Oak Cliff, 8.25.2023

Joe McPhee had his first recording session -- for Clifford Thornton's album Freedom and Unity --  July 1967, the day after John Coltrane's funeral (which he attended with Ornette Coleman, and where he heard Coleman and Albert Ayler play). The bass player on the date was Jimmy Garrison from Coltrane's classic quartet. No pressure. McPhee was playing trumpet back then. A couple of years later, he'd teach himself saxophone. Now he plays a whole array of reed and brass instruments. 

McPhee started coming to Texas -- Houston and Austin, at least -- back in 1998, and he's been here with a number of collaborators: his own Trio X (with Jay Rosen and ex-Cecil Taylor bassist Dominic Duvall), the Scandinavian power trio The Thing, Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Tentet, and a duo with Brotzmann. But he'd never been to Dallas until last night, when he played a soul-cleansing set at The Wild Detectives in Oak Cliff with a trio including Norwegian bassist extraordinaire Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten and Oak Cliff's own Stefan Gonzalez on drums. 

Together, the three musicians radiated energy like the sun that's been putting the hurt on us in Texas the last couple of months. (McPhee had flown in from his home in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he said the morning temperature was 66 degrees!) Haker-Flaten and Gonzalez play together in The Young Mothers, and the bassist had previously played with McPhee both as a member of The Thing and in a duet context. From the first moments, they sounded like a unit that had been playing together for years.

On this occasion, McPhee chose to concentrate on his tenor sax (without a mic), and his big sound on the horn, replete with wide vibrato, recalls Ayler's love cry. At times he'd stop and listen to the rhythm section as they developed ideas. Both the bassist and drummer are commandingly assertive players, and McPhee responded to them with blasts of power and multiphonics, sometimes vocalizing through his horn, before drawing the energy down with a lyricism reminiscent of Coltrane's on Crescent. 

It is quite striking to be in the presence of a musician who heard Coltrane, Ornette, and Ayler when their energy was still in the world, and he alluded to Trane's passing in a recitative, referring to "that giant step we all must take," from which "he ain't coming back!" McPhee closed with a statement of purpose, declaring, "Our music doesn't come from tape machines...When all the recording studios are empty, we'll still be playing!" At 83, he appears as vital as folks half his age. May it always be so. The trio is in Austin tonight for a performance at Cloud Tree Studios and Gallery. McPhee will return to the area in December for Molten Plains Fest, December 8-9 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. 

Opening the evening was a trio of Austin-based guitarist Jonathan F. Horne -- another Young Mother and a last-minute sub for saxophonist Joshua Miller, who has Covid -- along with Denton bassist Matthew Frerck and Dallas free jazz pioneer Gerard Bendiks on drums. The three met for the first time the afternoon before the performance, and their set ebbed and flowed organically, with spacious intervals where the musicians felt each other out before building to crescendos that gave way to new explorations as they subsided. 

By now, Horne has had something like ten surgeries to repair a severed tendon in his left arm. He plays with an intense physicality that lets you see his thought process as he shifts between hammering on the fretboard with a flatpick, applying a violin bow to the strings, playing rapid flurries of notes, and shaping his sound with an array of pedals. A rarity among electric guitarists, he keeps his stage volume low, and at times it was hard to distinguish between his electronically altered tones and the harmonics from Frerck's arco bass. 

Frerck used his bow to produce rhythmic and percussive sounds as well as tones, and his constant stream of invention was the music's fulcrum. (He's also in a trio with Miller and Gonzalez that is working on some compositions as well as free improv.) Bendiks manipulates pure sound as well as rhythm, using small instruments and a variety of attacks on his kit. Musicians who listen so intently to each other invite the audience to do the same, and the sizable crowd (the sold out event was moved indoors because of the heat) responded in kind. It was the best kind of musical evening. Kudos to Javier Garcia del Moral, Ernesto Montiel, and Sarah Ruth Alexander for making it happen.