Sunday 11 October 2026, 2–5pm
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Cafe OTO is proud to present a very special matinee residency from the great Evan Parker! Evan has been a hugely important part of OTO since we started, through countless incredible performances here over the years, as well as his releases and reissues on our inhouse Otoroku label. He has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s and his undeniable influence is evident across our programme. This matinee series brings together some of the key strands of Evan's creative output, with collaborations alongside Pat Thomas, Thurston Moore, John Coxon, Ashley Wales, Matt Wright and more.
Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens, Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).
Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.
11 OCTOBER 2026
"With Birds" – Evan Parker / John Coxon / Ashley Wales
Evan Parker duets with European birdsong, reimagined by John Coxon and Ashley Wales. Originally heard on Evan Parker's 2004 album dedicated to Steve Lacy, featuring studio reocrdings of Evan in a virtual duet with bird recordings captured by Geoff Sample, Charles & Heather Myers, Jean C. Roche, Myles North & Eric Simms, alongside location field recordings by Ashley Wales. In 2019 we hosted a live interpretation of the project as part of our Musics and Other Living Creatures series, and we're very excited to welcome it back.
John Coxon, perhaps uniquely for an improvising guitarist, is inspired as much by the plangencies of Reggie Young as by the astringencies of Derek Bailey. As irascible and as spiky as it gets, his playing is always haunted by the ghosts of popular song and fragments of the blues.
Ashley Wales is a British composer and record producer, one half of Spring Heel Jack with John Coxon and an integral part of Bruise with Tony Bevan. He put on and hosted the monthly ‘back in your town’ concerts at the Red Rose in North London which saw the likes of John Tchicai, Other Dimensions in Music, Matthew Shipp, Han Bennink and many others playing with local improvising musicians. Ashley uses a wide range of sources to make music with including live sampling, electronics and acoustic instruments .
