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.
AC/DC
Two totally infectious sets from Decoy -- the trio of John Edwards, Steve Noble, and Alexander Hawkins -- reunited with pocket trumpet and saxophone player Joe McPhee on the closing night of his four day residency at Cafe OTO. In the eight years between the recordings which make up AC/DC and their last release Spontaneous Combustion, Decoy and each of its members have been practicing individually at the very top of their form. Coming together again in such celebratory circumstances and in the go…
No Time Left for Sadness
Despite having worked together in innumerable settings, including the longstanding Survival Unit III, with drummer Michael Zerang, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee have never released a CD of duets. In an extra intimate studio setting in upstate New York, where both players reside, No Time Left for Sadness demonstrates their incredible musical understanding. Recalling some of McPhee's landmark records with Marseilles musicians in terms of telepathy and trust, it's a…
Largest Afternoon
One day in the studio, something ridiculously great happened. It was deep Chicago winter, cold as shit. Four musicians assembled for a round-robin set of improvisations -- duets, trios, a few quartets. Approached casually, the late morning bloomed into Largest Afternoon, 15 crackling encounters between guitarist Arto Lindsay, saxophonists Joe McPhee, and Ken Vandermark, and drummer Phil Sudderberg. No expectations -- open minds and creative intent. Lindsay, a brilliant singer and songwriter and …
Invitation to a Dream
**CD version** First release from the first time trio of legends Susan Alcorn, Joe McPhee and Ken Vandermark. Invitation to a Dream is not only the first recorded statement, it is also a document of the very first meeting of the trio. Back in 2016 we asked Alcorn and McPhee to play a duo set at our favorite festival Cropped Out in Louisville, KY, and after getting our minds blown we knew we had to get the duo into a studio to record an album. After a few failed attempts due to schedules and bad …
Live in the Batcave
Black Truffle invite you to an evening of drunken revelry in the Batcave! After a chance meeting at a local supermarket in Poughkeepsie, New York, Joe McPhee and Graham Lambkin have performed together as a duo extensively in recent years, in addition to their joint work excavating some of the wildest tapes from McPhee's archive for Lambkin's now defunct Kye label. Live in the Batcave documents an evening the two friends spent together in the company of Joe's brother Charlie and Lambkin's son Oli…
A Night In Alchemia
A Night In Alchemia was recorded by Joe McPhee (trumpet and saxophones), John Edwards (double bass) and Klaus Kugel (drums). The improvisations of this trio always have exceptional sound and are filled with inventive, interesting, innovative and bright decisions. Eclectic ideas, organic stylistic allusions, sound experiments, moody and sudden changes, contrasting pieces, an influenze of various jazz styles and musicians unique sound – all these elements are gently combined together. The music is…
Lift Every Voice and Sing
**500 copies, strictly no repress** Smalltown Supersound are going hard on the free jazz this year - so much so that they've set up new sub-label Actions For Free Jazz to accommodate the load. This was the slogan for Smalltown Superjazzz and was borrowed at the time from Don Cherry and Krystzof Penderecki’s The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra track Actions For Free Jazz Orchestra from the 1971 album Actions. The inspiration for the label is BYG Actuel, Incus, Freedom and ESP-Disk. AFJ's latest fora…
Tree Dancing
This recording from the earlier years of Cafe Oto documents the impossible pairing of four contemporary giants. It's the reason the venue opened in the first place, for miraculous one-off groupings like this. "The magic of the first minutes -- an alto solo by Joe McPhee of true purity -- soft-spoken, masterful and accomplished -- brought back to mind the blissful Coleman/Haden duet last year at the Royal Festival Hall. 'Ornette gave me freedom to move in a certain way,' said McPhee. He searched …
Seattle Symphony
Kye is proud to present Seattle Symphony, the new LP by Poughkeepsie's Joe McPhee. 'Seattle has become my home away from home, my second city, since first being invited to join trombonist Stuart Dempster for duets in 1984. When the opportunity for a solo concert arose, I learned of the passing of Bill Dixon and Fred Anderson and decided to make the focus of the performance a celebration of the lives, and music, of these two legendary heroes, who both passed away in June of 2010, within 8 days of…
The Paris Concert
** restocked** Kye is proud to present The Paris Concert, the second installment in our Joe McPhee archival series, following 2015's To Be Continued. Recorded May 13th 2015 The Paris Concert documents a historical private performance held in a 5th floor Paris apartment to an invited audience of 15 people. '40 years after a chance meeting in 1975 at The American Center in Paris, Raymond Boni (guitar), Jean Marc Foussat (synthesizer) and Joe McPhee (tenor/pocket trumpet) reunite with an impromptu …
The Fire Each Time
This landmark production from the renowned Polish label is finally here! Not Two Records presents, "The Fire Each Time," a 6 CD boxset of recordings from the DKV Trio with Joe McPhee as a guest, and dedicated to James Baldwin. The music was recorded during the quartet's tour in Europe which took place in November of 2017, and at shows in Chicago and Milwaukee from December of that year. These performances are historic in many respects: the DKV Trio (with Hamid Drake [drums], Kent Kessler [bass]…
At The Hill Of James Magee
At The Hill Of James Magee presents the duos complete performance at the extraordinary monument "The Hill" in the Chihuahuan Desert in the middle of nowhere in Texas. John Butcher and Joe McPhee had never shared a stage before which ended up being an attentive collaboration, starting with a long duo, alternating solo performances, and closing the atmospheric set with another duo. Personnel: Joe McPhee - alto sax; John Butcher - tenor sax.
Keep Going
It's easy to be cynical these days, maybe difficult to imagine that music can change the world, but not for Joe McPhee and Hamid Drake. With Keep Going, they will make the planet a better place for humanity, a place to be humane, to preserve humankind. At 78 years old, Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist McPhee is a national treasure, and he's making more music than ever before, pushing himself to tour incessantly, issuing astonishing new records at a fierce rate. But this release, with legendary…
Brace For Impact
Some recordings, the world is just not ready for them when they're made. In 2008, Swedish born, Austrian resident saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and Poughkeepsie, New York multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee made a suite of studio recordings, Brace For Impact that they loved so much they immediately culled, mixed, and mastered them. A decade later, when the original label for which they were planned had not yet issued them, Gustafsson and McPhee offered them to Corbett Vs. Dempsey, and when the label …
One Day... A Lightning Storm
**Edition of 200. Comes with a 20pages booklet** This very special limited edition release features excerpts from Joe McPhee’s conversation with John Corbett and is accompanied by the complete interview in a beautifully designed 20 page booklet. It’s release coincides with the Blank Forms celebration of Joe’s career. Joe McPhee is a saxophonist, improviser, American musical iconoclast, and a storyteller. A lucky few have been able to hear the stories of Joe’s life, usually after concerts, and of…
Journey To Parazzar
Recorded at Metallurgov House Of Culture in the Ukraine as the 2nd concert of their tour, the trio of Joe McPhee (trumpet, alto saxophone), John Edwards (double bass), and Klaus Kugel (drums) present a masterful concert that includes a 29-minute "Re-Hairing In Zaporozhye" a 19-minute "To Rush At The Wind", and a wonderfully unconventional tribute to Cecil Taylor
A History of Nothing
Great dedicated music by four strong individual players, brought together by Rodrigo Amado -- intense communication with room for outbreaking solo-parts but always held together through a vision of playing together, all the time exiting and interwoven with beautiful melodies. Personnel: Rodrigo Amado - tenor saxophone; Joe McPhee - pocket trumpet, soprano saxophone; Kent Kessler - double bass; Chris Corsano - drums.
From Outer Space
**sold out at source, few copies left**At age 78, Joe McPhee shows no sign of slowing down. Plan B is the master improviser's new trio, with James Keepnews on guitar and laptop and David Berger on drums. A soundtrack to a science fiction movie existing only in their heads, From Outer Space finds McPhee and company envisioning the first encounter between alien life and a delegation of earthlings (while giving a nod to jazz's original man from another planet, Sun Ra, with a side-long suite dedic…
The Willisau Concert
Corbett Vs. Dempsey present a reissue of Joe McPhee's The Willisau Concert, originally released on Hat Hut Records in 1976. Asked earlier this year which of his out-of-print records he'd like to see available again, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's response was immediate: The Willisau Concert! Recorded at the Swiss festival that gave it its name in 1975, it appeared a year later as "Hat Hut B", the second of the new label's great letter series. It came packaged gorgeously in a double-gat…
Cosmic Love
Joe McPhee on seven inches of pure loving vinyl. Features two versions of the 1970 classic "Cosmic Love". McPhee rocking the cosmic wavelength on space organ and tenor sax. Recorded in Poughkeepsie, NY, 1970; Produced by John Corbett; Vinyl project coordinated by Marc Bonadies. Cover artwork by Dick Higgins. 33 1/3 rpm.