McPhee, Joe

McPhee, Joe

Nation Time

Superior Viaduct

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  “It’s been nearly five decades since Joe McPhee assembled a group of musicians to perform the weekend concerts that would become Nation Time. It was December 1970, thirty-one-year-old McPhee was inspired by Amiri Baraka’s poem ‘It’s Nation Time,’ and the students at Vassar College didn’t know what hit them. ‘What time is it?’ shouted the bandleader. ‘C’mon, you can do better than that. What time is it?!’ “The music on Nation Time came out of the fertile, but little-known creative jazz scene in Poughkeepsie, New York, McPhee’s home base. Two bands were deployed, one with a funky free foundation featuring guitar and organ, the other consisting of a more standard jazz formation with two drummers and the brilliant Mike Kull at the piano. Across the concert and the next afternoon’s audience-less recording session, the band was ignited by McPhee’s passion and his gorgeous post-Coltrane / post-Pharoah tenor. On ‘Shakey Jake,’ they hit a James Brown groove filtered through Archie Shepp, while the sidelong title track is as searching and poignant today as it was during its heyday. “Originally released in 1971 on CjR, an imprint started expressly to document McPhee’s music, Nation Time has a sense of urgency and inspiration. Additional material from those December days would later appear on Black Magic Man, Hat Hut’s first release. In fact, the first four records on this seminal Swiss label all featured McPhee. “Nation Time was largely unknown a quarter century or so later, when it was first issued on...

McPhee, Joe

Zurich (1979)

Monofonus Press / Astral Spirits

We are incredibly honored to present Joe McPhee’s “Zurich (1979)” LP…this LP features a previously unreleased 19 minute solo tenor sax recording from 1979. Astral Spirits Records was named after the song “Astral Spirits” on Joe McPhee’s classic “Trinity” LP so this is a true honor for us. This recording also is quite fitting as it was made directly to cassette tape back in 1979 and now is pressed onto vinyl for the first time ever! The vinyl master/laquer was cut in Austin, TX by Adam Smith (Columbus Discount Records/Necropolis/Unholy Two) on an old 1940’s lathe that was quite a beautiful thing to see & hear. The music speaks for itself in true McPhee fashion, from softly blown themes to roars of fortissimo and all places in between. A true joy to listen to McPhee from the late 70’s again.