© 2003 Jim Newman

William Parker has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.” After entering the New York music scene in 1972 at the age of 20, Parker quickly became the bass player of choice among his peers. Within a short time he was asked to play with established musicians such as Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Billy Higgins, and Sunny Murray. In 1980 he became a member of the Cecil Taylor Unit, in which he performed for over a decade. He now leads several groups, including the Curtis Mayfield Project, In Order to Survive, and the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, which has performed in the Verona Jazz Festival, Alice Tully Hall, and Banlieues Blues in Paris.

He is also a member of Other Dimensions in Music, a collective whose music is fully improvised. Parker’s many CDs are on Black Saint, AUM Fidelity, Homestead Records, and other labels. He has composed for opera, oratorio, ballet and film; he composed for the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater and re-orchestrated music from Dvorak ’s Rusalka, while exploring concepts of instrumentation for large and small ensembles. William Parker has published three volumes of poetry and is compiling a book of interviews with fellow improvisers. He continues to perform solo bass concerts with choreographer Patricia Nicholson and poet David Budbill, and also tours with In Order to Survive and The Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra.