Review: William Parker’s ‘Migration of Silence into and Out of the Tone World [Volumes 1-10]’

Has there ever been a musician whose musical imagination is as universal and as omnivorous as William Parker’s? Perhaps Alexander Scriabin, a composer and virtuoso instrumentalist whose unfinished “Mysterium” was conceived to be performed over a week’s time by an orchestra, choir, dancers, visuals, and incense in the foothills of the Himalaya. Or possibly Don Cherry, a musician whose curiosity about indigenous musical traditions and imperative to collaboration knew no bounds. Duke Ellington, whose dazzling career can be understood as an attempt to create nothing less than a tone parallel to the Black experience, also comes to mind. But in Parker’s case, a mere one-to-one comparison falls short. He is all those things: synesthete, creator, griot, and maker of musical and cultural connections. He is a man whose project, Ellingtonian in its scope, is to transmute the entire experience of the world into tone. For almost 50 years as a professional musician, Parker has bravely sought an art that transcends the merely aesthetic to embrace an all-encompassing humanistic vision. It’s an ambition that makes Wagner’s dream of gesamtkunstwerk look like a middle school art project.  Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World (AUM Fidelity, 2021), is its apotheosis.

The set’s title is almost as imposing as its contents: 93 selections performed by 65 musicians over 10 CDs comprising 612 minutes of music (no wonder it took me a year to write about it!). Such scale is not unprecedented in Parker’s oeuvre; his 2013 “Wood Flute Songs” was an 8-CD collection of works recorded over a six-year span. Yet this one seems especially significant as if Parker had something especially urgent to tell us.

What that might be is immediately established on Album 1, Cut 1, which begins with a single spoken word: “Listen!”

The disc, Blue Limelight, is chamber jazz for an octet of strings, oboe, piano, percussion, bass, and vocalist Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez. The arrangements are imaginative and the title song, an elegy for Cecil Taylor composed hours after the great man’s passing, is made doubly heartbreaking by Jim Ferraiuolo’s lamenting oboe.

An outlier among the vocal music that predominates this set, Child of Sound, Album 2, is a collection of 14 pieces for solo piano played with acute sensitivity and great heart by Eri Yamamoto. There are a few nods to Thelonious Monk and Abdullah Ibrahim, but on balance, this is relatively simple music. It is largely tonal with real melodies. “Golden Light,” subtitled “Hymn,” is exactly as advertised. Music for healing.

Nine of the ten albums in the set were recorded between 2018 and 2020, but the original sessions for Album 3, The Majesty Of Jah, were recorded almost a decade earlier. It’s a tour de force for vocalist Ellen Christi, who also supervised the post-production in 2019. With titles such as “Freedom,” “Letter to a Resurrected Slave Owner,” and “Baldwin,” the last of which incorporates actualities from an interview with the author, The Majesty Of Jah proclaims Parker’s longstanding social activism. “If the world were brand new,” Christi asks on “Letter,” “What would you do?” Parker makes his first appearance on the set here singing and playing donso ngoni, percussion, and for one of the rare occasions on this set, bass.

He picks it up again for a single cut of Album 4, Cheops, on which he also plays bass duduk and a Slovakian overtone flute. The star of the album is vocalist Kyoko Kitamura for whom “If We Play Soft Enough” (“If we play soft enough, we can hear the singing of silence.”) is a sort of vocal concerto. Parker’s arrangements for the quartet of soprano sax, vibes, tuba, and drums (the startling Rachel Housle) are spacious and well ventilated, evoking the composer’s beloved natural world.

Of course, Parker loves New York, too, and Harlem Speaks, with its Ellingtonian title, is his valentine to his home. It finds him in the familiar company of percussionist Hamid Drake for a program of six reflections on Black life north of 125th St. Fay Victorhowls as he croons, spits, and caresses these stories of triumph, heartbreak, and everyday heroism with commanding authority.

Unusual ensemble textures and voices reappear on Album 6, Mexico. Parker is present on two of the four compositions, playing ngoni and Serbian flute in a multigenerational ensemble featuring Housle and Israeli harmonica player Ariel Bart. Mexican vocalist Jean Carla Rodea feeds the fire singing (in Spanish) Parker lyrics such as, “We are not criminals / We are not drug dealers / You have it wrong / We are song . . . / We are not drug dealers / We are human beings / More than you see.” Yet the most memorable moment on Mexico comes when engineer Jim Clouse jumps in on tenor to form a horn section with trumpeter Matt Lavelle on the title cut.

Afternoon Poem, the seventh of ten albums, is a solo vocal recital of Parker compositions by Lisa Sokolov. Some, like the 24-second-long “First Vision,” are little more than sketches. The longest is a seven-minute-long duet with pianist Yuko Fujiyama, originally recorded in 1993.

Parker the cinephile gets his close-up on Album 8, Lights in the Rain (The Italian Directors Suite). Vocalist Andrea Wolper stands in for Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, and other legends in a set of 10 vivid character sketches. “De Sica” evokes the director’s gritty fables of fate and urban poverty through a series of jump cuts between a dancing, syncopated passage, a dirgelike minor melody sung by Ferraiuolo’s oboe, and an unaccompanied oration by Wolper. Pasolini’s defiant politics are evoked by Wolper’s impassioned opening declamation, “Power must change!” and ends with the demand, “Lock up the rich! Lock ’em up!” This might be the richest and most evocative of the set’s 10 albums.

Album 9, The Fastest Train, documents a live encounter in Rotterdam between Parker and Dutch multi-instrumentalists Coen Aalberts and Klaas Hekman. Their meeting is captured by a variety of traditional instruments, including keringot, hochiku, conch shell, winti flute, and even a drum kit. All of the 13 compositions (improvisations?) are inspired by a poem or statement, a few of which are printed in the set’s lovely and otherwise comprehensive booklet.

The long journey from Blue Limelight concludes with Manzanar. Recorded just weeks before the lockdown in 2020, it showcases a four-part suite where Parker plays flutes and khaen with the Universal Tonality String Quartet. Manzanar was the first of the notorious concentration camps to which Japanese Americans were deported during World War II. Given the theme, there is little surprise that the quartet- violinists Jason Kao Hwang and Gwen Laster, violist Melanie Dyer and Dara Bloom on cello – respond with furious commitment and fiery playing where called for and mournful, elegiac gravity elsewhere. When overblown, Parker’s khaen, a Cambodian mouth organ, takes on the haunting quality of a distant train whistle, adding a haunting note to this sad saga of displacement and incarceration. The 50-minute suite would have been a stunning and substantial way to end the set. But Parker offers, as lagniappe, “On Being Native” featuring a different string quartet and alto saxophonist Daniel Carter.

It might go without saying that not all music on this giant set is equally compelling. The Fastest Train never really met me at the station. And nearly two albums of solo voice turned out to be a lot when encountered in two music-stuffed days, which is how I approached these 10 discs. Yet I would encourage you to do something similar if you can. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World is a banquet, not a series of snacks, offered by William Parker with generosity as vast and wondrous as the universe.

Listen.

William Parker’s Migration of Silence into and Out of the Tone World [Volumes 1-10] is available on Bandcamp.