Joe McPhee
Joe McPhee (1939) is a US multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist and theoretician. He is currently the member of Trio X, Survival Unit III and has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Raymond Boni, The Thing, Trespass Trio, and Universal Indians among many others. With a career spanning nearly 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forge new connections and reach for music’s outer limits.
Joe McPhee (1939) is a US multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist and theoretician. He is currently the member of Trio X, Survival Unit III and has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Raymond Boni, The Thing, Trespass Trio, and Universal Indians among many others. With a career spanning nearly 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forge new connections and reach for music’s outer limits.
Tenor
There are lots of outstanding Joe McPhee LPs. Nation Time being chief among them, but there's also Pieces Of Light, Oleo and Topology. The Poughkeepsie, New York-based multi-instrumentalist, by now an international star of free music, has amassed a daunting discography, no doubt. If you want to peer deeply into the soul of Joe McPhee, however, there's no way around it, you need to spend some quality time with Tenor.
" Tenor is McPhee's first solo record. He did not set out to make it. It was an …
The Willisau Concert
Joe McPhee's first international release, Black Magic Man, was issued on the newly formed Hat Hut imprint in 1975. It was a watershed moment for the 35-year-old musician. Based in Poughkeepsie, New York, he was too far away from Manhattan to have participated extensively in the Loft Jazz happenings of the decade. European exposure, however, would give McPhee an alternative circuit, something of an escape route from the trappings of American cultural myopia.
" In support of the new record for thi…
Black Magic Man
Black Magic Man is arguably the pivotal Joe McPhee release. It bridged the span between the regional and the international, bypassing the national altogether. "Recorded in the same sessions that produced Nation Time, Black Magic Man consists of music not chosen for that LP. Like its much-feted sister, technically it falls under the domain of CjR, Craig Johnson's herculean effort in support of McPhee. An erstwhile painter, Johnson became a self-taught audio engineer, acquiring equipment expressly…
Musings Of A Bahamian Son
Joe McPhee is one of the great multi-instrumentalists of contemporary improvised music. His instrumental battery has included saxophones, clarinets, valve trombone, pocket trumpet, sound-on-sound tape recorder, and space organ, but another arrow in his quiver is text. McPhee has been writing poems since the 1970s. He occasionally introduces one into performance, as an introduction or afterword to music, and in recent years he's been known to do full-on readings, text only, featuring his inimitab…
Creole Gardens (A New Orleans Suite)
*2023 stock* The title already suggests the content is inspired by the devastation of hurricane Katrina in 2005. And it is without a doubt the best musical performance dedicated to the catastrophic event (as by Terence Blanchard or Wynton Marsalis). How to be all soul and all spirit with just two instruments and remain captivating and compelling from beginning to end may seem like a great challenge to many, but these two fantastic mugicians do it.
Oblique Strategies
Black Truffle is pleased to welcome free jazz legend Joe McPhee back to the fold with Oblique Strategies, a wild trio recorded in Antwerp in 2018 in the company of Mette Rasmussen’s fire-breathing alto saxophone and Dennis Tyfus’s post-Fluxus antics on tape, voice, and percussion. Rasmussen and Tyfus have previously recorded together as Bazuinschal, and some similar strategies are on display here: mysterious metallic scrapes, extended tones in which voice and sax become indistinguishable, comic …
A Night In Alchemia
"This was a fine album, an excellent snapshot of working band at the peak of their not inconsiderable powers." - Tim Niland
Nation Time
2022 Repress. "Joe McPhee's solo album, Tenor literally changed my life. The recording (one of his first for Hat Hut, in September 1976) displayed his unique ability to integrate unconventional sounds and extended techniques with pure melodicism, and it permanently altered my perspective on what the saxophone could do and what music could be. Nation Time was recorded six years earlier, but ideas regarding the integration of means and methods were already at the forefront of McPhee's approach to …
Let Our Rejoicing Rise
*2022 stock* In the year that Juneteenth was finally declared a national U.S. holiday, 2021, Joe McPhee and Tomeka Reid united for a live concert in celebration. Multi-instrumentalist McPhee was deeply moved by the historical nature of the circumstances, the incredible freight of that history of oppression and liberation represented in the legislation, both the insanity of its overdueness and the joy of its institutionalization. As a preamble to the music, McPhee led off with two poems, read wit…
Existential Moments
The 3rd album from the touring trio of Joe McPhee on trumpet & tenor sax, John Edwards on double bass and Klaus Kugel on drums, following their previous NotTwo releases A Night In Alchemia and Journey To Parazzar, here captured live at FreeJazzSaar 2019, in Saarbrucken, Germany for a boisterously exciting set of three collective improvisations, including a tip of the hat to Charles Gayle.
Sweet Nothings (for Milford Graves)
*In process of stocking.* Two masters of wind instruments blowing in from the Windy City. In 2003, as part of the seventh annual Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music, Joe McPhee and Evan Parker squared off for a round of intimate dialogues. The resulting recording is just the second time they had played as a duet, the previous also being in Chicago, at a studio in 1998, where the limited their instrumentarium to tenor saxophones, resulting in the Okka Disc classic Chicago Tenor Duets…
Quod
*2022 stock* Experimental improvisation from three masterful players --Joe McPhee on soprano sax, Sylvain Guerineau on tenor saxophone, and Jean-Marc Foussat on synthesizer and voice--recording in France in 2010 for two extended works of concentrated and diverse dialog.
McPhee Marker
Chicago-based saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark was invited to arrange a set of seventies music for a concert in 2019, and among the pieces he chose were tracks by funk legends Parliament and post-punk iconoclasts DNA. On this 12-inch 45rpm EP, Vandermark's band Marker presents a unique take on "Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples," drawn from Parliament's 1975 LP Mothership Connection, and DNA's "Egomaniac's Kiss," which first appeared on the classic 1978 Brian Eno-produced collection No …
Visitation
This 1983 recording, originally issued on Sackville LP, features jazz trumpeter Joe McPhee with the Bill Smith Ensemble.
” …a stimulating set of avant-garde music. The interplay between these masterful improvisors on group originals and Albert Ayler’s classic ‘Ghosts’ is consistently impressive and worthy of a close investigation by the more open-eared segment of the jazz audience.” — Scott Yanow, Allmusic
“Vistation breathes as if it were music that was recorded yesterday. Joe McPhee…
Route 84 Quarantine Blues
Joe McPhee’s response to the challenge of making a new CD of solo music during Covid was to go at it head on, to address the present in its starkest aspects, to reach for comfort in the music of great composers, and to speak directly to the virus in no uncertain terms. The result is unlike any other of McPhee’s many records, a variety show of improvisations, favorite compositions, field recording, multi-tracking, incantation and recitation. After searching for the right studio-like setting wit…
Let The Free Be Men
CD version. Music by four strong individual players with room for eruptive solo-parts, but always held together by intense communication and beautiful interwoven melodies. The quartet's second album A History Of Nothing got a huge number of excited reviews: "A superb quartet outing. The music is all improvised, but it's firmly rooted in jazz, with superb interaction between all of the players, both on ripping, high-velocity blowouts and more delicate forays." --Peter Margasak (Chicago Reader) "…
Let The Free Be Men (Lp)
LP version. Music by four strong individual players with room for eruptive solo-parts, but always held together by intense communication and beautiful interwoven melodies. The quartet's second album A History Of Nothing (TROST 170CD/LP) got a huge number of excited reviews: "A superb quartet outing. The music is all improvised, but it's firmly rooted in jazz, with superb interaction between all of the players, both on ripping, high-velocity blowouts and more delicate forays." --Peter Margasak (C…
Unquenchable Fire
Joe McPhee's Unquenchable Fire, a work inspired by Rachel Pollack's award-winning novel of the same title, was commissioned by The Deep Listening Institute for the Deep Listening Band and premiered at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. The Deep Listening Band explores the sensual combination of musical sound combined with natural sound, as well as the sounds of daily life and one's own thoughts. One never knows what Pauline Oliveros will do next, but whatever it is, she is sure to go beyond boundaries…
The Mystery J
Yet another triumph from the legendary multi-instrumentalist, Joe McPhee, Corbett Vs. Dempsey drops "The Mystery J", their first ever full-length vinyl release, issued in a limited edition of 500 copies. Recorded in 2014 with violist Jen Clare Paulson and Brian Labycz on electronics, it writhes with bristling tension, while retaining a remarkably minimal form. Visionary experimentalism and freejazz reimagined on entirely singular terms, 'The Mystery J' encounters McPhee producing some of his bes…
Voices: Ten Improvisations
This superb pairing of two top-flight improvisors reminds me of why I listen to this music. It’s not about ‘music’, it’s about sounds and their making. It’s a given that these two can really ‘play’. Joe McPhee established that in the immediate post-Coltrane era, and Heward – while I know little about him except that he’s also a visual artist who recorded a duo album on Avant with Steve Lacy – I’m sure he can really whack those tubs. The point, however, is that they don’t ‘just play’, they also l…