I'm Just Say'n

"On a remarkable collaboration with Swedish multi-instrumentalist Mats Gustafson, the 85-year-old free-jazz icon lays down his horn and lays into a bracing set of his own poetry." - Pitchfork "Absolute K.O. bout of free jazz poetry by a spry, 85 year old Joe McPhee, adapting his renowned improvised practice to words - juxtaposed with Mats Gustafson’s sparing brass and electric gestures. It’s an utterly timeless and transfixing salvo, another shiny notch for Smalltown Supersound’s brilliant Le Jazz Non Series." - Boomkat 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).

On a remarkable collaboration with Swedish multi-instrumentalist Mats Gustafson, the 85-year-old free-jazz icon lays down his horn and lays into a bracing set of his own poetry.