A few words of (self) introduction. Much like Kid Gloves, I live for music, though I must confess with me it's (only slightly) more a hobby. For the past few years, that music has, by-and-large, been jazz.
Joe McPhee, saxophonist, trumpeter, and composer of my first musical offering for this blog, operates out of Poughkeepsie, New York. He records for a Swiss record label, Hathut Records, which was seemingly founded to ensure the distribution of his earliest live recordings. It is safe to say he is, and will remain, an outsider to "popular music."
This is not to say that McPhee refrains from recording music grounded in popular forms. One of his earliest releases, Nation Time, recorded at Vassar College in the late sixties, in honor of future New Jersey poet laureate Amiri Baraka, sounds quite like the missing link between the methods of Nuggets and (though I for one am sick of this album being trotted out for comparisons) the practice of Bitches Brew. Recently, he could be found adding his squeaks and squalls to that erstwhile bathroom classic "Louie Louie," on last year's modestly titled Two Bands and a Legend, which found him sandwiched between two Norwegian groups, one "jazz" (The Thing) the other "garage rock" (Cato Salsa Experience).
In 1982, McPhee, with a trio of French collaborators (bassist François Méchali, reedist André Jaume, and electric guitarist Raymond Boni) recorded the album Oleo, for Hat Hut. The title track, their take on Sonny Rollins' composition, stands the original version's hard bop on its face - without a drummer, each member of the quartet is invited to participate equally, to keep time or avoid it altogether. Equal participation is also the name of the game on the track offered, McPhee's composition "Pablo." Jaume's clarinet and Mechali's bass dance about each other, as Boni's guitar jangles reappear at key junctures, and and McPhee's sax states and then improvises upon the theme, finding the bridge between chamber music and the blues.
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