Evan Parker came out of the same London scene that gave us Derek Bailey, and like Bailey he decided early on that bebop harmony and song form were someone else's problem. He wanted the saxophone itself — the overtones, the multiphonics, the weird stuff that happens when you blow two notes at once and let the horn fight it out. Circular breathing became his signature trick, the ability to keep air moving in and out without ever stopping the sound, which meant his solo pieces could run on in a single unbroken stream for twenty minutes or more. It sounds like a loop pedal except there is no pedal. It's just lungs and a lot of practice.

His solo records are the place to really hear this up close. Saxophone Solos (1976) is the one people point to first, a record where he is essentially having a conversation with himself through the horn, layering patterns that seem to come from two or three players instead of one. It is not easy listening in the coffee-shop sense, but it is mesmerizing in the way watching someone solve a Rubik's cube at speed is mesmerizing — you don't need to know the trick to appreciate that a trick is happening.

Parker didn't work alone, though. He spent years in the trio with Derek Bailey and drummer Paul Lytton, a group that basically wrote the rulebook for free improvisation in Britain by refusing to have a rulebook at all. Topography of the Lungs (1970) came out of that world, all three players reacting in real time with no safety net. He also co-founded Incus Records with Bailey, because nobody else was going to put this stuff out, and he spent time in Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra and alongside Peter Brötzmann in the louder, more combative corners of European free jazz — Brötzmann's own Machine Gun (1968) gives you a sense of the temperature of that scene.

What's interesting about Parker is that he never really calmed down into respectability the way some free players eventually do. He kept pushing into electronics later in his career, adding live processing to the solo soprano sound, treating his own saxophone like raw material to be bent further. If you come to him expecting melody and resolution you will be frustrated. If you come expecting one of the most committed sound-explorers jazz ever produced, you'll get exactly that, and probably more than you bargained for.