Joe McPhee Bio

Joe McPhee

Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late 1960s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. McPhee first began playing the trumpet at age eight. McPhee continued on that instrument through high school and then in a U.S. Army band stationed in Germany; during his army stint he was first introduced to traditional jazz. Clifford Thornton's Freedom and Unity, released on the Third World label in 1967, is the first recording on which McPhee appears. In 1968, he began playing the saxophone, and since then has investigated a wide range of instruments (including pocket trumpet, clarinet, valve trombone and piano), with active involvement in both acoustic and electronic music.

McPhee's first recordings as leader appeared on the CjR label which he founded in 1969 with painter Craig Johnson. These include Underground Railroad by the Joe McPhee Quartet in 1969, Nation Time by Joe McPhee in 1970, and Trinity by Joe McPhee, Harold E. Smith and Mike Kull in 1971. In 1974, Swiss entrepreneur Werner X. Uehlinger was so impressed with McPhee's recordings that he decided to form the Hat Hut label as a vehicle to release McPhee's work. The label's first LP was Black Magic Man, which had been recorded earlier by McPhee in 1970. Black Magic Man was followed by The Willisau Concert and the landmark solo recording Tenor, released by Hat Hut in 1976.

As the 1980s began and with a number of Hat Art recordings under his belt, McPhee met composer, accordionist, performer and educator Pauline Oliveros, whose theories of "deep listening" strengthened his interests in extended instrumental and electronic techniques. McPhee also read Edward de Bono's book Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity, which presents concepts for solving problems by "disrupting an apparent sequence and arriving at the solution from another angle." de Bono's theories inspired McPhee to apply this "sideways thinking" to his own work in creative improvisation, resulting in the concept of "Po Music." McPhee describes "Po Music" as a "process of provocation" which can be used to "move from one fixed set of ideas in an attempt to discover new ones." He concludes, "It is a Positive, Possible, Poetic Hypothesis."

Although his work was well documented on Hat Hut, McPhee remained relatively unknown in the United States as the 1980s progressed and he went on hiatus to care for his aging parents. McPhee reemerged into the performing and recording world during the 1990s and finally began to attract wider attention from the North American creative jazz community as he performed and recorded prodigiously as both leader and collaborator.

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