazz noise’ (Dudu, Moholo and Dyani are mentioned) and a visit to New York, where, when it came to reciting the poem that gives the collection its title, ‘not everything went to plan.’ New York, for Urpeth is, as he wrote in Morton Street, ‘… the city / that always weeps.’
Evan Parker’s multi-phonic, multi-layered playing on soprano sax was intense, transcendental and technically extraordinary, yet underlying it all there is a profound clarity in its essence. As always, concentration on the part of the listener yields a mesmerising experience and an appreciation of the emotional and structural complexity of his playing as layers are identified and revealed.
Between Parker and Urpeth there was a relaxed understanding, and their reflections on players in the New York jazz scene were amusing and insightful. Urpeth read a series of poems drawn from jazz-related notes, titled with consecutive numbers. In One, Parker is the subject: ‘Evan Parker was walking by Central Park. His hand was holding the handle of a battered sax case … brother Evan played a thousand notes to the passing skyscrapers …’, and in Three ‘Evan … could not tell where his sax began and his lungs ended,’ which prompted a ‘yeah’ from Parker. Others focussed on John Coltrane, Albert Ayler in Stockholm with Cecil Taylor, and Sunny Murray.
Parker countered with a story which had Coltrane entering the mens’ room at the Half Note playing 1,000 notes, followed by his own encounters with Cecil Taylor which led to them recording together, but characterised by Taylor’s disappointment that fellow revellers couldn’t keep up with him at 6am ‘when things were just warming up!’
Urpeth also talked about the vital Manna House Workshop, set up in 1967 by Gloria De Nard, to teach jazz and dance to youngsters, forming a lifeline for deprived families with hopes for their children, about which he made a fascinating short film, Manna – Jazz and Survival in East Harlem. (Link) Jazz musicians at the highest level taught there, including Cooper-Moore and Craig Harris. He also spoke of the great bassist, Henry Grimes, who played several benefit gigs for Manna House, at which point he delivered the sad news that Margaret Grimes had died that week.
Walking forms a link for Urpeth between daily routine and the poems in which the act of walking is integral to the evocation of memories and a means of constructing sense out of incomprehension. East River Blues begins ‘Walking … walking … walking’ which took us all over Manhattan and then focussed on the activism of Lee and Grace Lorch and the opposition they experienced from conservative educational institutions and the House Anti-American Activities Committee.
Parker placed his own musical poetry between each episode, bringing with it a sense of meditations on infinite space and time as he wove ever more intricate patterns, pushing the boundaries of continuous breathing, sounding like three saxophonists playing simultaneously, only occasionally tempering the flow with brief decelerations. Equally comfortable working with melody, he would also improvise on contemporary jazz standards, notably a beautifully rendered, stripped back version of Monk’s Let’s Cool One, and Eric Dolphy’s Miss Ann, with its cues to break out with intent, which he claimed he would ‘get right one day’! He got it right.
Urpeth covered much ground in the two sets and ended with a nice touch of wrong-footing, delivering the poem, Essex Man (prepares for Death), from his new collection, based on his fondness for Romford and Dagenham.
With thanks also to Graham MacKeachan, Hundred Years Gallery Director & Music Programmer, for hosting a remarkable evening.
Full review Here
Oct 22 - From The Wanstead Tap - The 4000 Nights of New York in 1988:
‘You should always push your interest in music and art and music - this afternoons poetry from and free jazz from Evan Parker has to be seen and heard to be believed. Something so different for a Saturday afternoon but then that’s what makes the Tap so perfect.’