Jazz
False Walls · 7 August 2026
Two tenor saxophones and nothing else — no bass, no drums, no piano. It was cut on 17 May 2025 at Arco Barco in Ramsgate, recorded and mastered by Filipe Gomes, and it arrives as a single fifty-three-minute track. It is the first duo record by the two of them and Evan Parker’s fifth appearance on the False Walls roster.
How they got there is set out by the label: years of informal practice sessions and then two live performances before the session. The first time they played together at all was a quartet gig at The Vortex in London with John Edwards and Mark Sanders, which Challenger places “six or seven years” before the conversation published in August 2026. They did two sets, one with Parker on soprano and one on tenor, and he remembers the tenor set working a great deal better. Parker explains there that he has come to a fork in the road and now treats tenor and soprano as two separate streams, for philosophical reasons and also because carrying both on public transport is a challenge.
The first duo rehearsal was at The Hot Tin in Faversham, where Parker turned up with two tenors and no soprano. Talking about the instrument while playing became part of the method: “the whole idea of a piece or something like this was gone”, says Challenger, and Parker finishes the sentence for him with “process”. They later rehearsed a couple of times in a big sports hall and ended up looking for a smaller room to hear the detail. Parker’s formulation: “It’s not about my playing or your playing, it’s about our playing.”
And that fifty-three-minute continuity is a construction: by the account in the booklet conversation, Challenger reordered the sections after the session. The record, though, is pressed and issued as one continuous piece, and the label does not explain it on the release page or in the extract of the conversation it has put online. The people who have explained it are the reviewers who read the whole booklet. Parker’s discography is full of saxophone duets that are what they claim to be, with Joe McPhee or John Tchicai, and it is hard to square the form Parker describes as the one with nowhere to hide with a reordering done after the fact.
That phrase is his own and it sits in the booklet: “Duo is the simplest form of group playing. And so it’s the simplest, the purest in a certain sense, and the most challenging. There’s nowhere to hide, really. It’s about the exchange.” Challenger describes the opposite effect, moments “where there’s no one, and then there’s moments where there are four or five”. Parker recorded it at eighty-one (he was born in April 1944). It comes on CD in a six-panel gatefold sleeve with photographs by Caroline Forbes, and they launched it at Cafe Oto in London on 21 July and at The Hot Tin on 25 September.
Rating: 8.3/10
Text by Aina Torrents