If you've never heard William Parker play, start with this: he sounds like he's playing three instruments at once. There's the low, wooden thump that keeps things grounded, then this bowed, keening cry that sits somewhere between a human voice and a foghorn, and underneath it all a rhythmic pulse that never quits, even when everyone else in the room has gone completely off the map. That's the trick with Parker. He came out of free jazz, a music people associate with chaos, but his whole reputation is built on being the guy who makes chaos feel like it has a floor under it.

He grew up in the Bronx and taught himself a lot of what he knows, though he also studied with players like Jimmy Garrison and Wilbur Ware, guys who knew exactly what a bass was supposed to do in a band even when the band decided to ignore the rules. By the mid-1970s he was deep in New York's loft jazz scene, playing with anyone doing serious improvised music, and by the late seventies he'd landed in Cecil Taylor's working group, where he stayed for close to a decade. That gig alone would be enough for most careers. For Parker it was just the warm-up. In the 1990s he became the anchor of David S. Ware's quartet, a group that made albums like Flight of i (1992) and Third Ear Recitation (1993) that still get pulled out as proof of what that decade's avant-garde could do.

Parker's own bands are where you really hear his personality. The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra is this sprawling, joyful, sometimes ramshackle big band that pulls in gospel, blues, marching band energy, and total-freedom improvisation all at once. His smaller groups, like In Order to Survive, do something similar on a tighter scale — check In Order to Survive (1995) if you want to hear how disciplined 'free' playing can actually be. He's also spent years in duo with drummer Hamid Drake, and that partnership is worth seeking out on its own, because Drake is one of the only drummers who can match Parker's sense of groove without smoothing out his edges.

What doesn't always get mentioned is how much Parker has done off the bandstand. With his wife, dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker, he co-founded the Vision Festival, which has been keeping New York's avant-garde jazz community alive and visible for decades, giving space to musicians who don't get much attention from the mainstream jazz industry. That's not a side note to his playing — it's part of the same instinct, the belief that this music needs people willing to hold the structure together so everyone else can push against it.

If you're new to Parker, don't go in expecting pretty. Go in expecting depth. His bass tone alone is worth the price of admission, thick and dark and full of overtones, the kind of sound that makes you feel it in your chest before you understand what he's doing with it. Once you get past the surface noise of free jazz — the squawks, the density, the lack of an obvious melody to hum — what you find underneath is one of the most patient, listening musicians the music has produced. He's not trying to overwhelm you. He's trying to build something you can actually stand inside.