"[His] visions were forged in the fires of the 196O's free-jazz underground and honed by a lifetime of experience."

[Joe has the] "ability to sustain free-flowing, hard-blowing energy and at the same time effectively deal with elegance, lyricism, and melodicism.... Many a free musician could learn a thing or two from McPhee about collaboration, process, the unfolding of music in real time.... With McPhee, the harmonies are very deliberate, often extremely surprising, and always somehow right on." 

"Joe has an immense capacity for artistic inquiry [resulting in] some of the best recorded improvised music.... The elements of adventure and surprise held forth, as did the deep personal emotion which has always characterized McPhee music."

"Probably the best saxophone/ cornet instrumentalist in the history of jazz."

"Renowned for his powerful solo performances... a player with an ear for texture and interplay as well as for fire and passion, [he controls] the full range of the horn, from a whisper to a scream." "One of the last saxophonists working in the great tradition of vocalized tonality & instrumental storytelling."

"Multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee filled the cavernous Bop Shop atrium with a spectrum of mind-altering sounds during a solo visit a few months ago.... Raspy minimalist drones, fluid squeaks and squeals, and very quiet mouth and valve sounds kept the rapt audience guessing which direction the veteran player would move next."

"Highly recommended... Mr. McPhee's first extended stay at a New York club is even more valuable for its rarity."

"What was noticeable above all wasn't the facility and speed of his playing but the quality of sound itself... a brave set... Mr. McPhee is intellectual about his music, but the high point of the set spilled over into surprisingly emotional territory...not unlike what Rahsaan Roland Kirk did with folk songs and Jimi Hendrix did with 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'"

"McPhee traced long, hypnotic tenor lines and summoned aching, tremulous cries of commingled joy and pain, played with great rhythmic certainty.... The too-brief set concluded with a solitary McPhee singing into his tenor. His gorgeous multiphonics opened portals to untold places..."

.

.
.
 

..

"Joe McPhee has been a leading new improviser for 30 years, and his solo set would have been hard for anyone to follow.  A multi-instrumentalist who performed on soprano sax, tenor sax, and cornet, McPhee employed harmonics and other extended techniques with absolute clarity, and wedded an astonishing control of circular breathing with the shaping instincts that turn experiment into art.  He was also unafraid to play melody..."

"[Joe McPhee] picked up a soprano saxophone and began to play. A lesser spirit might have said, 'This is how it's done, boys,' but that lesser spirit would probably never have been able to cast such a spell of almost unimaginable virtuosity and vision.... It was soon hard to understand how one man alone with one horn could create so much sound... It was a jewelled curtain of music that he opened to show us listeners the many rooms of creation that he has found. There were cool salons and sharply lit hallways as he turned a brilliant corner and brought us to a Thelonious Monk theme, which then flowed back into astral improvisations.... Next, McPhee picked up his tenor... He breathed through the horn and sang through the horn and ran wailing improvisations above the beat, breaking the rhythm now to expand a statement, then resuming the beat while building new combinations of sound. And for those who might be wondering, 'Well, sure, but can he play a ballad?' he then offered a compelling rendition of 'God Bless the Child' with such perfection of timing and tone that all the side roads not taken from the melody seemed to register with the listeners, as if he were saying, 'Take a look: We could go over there, or check the scenery over here, or we could blast off to the stratosphere from this point, but we're just going to stay on this sweet and lovely path for now.' Next, great rotund tones emerged from a tiny pocket cornet.... By 11:3O on that Sunday night in Cambridge, there were many new believers."

Designated "critics' pick"... "The internationally renowned Swiss label HatART was actually started to record Joe's music; once you hear his gorgeous tenor sound, you'll know why." "Magical expressionism... He still has one of the most beautiful tones on the planet, even when he's reaching for jazz's outer limits." "Nearly 3O years after tenorist Joe McPhee hit the scene in the '7O's, his magical take on avant-garde sax remains one of the wonders of the scene."

"The Saturday concert was in essence a sermon, congregation in a semicircle cradling Joe, Joe moving in and out of the circle, alto saxophone at times not consciously raised up but pulled up, his whole body lifted in the draft of truth traveling light~speed through his human frame:  truth that was threatening ~ as it always does ~ to take the prophet away; words that were laying bare ~ as they always do ~ the flesh and bones and soul of the righteous; sounds that were setting free ~ as they always have and always will ~ those who can still recognize and be moved by beauty."

"Where his soprano playing tends toward the ethereal and abstract, and his tenor work to fiery outside edge, his alto is in general earthier, tending toward the gorgeous, noble, and folk~tinged themes that he plays so well...  Who else is working on such a high level today? ...One for the ages... fervently recommended."

"Joe McPhee and Bluette presented a gripping body of spiritual material at a church sanctuary venue.  It was a stunning performance that reverberated through the hallowed space and straight into one's soul.  With Joe Giardullo on reeds, two bassists in Dominic Duval and Michael Bisio, plus guest violinist David Prentice, the quintet emotionally moved through a series of modern and traditional spirituals.  The entire band was inspired and inspiring, and no one displayed this more than Bisio, whose extended solo on "Shenandoah" was crafted through love, innovation, and phenomenal technique.  McPhee and Giardullo soared on high, lifted upward by the motivational force of the three string players.  One could not help but be stirred by the mastery of these five artists and the beauty of their music."

The music is breathing again please check out the melody, the harmony.  Check out the spirits rising and falling.  The burning straw.  The hot peppermint stick dancing!  Check out the heroic smoke from the tenor sax.  And get with this now bass beyond basics get into the memories of the unanswered question.  This is the music of McPhee, Duval and Rosen.  Rosen doing more with less.  It is the cosmos. It is the purple blues phrasing the call, blow baby blow, it is the song of the pineapple forest and the steelworkers.  It is the new it is 1998 not the `60's so this is new music because it is being played now check it out it is great music it is good!  All part of the continuum of the mountain sky.  It is the morning language.  It sits on rooftops and spreads over the city.

What am I saying?  I am saying check out the music now!  Listen to it, seek it, feel it, buy some CD's that carry the names McPhee, Rosen, Duval.  Buy all you can carry get a truckload!  Listen, & listen, & listen some more.  Let it fill you.  Let it bounce off the walls of your soul.

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.

Photo © Shelley Ann Carver, NYC, '99

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, an 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.

This is one of the most challenging reviews I have ever written because it involves writing about music that cannot easily be separated from itself to order to be translated to another mode of communication. Hamid Drake on drum & percussion and Joe McPhee on tenor & pocket trumpet have created a CD which coincides with art, belief, cause, pain, longing and pursuit for resolution. It is called EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, A Real Statement of Freedom.

The conceptual essence of the CD symbolizes the African-American experience. This is a journey that is delicate, glorious yet also torrentially harsh. As does speak the music. The statement of freedom that exists here is one in which the artists have accepted and embodied the responsibility necessary to convey their message, no matter how difficult it is to do so, and that is the reason it is REAL.

There are five works on this hour-long 2000 OKKAdisk recording. Each piece is a blend of tribalism and expressive formalism. Drake extends the limits of his conventional drum set with rhythmic collectives that are breathtaking. His ability to balance stick manipulation that is so quick and precise on the cymbals, toms, snare and hi-hats with the bravura with which he rumbles and interjects the pounding of the bass drum cannot be duplicated. The maturity of the development of his style of playing all his percussion instruments and his sensitivity to other players -- in this case Joe McPhee -- are exceptional. Drake feels & responds in kind with the horn dropping back and whispering; Drake feels & responds in kind with the horn’s intense screaming. Drake feels when it is time to be silent and when it is time to be the gentle inescapable backbeat or to become the pulse that progressively escalates into a raging fire.

McPhee stretches the sonic breadth of his horns to spaces where rhythm is the ultimate content and whatever sound he produces has no alias. Ostinatos rise out of beautiful melodic lines to penetrate & cut through space to shape another space that makes me shiver. His capacity to breathe allows him to blow and mold extended lines, having boundaries that reveal themselves only in the listening. His capacity to render his melodic lines sensuous with an occasionally interjected sour split tone is incomparable. His tenor sings from his heart no matter whether he is tearing out a succession of notes or stroking the air with a tenderness that does not go away from the listener’s mind.

The first cut, CRIES AND WHISPERS, speaks of the worthiness of the expression of black culture; the second, MOTHER AFRICA, is dedicated to Miriam Makeba, the pre-eminent African singer of the 20th century. Next, McPhee plays a recurring favorite tune, GOD BLESS THE CHILD, this time with Drake supporting the sweetness of the notes.

The title track, EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, bears an inherent structure which when realized is amazing. The improvisation is declarative, storming, and talks the truth of fighting and struggling and being heard. At exactly the midpoint of the piece, Drake builds a bridge of percussive excellence which can ONLY introduce the tenor’s bold operatic elongated pitches which transform into single notes, distancing themselves from the listener but implying a soundless continuation of the metaphor. This is perceptibly the crux of the last cut, HATE CRIME CRIES.

This recording deserves a billion stars. These two musicians are so incredibly married to their musical intentions that their music is overwhelming. Had I been at the live performance at the Empty Bottle in Chicago in 1999, I know that I would have not been able to leave in one body. In fact, having listened to the CD already a dozen times, I have to pinch myself to see if I am still able to function.