Evan Parker - extract from BBC Radio 3 interview May 2004

The interviewer asks EP about his longtime association with bassist/composer Barry Guy and drummer Paul Lytton over something like 30 years. Has the experience changed over the years? What is the dynamic? 

"Well in the same way that practising your instrument makes you more familiar with its possibilities by the same token what we bring with us to the next gig is the memory of our life in that group. Certain kinds of gestures result in a flow of patterns round the group, of call and response, or a three way idea of call and response. I do something, you do something, the third guy does something. At a certain point it's not clear who's is calling and who is responding, the whole thing is in a kind of flux. 

You can make any kind of analogy you want. Let's say it's like juggling, you've got ten balls in the air, juggling between the three of you, stuff is being thrown around, the whole thing is about confidence and the knowledge that I can throw a ball without knowing whether you've even seen it but out of the corner of your eye you've seen it, it's an audio equivalent of peripheral vision. The implications of something thrown in this or that direction will be picked up, amplified, and sent back. 

Of course it's an illusion, we're just making puffs in the air and hoping that it seems to mean something, but what can it mean in the end? We're just flapping the air and there's something beyond that which might speak about our friendship, our community, our energy, our life, it's positive, it's good to be alive. It's as simple as that. There's no great mystery. 

It is of course a privilege that people think the noise you make by flapping your wings is significant, it starts with you thinking that it's significant, but it's all in a way a kind of juggling with illusions. Why should a B flat here in relation to an A flat there, and an F over here, why should that be interesting? Why, unless there's something more going on? If it's reduced to a kind of fulfillment of some rule about how music should be in advance of the music happening then what are we? We are drudges, we are drones, we're just doing what the laws of music require us to do. You turn it round and suggest that the laws of music are distilled from the free activities of things that musicians choose to try out. Then we have an open system and an open ended dynamic that is going somewhere, that's the kind of thing that interests most improvisers actually regardless of the genre. They're always looking for something that hasn't been done before."