In the words of Gargi Shindé, former AFA Board member:
To the community he calls home in the Lower East Side of New York City, the professional accomplishments of William Parker are not separate from his humanitarian vision to heal a world severed by capitalistic greed and hyper commodification of culture. Global consequences of American imperialism, labor exploitation, disenfranchisement in literacy and education, and aggressive urban gentrification—William’s creative repertoire is an unceasing response to the perpetually shifting targets of socio-political disenfranchisement.

As a world-renowned bassist, improviser, composer, poet, writer, and educator, William Parker brings together music, words, sound, and organizing through his innumerable recordings and live performances, operas, compositions for dance, plays, and much more. His practice, in a single lifetime, encompasses a range that evades even the most accomplished artists. He is the very embodiment of an arts ecosystem, without the spectre of corporate artifice and arts bureaucracy. William’s is a “True Self Art” as the American art critic and historian Donald Kuspit suggests, where “the self is in perpetual creative process,” a being “in perpetual metamorphic motion.” William has recorded over one hundred and fifty albums and has taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists who are today the successors of the free jazz music legacy. As notions of gender inclusivity devolve into a pervasive buzzword, William has for decades created spaces for women in the vanguard of his aesthetic experimentation within large and small ensembles, and with co-editor Renate Da Rin, he published Giving Birth to Sound, a collection of essays authored by forty-eight women sound artists from North America and the global south on their life experiences and creative processes.

In 2014, The Doris Duke Foundation awarded William its largest national prize to “propel leading artists” and unlock new levels of creativity. Indeed, as a Doris Duke Artist, William’s impact on the free jazz scene for over forty years at the time was acknowledged widely, and enabled him to publish his four-part book series Conversations, an invaluable cultural preservation project documenting the lives and practice of the free jazz community of artists and organizers, bringing those individuals, as William states, “out of the realms of myth and more into the realms of reality.”  Composer and MacArthur Fellow John Zorn has called Conversations, “oral history at its best.” 

William memorializes a movement and exemplifies the kind of artist that is becoming a rarity in contemporary America. He has resisted the devolvement and sublimation of his aesthetic into socially acceptable art, not because he inhabits the margins of the mainstream as a free jazz icon, but because he radically transforms the margins into locations of artistic power. Through his collaborations with a constellation of influential artists as Cecil Taylor, David S. Ware, Don Cherry, Hamid Drake, Jeanne Lee, Maxine Sullivan, Marilyn Crispell, Milford Graves, and Peter Brotzmann, and with William’s key collaborator, artistic and life partner and muse, his wife Patricia Nicholson, the primary force behind New York Sound Unity Festival (1984) and Vision Fest, the global music gathering of creative improvisers, William is, in poet Fred Moten’s words, “the most important artist living in the world today.”

What we inherit from William Parker as creative artists, listeners, and future patrons of free jazz, is a living heritage whose origins and practice are willed into the communal encounter every day in New York City. Despite a history of philanthropic divestment from this art, William and Patricia have infused the astonishment and wonder of free jazz into the American consciousness through child and youth programs where William’s distinct pedagogy imparts the values of this music to a new generation, and free programming to audiences of all ages throughout the community gardens of the Lower East Side neighborhood.