Saxphonist Joe McPhee shares his poetry on Musings of a Bahamian Son

Joe McPhee is joined by fellow saxophonist Ken Vandermark to duet during nine interludes between his poems.  Photo: Michael Jackson

Here's the scoop...

Joe McPhee is one of the great multi-instrumentalists of contemporary improvised music. His instrumental battery has included saxophones, clarinets, valve trombone, pocket trumpet, sound-on-sound tape recorder, and space organ, but another arrow in his quiver is text. 

McPhee has been writing poems since the 1970s. He occasionally introduces one into performance, as an introduction or afterword to music, and in recent years he's been known to do full-on readings, text only, featuring his inimitable sense of dramatic timing intoned in his rich voice. The poems range from the observational to the political to the surreal. They're composed in rhyme or according to an internal rhythm, sometimes utterly prosaic, sometimes fantastic and flamboyant. A few of them capture the immediacy of improvised music more acutely than any critical writing on the subject, his half-century immersion in the craft of free music having given him a bottomless cup to draw on and his sensitivity to the nuances of language providing a host of palpable metaphors and metonyms, similes and strophes. 

The poems are marvels on the page, but they really take flight in McPhee's mouth. In 2021, during a flurry of pandemic-inspired poetic activity, he traveled to Chicago expressly to record a program of his poems. For the studio date, he invited saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark to play duets as interludes between groupings of the poems. Then Vandermark, engineer Alex Inglizian, and the CvsD team sat breathless in the Experimental Sound Studio control room as McPhee proceeded to perform his poetry nonstop and without repetition for nearly two hours. The result is Musings of a Bahamian Son, the first full-length release dedicated to McPhee's writing, with 27 poems interspersed with nine musical interludes and a postlude. 

Writes collaborator Ken Vandermark: 

"I can’t put into words the impact that Joe McPhee has had on me over the last 45 years, as a creative force and as a beautiful, powerful human being.  So, I celebrate every encounter with him: socially, onstage, or in the studio.  And, right now, there is a lot to celebrate in this regard - Corbett vs. Dempsey have just released, “Musings of a Bahamian Son: Poems and Other Words by Joe McPhee,” a collection of pieces read by Joe with duo improvisations with me used as interludes and a postlude.

"The material was recorded by Alex Inglizian in a single afternoon at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, on October 15th, 2021.  Things began with a series of 10 concise duo performances where Joe played soprano and I used Bb and bass clarinet.  From the first moment the music felt timeless, phrases transcending concepts, going straight to expressing the idea of being alive in that moment, side by side, exploring wherever the sound and feelings led us.  Then the miraculous took place.  

"Joe read poem after poem straight through without a break for more than an hour, every poem read with a different rhythm, another tempo, a unique voice.  The few of us in the engineering room glanced around completely mesmerized by Joe’s presentation of his words, unable to believe the performance we were witnessing, thankful to the core that all of it was being captured, not gone in the air.  Now it’s out in the world for all to hear.  I’m so grateful to Joe, John Corbett, and Jim Dempsey for making this celebration possible." 

This CD release anticipates the forthcoming McPhee memoir, Straight Up, Without Wings: The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee, written with Mike Faloon, a book that will be published in the fall by CvsD. 

Get a digital copy of Joe McPhee's Musings of a Bahamian Son via Bandcamp where you can listen to a few excerpts right here.

CD available at found.ee/Musings or Catalytic Sound right here. 

Listen to Joe McPhee Po Music perform "The Lonely Woman" from 2012 below.