Christopher Parker & The Band Of Guardian Angels | "Soul Food"

This is the sound of an artist becoming what he is, manifesting what was inside him for a very long time. Of course, Christopher Parker is no newcomer to music. First mentored by pianist Charles Thomas (whose 1996 album The Finishing Touch! was recorded with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins), Parker has played piano and organ for over three decades in Little Rock, Memphis, New York, and now Little Rock again. But lately, all the musical choices he makes have been distilled down to what resonates on the most personal of levels. “The ideal is to mature and age in a way where you're ripening, rather than decaying,” he laughs, and that's at the heart of his debut album, Soul Food. 

Parker has worked the genre known as free jazz for most of his musical life, or at least since the 1990's, when he bucked the conventions of music school at the University of Memphis (which features a long list of legendary jazz alums) by playing with the likes of Frank Lowe and George Cartwright. That was also when he met his wife-to-be, Kelley Hurt, a true artistic partner, whose voice, reminiscent of Jeanne Lee, graces this album with everything from whispers to wails. 

In the years after, Parker kept playing, studying and teaching jazz, often with Hurt, and gained some local renown, but nearly five years ago a sea change came about: The couple was commissioned to write music celebrating the Little Rock Nine, heroic high school students who defied local segregationists in 1957, resulting in their No Tears Suite in 2017. That quickly led to the decidedly less-arranged free jazz outfit Dopolarians, where the couple joined Chad Fowler (Parker's old friend) and Kidd Jordan on saxophones, William Parker on bass, and the late, great Alvin Fielder on drums.  

Suddenly, the floodgates of in-the-moment creativity within Parker opened like never before, as new projects for Fowler's Mahakala Music label followed in quick succession. In one lightning bolt of a week in New York, he and Hurt recorded both Nothing But Love, a tribute to Frank Lowe, and enough tracks for both Parker's debut, Soul Food, and its as-yet-unreleased follow up. 

For Parker, a longtime gigging musician, something inside was stirred. “It was starting to happen when the Dopolarians recorded,” he says, “but I was still getting my mind together at that point. Then about a year later, the Dopolarians played in Memphis, and something clicked in my head, like I'd been waiting for years for it to happen. Soon after that, the world stopped because of a pandemic; I had time to think. And I said, 'Maybe your job on earth is not to play every week at local bars. Maybe that's not your ultimate purpose. You certainly did your time with it, but when are you gonna get down and make an artistic statement and just go there? Quit tiptoeing around it and BE IT.'”

For Parker, Soul Food is the most perfect statement of that impulse, precisely because it is the most personal. As Parker notes, “Kelley and I were friends with Art Jenkins, who sang with Sun Ra. And he used to tell us, 'When you make music, it comes from your inner spirit. People don't have any choice. They have an inner spirit too, and their inner spirit is going to recognize your inner spirit.' It's a moth to a flame kind of thing. It's gonna get a reaction, because your inner spirit is gonna speak to their inner spirit, and it's beyond the surface ego plane.” With those words to guide him, he pieced together the ensemble for Soul Food. 

An ego-less approach brought spontaneity and flexibility to the sessions. “I picked the players I did on purpose. The first day was just me, Daniel Carter (winds), William Parker (bass, shakuhachi flute) and Gerald Cleaver (drums), and Kelley. It was a quartet with some vocals. We literally sat down and just started playing. No chord charts, no nothing. Daniel, for instance, only wants to improvise. When I realized that, I said, 'Okay, I 'm not going to be in charge of anything. I picked great musicians, so what do I look like telling them what to do, anyway?'

“Meanwhile, there was a Vision Festival going on in New York at the time, during which we ran into this woman, Jaimie Branch, and we just started hanging out together, not knowing who she was. Then it turns out she's this trumpet player who's on the gig we're going to see! So we asked her to play on the record and she came the second day. And those tracks make up Soul Food.”

The absolute freedom with which they play, accentuated by Hurt's intimate vocals, redefines freedom itself. This is not the freedom of chaos, but a freedom from within. Summing up, Parker reflects, “In the last three or four years, my music has been transforming into something more personal and meaningful. 'I'm gonna make this music with purpose.' Or, as Alvin Fielder used to say 'Buck naked.' We're going out buck naked. I'm not putting up a front. It's just me. And that's really hard to do. You have to avoid narcissism. And if you really tap into that inner spirit, you will affect people when they hear you play.”