WASHINGTON POST HITS AVANT-GARDE ARTIST FOR VACCINE DISSENT:
Even people who have never heard of Evan Parker and wouldn’t care for his music should note the ominous precedent that was embedded within the Washington Post’s review of his latest album, Descension (Out of Our Constrictions) with the Natural Information Society, a group of far-out jazzmen from Chicago. The Post’s popular music (a category in which the master saxophonist defiantly does not belong) critic, Chris Richards, was full of praise for “the tenacious British saxophonist Evan Parker,” and said that the album “felt responsive, propulsive and alive.” However: “Parker is 77, musically collegial, but a covid-19 denier.”
Richards went on to note with unconcealed lemming outrage that “in an interview published in April,” Parker “described the pandemic as ‘a sham’ designed to ‘harvest DNA and sell vaccines.’ Just like that, his remarks threatened to make his deeply empathetic new music make no sense at all.”
Wait a minute here. This is not vocal music. Neither Evan Parker nor anyone else says a word on the album, either about the COVID hysteria or anything else. Yet the Washington Post would have us believe that Parker’s COVID and vaccine skepticism “threatened” — threatened! — to render his new music meaningless.
This is pure Maoism: if your political views are not aligned with those of the elites, then everything you do is tainted and worthless. Like virtually all avant-garde artists, Parker has been reliably socialist up to now, but the Left doesn’t give out lifetime achievement awards. Chris Richards loves the music and waxes poetic about it: “this new album that Parker has made with Natural Information Society sounds like life, as if the band’s signature groove might be a growing, changing, living, breathing thing.” Parker’s astonishing technique is “inherently dazzling.” But Richards can’t let go of the fact that Parker is also a dissenter from everything he thinks is good and true: “So how could someone this attentive on the bandstand, this empathetic in song, this worldly in his playing come to the conclusion that a decimating global pandemic isn’t real? It baffles and burns.”
Richards also includes a veiled warning: “It’ll be a shame if Parker’s denialism ultimately fouls this band’s great art.” How could it, unless smarmy little fascists such as Chris Richards work to get Parker canceled and discredited because he has dared to enunciate politically unacceptable opinions? Parker’s music has nothing whatsoever to do with his politics: I myself have been entranced with it and fascinated by it for decades despite the fact that Parker has always been a man of the Left.
It’s the same playbook the Post ran on (the infinitely better known) Eric Clapton last year. “It’ll be a shame if Parker’s denialism ultimately fouls this band’s great art” sounds a bit too close to the rhetoric of Monty Python’s resident Mafioso characters Dino and Luigi Vercotti: “Nice career you have. Shame if something were to happen to it.”
