Teri Parker: Shaping the Invisible
Teri Parker

The quintet Toronto-based pianist Teri Parker assembled for her bandleader follow-up to 2017's In the Past impresses for, among other things, its cohesiveness. The musicians performing her material (along with tunes by Charlie Parker and British singer James Blake) on Shaping the Invisible demonstrate the kind of rapport characteristic of a band that's been together for years as opposed to one freshly hatched. In one sense, synergy is easily explained when Parker has a musical connection to each of the players: she's married to saxophonist Luis Deniz, attended University of Toronto with bassist Mark Godfrey (the lone holdover from In the Past), plays in the Radiohead tribute band Idioteque with drummer Ernesto Cervini, and has performed with trumpeter Andrew McAnsh before. With the latter appearing on three pieces only, the album's largely a quartet affair, though “Desolate Places” further reduces the number for a luminous duet between Parker and Deniz on soprano saxophone.

Being the beneficiary of a Toronto Arts Council grant allowed Parker to hunker down at home for hours at a time, absorbing and studying music by a large pool of artists and writing. Hints of influences emerge in the pieces that resulted, though they largely remain hints: reflecting her idiosyncratic sensibility and writing style, Shaping the Invisible is very much Parker's baby and hardly an exercise in mimicry. Over many months, the material that would become the album crystallized, and after workshopping the tunes live the five entered Toronto's Revolution Recording studio last December primed to give them physical form. Things start off well with “Becoming,” titled after Michelle Obama's memoir and illustrative of Parker's sophisticated writing and arranging talents. Advancing episodically, the through-composed piece begins with a contemplative rubato intro before settling into a warm groove highlighted by Deniz's singing alto and circumspect voicings by the leader. McAnsh perpetuates the silky mood with a florid solo exploration, Godfrey and Cervini complementing his statement with ever-inventive commentary. Deniz delivers an acrobatic reply before the theme returns to initiate a satisfying resolution.

Apparently written with Dewey Redman in mind, “Humph” sees a brushes-wielding Cervini expertly shadowing the horns' feints and showing why he's one of Toronto's go-to drummers. After an unaccompanied Godfrey introduces the tune, “Kitchen Timer Tune” makes good on a composition idea of Fred Hersch's that involves combating writer's block by setting a timer to forty-five minutes and writing within that time frame. The sultry, rather Spanish-tinged result Parker generated in this case calls to mind the image of a cape-swirling matador gracefully sidestepping an attacking bull. As a composition, “Kitchen Timer Tune” wouldn't have sounded out of place on Dream Keeper, the 1990 album by Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra. On the covers front, Parker's “Segment” receives a treatment that alternates between bluesy swing and freewheeling bop, a blistering Deniz leading the charge and Parker bluesy, whereas Blake's “Retrograde” gets a makeover that captures the unit's soulful side. At album's end, echoes of Monk quickly surface in Parker's angular piano intro to “Strolling” and continue on into trilling exchanges between the altoist and pianist.

Parker's ventured far and wide, to New York and Europe among other places, but her roots are solidly in Toronto. It's where she attended school—U of T and York University—and where she operates her Annex Academy of Music, located, naturally, in the city's Annex neighbourhood and boasting thirteen instructors and 300-plus students. The generosity of spirit exemplified by that large-scale project finds another outlet in the performances captured on her new release. That earlier-noted sense of connection might also, incidentally, be accounted for by the exceptional calibre of the musicians involved: players so skilled, experienced, and quick on their feet can assemble for the first time and still come across like an outfit of long-standing. These five show throughout her fine release they're eminently capable of, as per the album title, shaping the invisible and giving form to Parker's vision.

October 2023