2013 · Album
Rocket Science
Recorded Live at the Vortex, London · Not verifiable from provided sources · Produced by Not verifiable from provided sources
Four Minds Meeting at the Vortex
This music takes concentration, but there is beauty to be found in it for those willing to make the effort.
Rocket Science exists because Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Craig Taborn, and Sam Pluta decided to play together in a room at the Vortex in London. That decision mattered. Evans had already worked with Parker in his Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and recorded Scenes in the House of Music with the Parker-Guy-Lytton trio. Taborn had played piano in Parker's Transatlantic Art Ensemble, which recorded Boustrophedon. Pluta was part of Evans' Quintet, documented on Ghosts. The musicians knew each other's work, trusted each other's ears, and came in ready to listen as much as to play.
What they made was not easy listening. The quartet operates in open forms where conventional song structures vanish. Evans' trumpet and Parker's saxophone trade space with Taborn's unpredictable piano voicings and Pluta's electronic interventions. Nobody's leading, nobody's following — they're solving problems together in real time. The energy stays high but the textures shift constantly, sometimes dense, sometimes sparse enough to hear everyone thinking. This is improvisation that demands as much from the listener as from the players.
The Vortex performance became the album because it captured something real: four musicians at the start of a tour, still figuring out what this collaboration could be. That opening night in London leads into concerts at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam and the Moers Festival in Germany, but this is where it began. JazzTimes reviewer Bill Beuttler acknowledged the ask — concentration required, but beauty waiting on the other side for listeners willing to meet the music halfway.
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The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
