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.
Straight up, Without Wings, The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee (Book)
In Straight Up, Without Wings, Joe McPhee surveys sixty years in creative music. Starting with his trumpeter-father's influence and formative years in the U.S. Army, McPhee recounts experiences as a Black-hippy-cum-budding-musician based in upstate New York, perched at an ideal distance from Manhattan’s free jazz demimonde of the 1960s and its loft scene of the 1970s. A natural storyteller, revealing never-told tales and reveling in the joys of noise, McPhee puts the influence of – and encounter…
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.
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 …
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.
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…
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…
The Wolf Has Come Down From The North
** 2021 stock ** This record of absurd, delirious sound poetry, drawn primarily from the voices of Graham Lambkin and Joe McPhee, marks their first vinyl release as a duo. It was published in 2018 in an edition of 270 regular copies and 30 copies with handmade art.
Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scenes in the late 60s. Inspired by the music of Albert Ayler, he taught himself the saxopho…
Black Is The Color: Live in Poughkeepsie and New Windsor 1969-70
Never-before-issued music from three very different settings in upstate New York, all recorded in the period running up to Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee's Nation Time (CVSD 054CD). From a year before that landmark LP, in the same hall at Vassar College, McPhee led a band with soulful vibraphonist Ernie Bostic and voluble rhythm section of Tyrone Crabb and Bruce Thompson, both of Nation Time fame, performing a John Coltrane-oriented set that included versions of Mongo Santamaria's…
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 …
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 …
Nuclear Family
2016 release. Multi-instrumental master Joe McPheeand his longtime colleague, French saxophonist and clarinetist André Jaume, joined forces for this studio recording in 1979 that was prepared but never released. It is primarily structured around pairs of tunes by Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (or Billy Strayhorn), adding Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" for good measure. The results are stunningly intimate and show the twosome's capacity for creative interplay at a fairly e…
Alone Together
2015 release. A reissue of arguably the rarest LP of European free jazz, Axiom, recorded in 1963 for the Swedish label Sonet. Test pressings were released to the musicians, but they were not approved and the label never printed more than the two first copies. Tom Prehn's music, which is exclusively known from a 1967 release that was reissued on the Unheard Music Series, is not only impossibly uncommon, it is also exceptionally wonderful, featuring an extended tenor saxophone solo by Frits Krogh …
The Loneliest Woman
2012 release. In 1981, Joe McPhee culled together one of his greatest bands to record Topology (1981), his classic outing for Hat Hut Records. Featuring an expanded version of Po Music, his ensemble with saxophonist André Jaume, guitarist Raymond Boni, and bassist François Mechali, the group included pianist Irene Schweizer, percussionist Pierre Favre, baritone saxophonist Daniel Bourquin, cellist Michael Overhage, and trombonist Radu Malfatti. One of the tracks left on the cutting room floor wa…