Joe McPhee is a magician who brings color into sound, crafting musical edifices of extraordinary beauty out of building blocks including pure scorching heat, aching romanticism, and a maturely reverential spirituality.

Joe McPhee plays kind and loving music, music that issues from the core of his being, music that settles for no easy or pat solutions but blazes ahead on its own. It is gorgeous music, difficult music, challenging music, full-throttle industrial music as delicate as a snowflake.

Joe McPhee plays music that laughs, preaches, shouts, and cries. It keens, soars, exhorts, mutters, sputters, and sings. It is jazz, classical, country and western, Latin, gospel, and brilliant.

Joe McPhee works the spectrum. He plays inside and outside, up and down, high and low, loud and soft, consonant and dissonant. He is not an either/or man, but an both/and man. He plays the changes and he plays free. He improvises compositions and he prearranges compositions. He plays trumpet and saxophone. He plays soprano and tenor (and more). He plays trombone and clarinet (and piano). He plays solo and in small groups and in large groups. He plays acoustic and electric. He weaves textures of incomparable delicacy and industrial power. When Joe McPhee plays, the music jumps. Leaps. Flies.

Joe McPhee started all this in the Sixties and has gathered momentum as the years have gone by. He was born on November 3, 1939, and when he was a boy his father taught him how to play trumpet. The saxophones came much later. He went to New York and began to collaborate with the great Clifford Thornton. He played Ornette Coleman's trumpet and attended John Coltrane's funeral. He played with Don Cherry and met a Swiss gentleman named Werner X. Uehlinger, who loved his music so much that he started a record label, the premier free jazz label Hat Hut, just to put out his music. This was after another man named Craig Johnson had already started the CJR label to put out some of his other recordings. How many other musicians can say that two record labels were started just to get their music out?

Some of the best of his many recordings are Tenor, and early Hat Hut solo album that is on Hat Hut's current schedule to be re-released. Other great Hats are Oleo and a Future Retrospective, Old Eyes and Mysteries, Topology, and Linear B. More recently Joe has released a magnificent string of releases on Bob Rusch's CIMP and Cadence Jazz labels, including Inside Out with violinist David Prentice, Finger Wigglers and Zebulon with bassist Michael Bisio, The Dream Book with bassist Dominic Duval, and The Watermelon Suite with Duval and percussionist Jay Rosen.

He has a beguiling sympathy with string players. Listen to his interactions with Prentice, Bisio, and Duval. But at the same time, his new duo disc with drummer Johnny McLellan, Grand Marquis, proves that he is equally at home with a purely percussive background.

But that's Joe, who would be at home anywhere. If his music isn't in yours, you are missing out on a great deal.

"Joe has a great spirituality and soul which is of his essence, not convenience." --Bob Rusch