{"id":3650,"date":"2022-01-10T13:47:06","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T19:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/?p=3650"},"modified":"2022-01-10T13:47:12","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T19:47:12","slug":"migration-silence-william-parker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/migration-silence-william-parker\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: William Parker’s ‘Migration of Silence into and Out of the Tone World [Volumes 1-10]’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u00a0gesamtkunstwerk<\/em>\u00a0look like a middle school art project.\u00a0\u00a0Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World\u00a0<\/em>(AUM Fidelity, 2021), is its apotheosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

The disc,\u00a0Blue Limelight<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n