Isaiah Collier & William Parker

Hot on the heels of their recent LP The Ancients (Eremite Records, 2025), recorded with the formidable William Hooker, Isaiah Collier and William Parker reunite for an intimate evening of improvisational duets complementing George Condo’s Pastels at Sprüth Magers. 

In Collier’s work as a performer, composer, and educator, he addresses the many intersections of Black music with struggles for freedom, describing jazz as “a message of the ancestors.” His inspired tenor and soprano saxophone playing, both as a bandleader and a sideman, unites the spiritual and free jazz tributaries of Great Black Music into a single flowing stream of consciousness. While his improvisations evoke the sound of Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, his idiosyncratic overblowing forebears, his compositions reveal the influence of his hometown’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, where he learned from members like Ernest Dawkins and Ari Brown. Parker, meanwhile, has been a central figure in creative improvised music since his first session as a sideman for Frank Lowe’s Black Beings (ESP-Disk, 1973). He is a founding member of the Feel Trio with Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley, as well as two large ensembles, the Little Huey Creative Orchestra and Little Huey Big Band, and he has contributed to recordings on over a hundred and fifty albums—most notably, with Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, Milford Graves, Peter Kowald, and David S. Ware. In addition to publishing his own writing, he has collected his interviews with other musicians in the book series Conversations (RogueArt, 2011–2023) and been the subject of the biography Universal Tonality (Duke University Press, 2021).