Joe McPhee

Today, the legendary saxophonist, trumpeter, and poet Joe McPhee announces his new album, I’m Just Say’n, out January 31st via Smalltown Supersound, and presents its lead single, “Short Pieces.”  At age 85, McPhee is almost solely dedicated to freely improvised music, working with several steady ensembles and in a constant stream of ad hoc settings. I’m Just Say’n, produced with longtime collaborator, saxophonist and flautist Mats Gustaffson, is the latest in the prolific musician’s decades-long exploration of free music. Across the album, McPhee  approaches words as if they were instrumental sounds, improvising entirely in language with Gustafsson, weaving wildness together in a thoroughly organic and experimental manner.

I’m Just Say’n’s opening track “Short Pieces” is sparsely populated with a dissonant, grumbling undercurrent accompanying McPhee’s spoken-word meditations on free jazz titans David Murray, Don Cherry, Eric Dolphy, and close collaborator Peter Brötzmann. 

Growing up in the Hudson Valley, McPhee was perched at an ideal distance from Manhattan’s free jazz scene of the 1960s – which he experienced first hand – and the city’s loft scene of the 1970s. He began playing tenor saxophone in the late 1960s, and his earliest records (made for the CjR label, which was formed exclusively to issue his music) featured McPhee prominently as a saxophonist. His second LP, Nation Time, has proven to be a classic, with The Guardian calling the album “A truly joyful, imaginative and energising collection.” 

McPhee forged close alliances with European musicians earlier than most Americans, assembling bands with colleagues in France and Switzerland and later in the UK and Germany. He worked extensively with American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros and was a member of Peter Brötzmann’s Chicago Tentet, in the context of which he began playing with Gustafsson. McPhee has also been a productive solo artist; his 1976 Hat Hut LP, Tenor, is a milestone in unaccompanied saxophone recordings. Over the last three decades, McPhee’s discography has grown exponentially, plumbing both the mists of his distant past (for instance 1966, from a recently discovered tape featuring him exclusively on trumpet with a band called the Jazzmen) and anticipating the future (see records like Harmonia Macrocosmica, an LP of duets with Lasse Marhaug on electronics).

In its own way, text has been important to McPhee since he shouted “What time is it?!” to his student audience at the start of “Nation Time.” McPhee has been writing poetry since the 1970s, drawing on his multicultural experiences in music and his detailed observations of everyday life, although he’s only started to read and recite poems in performance over the last decade.  In 2024, McPhee issued his first record focused on poetry, Musings of a Bahamian Son, and plans are afoot to publish a book of his poetry soon. Corbett vs. Dempsey, who have issued many of McPhee’s recordings, just published his memoir, Straight Up, Without Wings: The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee, co-written with Mike Faloon.