Reissue of a gripping 1975 throw down by self-taught horn blower Joe McPhee, driven by South African drummer Makaya Ntshoko and the synths of John Synder, marking his 2nd excursion on the Swiss label Hat Hut with an influential introduction to European ears - RIYL John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler.
As the story goes, McPhee picked up and tought himself to play sax after experiencing the rulebook-shredding free jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler in the ‘60s, and by the end of that decade he was cutting records for Craig Johnson’s label CjR, established with sole intent of giving McPhee’s music a proper platform. He notably produced the ‘Nation Time’ (1971) classic - and ‘Black Magic Man’ from same sessions - plus a groundbreaking jam with John Snyder on ARP synth, ‘Pieces of Light’ (1974) for the label during that period, before smiting Swiss businessman and jazz fiend Werner X. Uehlinger, who founded the Hat Hut label in order to give voice to McPhee’s music in an emerging European market hungry for new developments in free jazz.
‘The Willisau Concert’ was documented while McPhee and Snyder toured Europe in support of the first Hat Hut record, and became the label’s 2nd release on the strength of its outlandish fusions of modular synth and free jazz, as previously explored on their ‘Pieces of Light’ album (and predated by the likes of Elias Tanenbaum’s ‘Arp Art’ side, in particular ‘Fr the Bird’, where Tanenbaum samples Coltrane, concrète style). Initially sans electronics, with McPhee & Ntshoko tussling like wrestlers, it just gets better, and weirder, as the concert progresses. ‘Voices’ finds Synder’s extended vocal tekkerz, bordering on overtone throat singing, melding with mournful sax and sparing drums, erupting into horror film foley via wigged-out ARP 2600, leading into the wildly ahead-of-its-time knit of burbling ARP pulse, sticks, and avian sax lines on ‘Bahamian Folksong’, which bleeds into the quiet, curiouser strangeness of ‘Harriet’. It must have sounded fucking mad back then, ‘cos it still does now to our modern ears.
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Reissue of a gripping 1975 throw down by self-taught horn blower Joe McPhee, driven by South African drummer Makaya Ntshoko and the synths of John Synder, marking his 2nd excursion on the Swiss label Hat Hut with an influential introduction to European ears - RIYL John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler.
As the story goes, McPhee picked up and tought himself to play sax after experiencing the rulebook-shredding free jazz of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler in the ‘60s, and by the end of that decade he was cutting records for Craig Johnson’s label CjR, established with sole intent of giving McPhee’s music a proper platform. He notably produced the ‘Nation Time’ (1971) classic - and ‘Black Magic Man’ from same sessions - plus a groundbreaking jam with John Snyder on ARP synth, ‘Pieces of Light’ (1974) for the label during that period, before smiting Swiss businessman and jazz fiend Werner X. Uehlinger, who founded the Hat Hut label in order to give voice to McPhee’s music in an emerging European market hungry for new developments in free jazz.
‘The Willisau Concert’ was documented while McPhee and Snyder toured Europe in support of the first Hat Hut record, and became the label’s 2nd release on the strength of its outlandish fusions of modular synth and free jazz, as previously explored on their ‘Pieces of Light’ album (and predated by the likes of Elias Tanenbaum’s ‘Arp Art’ side, in particular ‘Fr the Bird’, where Tanenbaum samples Coltrane, concrète style). Initially sans electronics, with McPhee & Ntshoko tussling like wrestlers, it just gets better, and weirder, as the concert progresses. ‘Voices’ finds Synder’s extended vocal tekkerz, bordering on overtone throat singing, melding with mournful sax and sparing drums, erupting into horror film foley via wigged-out ARP 2600, leading into the wildly ahead-of-its-time knit of burbling ARP pulse, sticks, and avian sax lines on ‘Bahamian Folksong’, which bleeds into the quiet, curiouser strangeness of ‘Harriet’. It must have sounded fucking mad back then, ‘cos it still does now to our modern ears.