May Spring Last a Lifetime is the first duo release from improvising tenor saxophonists Tom Challenger and Evan Parker, and was released by False Walls in August 2026.
The CD booklet includes a 4,000 word conversation between Tom and Evan. What follows is the first part of that conversation.
CJ Mitchell [False Walls] So when did you start playing together?
Tom Challenger We played a quartet gig, didn’t we, at The Vortex [London], which must be about six or seven years ago now, with John Edwards and Mark Sanders. We did two sets, and one you played soprano, and one was tenor. And I remember the tenor set was a lot more effective.
Evan Parker It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me now. I think I’ve come to a kind of fork in the road, and it’s either a tenor gig or a soprano gig. Partly because carrying both on public transport is quite a challenge, and the risk of leaving one or the other behind. So there are many non-philosophical reasons, practical reasons, for sticking to one or the other, but fortunately, the practical tallies with the philosophical, because I see them as two different streams now. I have to play tenor here; I could take soprano but I don’t need to. I have to play soprano here; I could take the tenor but I don’t need to. It’s like that now for me. It’s helped me, it’s clarified a lot of how to proceed, how to prepare for particular situations.
Tom We first rehearsed duo at The Hot Tin [Faversham]. You had two tenor saxophones, but no soprano — another variation in the fork in the road! [laughs] This is where talking about your musical instrument, your subject, whatever you want to call it, during the playing became a really important part of what we did. It’s a new way of doing it, it was a new way for me playing in a duo. The whole idea of a piece or something like this was gone. It was just a …
Evan … process.
Tom You get together, you know. It was a social interaction.
Evan Later we rehearsed a couple of times in a big sportshall, then it seemed we needed a slightly smaller space to hear the detail more precisely. At a certain point, it’s like, okay, we’re ready, we can do something. There’s an understanding there now. It’s not about my playing or your playing, it’s about our playing. What is that about? What have we found? Do we now have a basis to operate securely from, without on the one hand the fear of upsetting the other person or on the other hand disappointing the other person, you know? So with two tenor saxophones, they have a shared language as instruments and I think we both have a relationship with the saxophone which is: what does this thing do, what can it do? I’ve learned things from Tom that he has discovered: you can do this and can I approximate that? Can I incorporate that into my language or my relationship with the output of the instrument? I’m always a bit concerned about the use of that word: the ‘output’ from the instrument.
Tom Yeah, ‘output’’s nice. [laughs] But we’d talk about how we talk on the saxophone, if you like. We’d talk about when those new things were coming out. I mean, I did a lot of new things for myself in the duos. And there was always this conversation about space for those new things to come out and then sort of dance between us, leaving the space for that thing to happen.
Evan I think the idea of conversation is not the best analogy. But it is often used. Dance is a much better analogy. It’s acoustic dancing, really, in the sense of looking for locking patterns. ‘Dancing in your head’, as the great Ornette Coleman put it. But I think he meant that in a different way. I think he got fed up with people saying ‘can you dance to it?’ and he said, ‘yes, dance in your head’. Which is profound, like a lot of the things that Ornette said. It appears oversimplified until you really give it the space it deserves in your own head, you know.
