Po Better Blues

Joe McPhee

Joe McPhee

In the world of music journalism, we like to throw around terms like “legend” or “highly influential” when referring to artists whose work we feel has been undervalued. In most instances, the situation is usually one of overreaching, of we scribes letting our enthusiasm get the better of us in order to grab the reader’s attention and make us feel like we’re doing our jobs. But in the case of Poughkeepsie multi-instrumentalist and composer Joe McPhee, any such advocacies are rooted in pure, documented fact.

McPhee, 68, is widely revered as one of the most important avant-jazz musicians to take the 1960s “new thing” ideas of icons like John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders to the next level. His incendiary early albums, Underground Railroad (1969), Nation Time (1970), and Black Magic Man (1970), burn with radical political themes, their rousing, often funk-fueled sound a preternatural balance of aggressive experimentalism and melodic sensibility. His incorporation of psychologist-theoretician Edward de Bono’s principles of lateral thinking into his approach has inspired other players to reevaluate their own methods, while his efforts at the now common concept of blending standard jazz instrumentation with electronics date from the early Seventies. McPhee’s discography continues to swell, with more than 70 recordings as a leader, on solo dates, with his bands Survival Unit and Trio X, and as a collaborator to Donald Cherry, William Parker, Rashied Ali, Matthew Shipp, DJ Spooky, Peter Brötzman, and other luminous names. And he’s a veritable god in Europe, where he tours multiple times each year.

“I really believe that years from now we will look back on some of Joe McPhee’s records as some of the most important records ever made,” says jazz historian and Chicagoan John Corbett, curator of Atavistic Records’ Unheard Music Series, which has re-released several of the artist’s earliest titles. “He can find the music in any situation. There can be the most insane, noisy stuff going on around him on stage and he’s able to pull the music out of it, and not in a way that’s predictable or cloying. Joe is just so deeply musical in everything he does. Just his way of being in the world is musical.”