Transatlantic Trance Map — Marconi's Drift

The ascent of Autumn seems perfect for the release of this absorbing and profound improvisational journey from the minds of renowned European free jazz pioneer Evan Parker and composer, producer and sound designer, Matthew Wright. Borne of the duo’s Trance Map project, Marconi’s Drift is an hour-long live performance recorded in 2022 by two sets of players on opposite sides of the pond aka the newly expanded Transatlantic Trance Map. It features seven musicians based at The Hot Tin in Kent including Parker on his soprano sax and Matt Wright on electronics - more specifically, turntable, live sampling and processing and six at Brooklyn’s Roulette venue, all of whom sound in their improvisational, jazz-infused element.

“The musicians involved in this piece are based either side of the Atlantic – essentially from the London and New York scenes,” says the eighty-year-old Parker in the liner notes. “They are all seasoned and distinguished members of the global community of improvisers that has grown out of the various strands of free jazz, open improvisation and real-time electronic music during my playing lifetime.”

Parker and Wright first met back in 2008 and began playing around with field recordings, sampling, and the looping and processing of Parker’s inventive sax lines; and low, the eponymously titled Trance Map project was born. Since then, it has evolved into a series of recordings and live events as the pair decided to take their electronically underscored version of European free jazz across the continent hooking up with guest performers such as Toma Gouband, Peter Evans, Hannah Marshall and Barry Guy along the way. They even fashioned a spin off for 2019’s Big Ears Festival featuring a State-side version of the group, which was followed by the duo’s sophomore album, Trance Map+ / Crepuscule in Nickelsdorf on which some of the US coterie, including Adam Linson, appeared. But as is part of most artists’ stories these days, the pandemic saw Parker and Wright having to baton down the hatches, ditch live venues and revert instead to streaming their performances, which brings us back full circle to the origins of Marconi’s Drift.

The two venues, the Hot Tin and the Roulette, were selected as they are what Parker deemed to be “musician-friendly work-spaces” boasting good reach to the right type of audience. To ensure the performances were in sync, the pair opted for SonoBus open-source software, something they had used previously for a similar cross-national live improvisation experiment and Parker then proceeded to assemble the basic structure of how he thought the performance was going to play out, centring on a sequence of combinations that incorporated duos and trios, but which was loose enough to give the musicians room to expand, evolve and experiment.

Replete with as many electronic devices as traditional instruments, the 55-minute concert went through Wright’s post-production and was brought together as one extended piece of improvisation. A miasma of exploration - this performance relies as heavily on electronic adventure as it does jazz innovation and as a result consistently skirts the bounds of originality and innovation – for the musically curious this is as rich as it is rewarding. Listen here.