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.
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…
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…
Harmonia Macrocosmica
** Restocked. Edition of 500, no repress, no digital.** For nearly 30 years, the Norwegian imprint, Smalltown Supersound, has ridden the razors edge of adventurous sound, issuing startlingly ambitious release that span a diverse number of musical idioms, from Neneh Cherry, Arp, The Thing, Lindstrøm, Dungen, Merzbow, Kevin Drumm, Mats Gustafsson, Paal Nilssen-Love, Ken Vandermark, and near countless number of others. Last year the imprint launched a brand-new series, Actions For Free Jazz, with t…
She Knows...
Temporary Super Offer! The Thing started as a recording project in 2000, for the newly formed label Crazy Wisdom, run by Christian Falk, Conny Charles Lindström and me. I wanted to put together a trio, to record some Don Cherry pieces and since I had recently played with Paal in Stockholm and heard Ingebrigt playing live, I knew they were tight. So, things went where they went.
I invited the two young Norwegians to Stockholm for a recording date at Atlantic Studios. One day of recording for the …
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…
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…