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Joe McPhee and Friends: Directed Improvisation at RUCMA, New York City
by Lyn Horton
Joe McPhee and Musicians RUCMA at the Living Theater New York City May 11, 2008
Although conducting and improvisation seem to be unlikely partners, nothing is more compelling than witnessing improvisation unfold during the process of conducting. To see a musician direct the music without necessarily playing an instrument can provide a concrete and vivid representation of how the mind of a musician works. This was the case during a May 11, ...
Continue ReadingJoe McPhee: Voices: 10 Improvisations
by Lyn Horton
Being able to speak a language well implies a command of its syntactical dimensions. A fearless approach to maximizing the expression of ideas within language signifies creativity. Common to both a command of language and creativity is the principle of voice, which distinguishes itself from all similar practice. In music, voice simply, unquestionably, identifies how the musician and instrument mix.
Voices: 10 Improvisations, featuring brass and reedman, Joe McPhee, and percussionist John Heward, opens with the ...
Continue ReadingJoe McPhee: A Legend In Heavy Company
by Clifford Allen
Forty-one years after beginning his recording career on the day after John Coltrane's funeral in sessions led by trombonist Clifford Thornton (Freedom & Unity, Third World, 1967), saxophonist and trumpeter Joe McPhee is indeed the yeoman legend of the modern jazz-world. For many years a factory worker and sometime professor at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, his approach as a true heir to the spirituality of Ayler, coupled with a sense of spatial organization all his own, brought him ...
Continue ReadingJoe McPhee: Intimate Conversations
by Lyn Horton
Intimacy permeates many kinds of relationships. It is rare that in one context, several can be examined simultaneously. But the language of music coupled with the poetry of viewpoint can cover descriptive territory without too much hardship to demonstrate that intimacy requires depth of connection and can stretch the parameters for gaining insight and paying attention.
On Intimate Conversations a trio of musicians, convened by saxophonist Joe McPhee in a Krakow, Poland studio in 2006, have seized twelve opportunities to ...
Continue ReadingJoe McPhee: Soprano
by Lyn Horton
Sometimes, the best way to grasp of the power of an instrument is to hear it in a solo context without other instruments impacting its singularity. It matters if the musician playing the instrument is so engaged in knowing and feeling the instrument's range that the resulting sound emanates seemingly without effort. The music has originated with a master.
On September 10, 1998, Joe McPhee performed solo in St. Georges Chapel in Guelph, Canada at the Guelph Jazz Festival. He ...
Continue ReadingJoe McPhee / Peter Br: Guts
by Lyn Horton
When people die for what they believe in, their actions speak louder than words. At least for a moment. Repeat performances of their deaths are impossible. So it is up to those who survive them to revitalize the symbolism of their deaths. Creative people do this well in the form of a tribute, for they are lending their lives to the realm where they have invested their own spirits already.
The quartet of reedmen Joe McPhee and Peter ...
Continue ReadingCato Salsa Experience & The Thing With Joe McPhee: Two Bands And A Legend
by Eyal Hareuveni
Two Bands And A Legend Cato Salsa Experience & The Thing With Joe McPhee Smalltown Superjazz 2007
“Are you cramped? Can you find your mind? Can you shake your ass?" asks Sonic Youth's guitarist Thurston Moore in his liner notes to Two Bands And A Legend. The album is the second collaboration (after Sound Like A Sandwich, Smalltown Superjazz, 2005) between Norwegian/Swedish power jazz trio The Thing, Norwegian psychedelic quartet Cato Salsa ...
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