Too cool for school

In 1973, the progressive music teacher in the east London Church of England school where I was working invited Stevens and his free jazz confrere Trevor Watts into the school for a day's sessions with her classes.

Stevens and Watts found a wholly enthusiastic and imaginatively intelligent response from the 100 per cent working-class students with whom they worked.

I was teaching nearby and I'll never forget hearing the beautiful, melodic sound of Blue Monk as I was teaching poetry, being tapped and whistled out by a class of intensely involved 12-year-olds in the classroom opposite.

By that date, the great Thelonious was locked in his long, latter-life silence in his New York apartment and I remember thinking: "If only he could hear this! He would marvel at the sound."

But it could not last. A less than groovy colleague complained about "the noise" and the equally backward school hierarchy ordered the music to be silenced and Stevens and Watts, two of the most brilliant jazz improvisers anywhere, to cease their work forthwith.

They left the school buildings, frustrated, bemused and angry. The students were left disappointed and bereft. It was educational ignorance and stupidness of the worst order and typical of the regime. A huge opportunity was lost.

So what a delight to savour the drums of the now deceased Stevens again, playing in a duo with the Bristolian saxophonist Evan Parker. Two sessions are included on a double CD, The Longest Night, from 1976, and Corner to Corner, from 1993.

By 1976, Stevens and Parker had been playing together for a decade as members of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, with other path-finding musicians such as Watts, Derek Bailey and Paul Rutherford. They knew each other's music intimately and empathetically, creating their own improvisational dialogue with a pioneering commitment and daring.

Parker plays soprano saxophone, Stevens plays drums without a bass drum, percussion and cornet. As soon as the opening track, 19.11, begins, there is a unique amalgam of sounds.

Although Stevens could play volcanic drums like an Art Blakey or Elvin Jones, here, he plays with fluttering cymbals and gently rolling snares, tapping his skins while Parker's gurgling reed converses with the percussive density.

All through the 73 minutes of the recording, there is a quiescent intensity of jazz comradeship intuitively realised and, when one or the other artist takes solo flight, as Parker does with an adenoidal sublimity in 19.44, part-spitting, part-screeching, part-burbling, part-babbling out his sounds, you can feel his silent confrere willing him forward.

Waxed some 16 years later, Corner to Corner may sound more competitive, even gladiatorial, by its title, but the two contenders' musical embrace is even more telling.

Parker's playing is beautifully fluid, as lucid as spring water as he plays many more phrases in a high, leaping register.

Stevens plays as if the world is full of percussion, as if he is prepared to test and sound any surface to make music, to touch, to tap, to strike, to scrape, to tinkle.

It made me think that this was a part of the lesson that he and Watts were teaching those engrossed Stepney children in their classroom three-and-a-half decades ago - that music comes from real sounds, real instruments, real objects, real connections and real lives. That is also the enduring message of this unique record.

CHRIS SEARLE