Joe McPhee
Tenor & Fallen Angels

★★★★½

If I had to describe this album with one word it would be: colorful. Bursting with different shades and intensities that not only keep the album incredibly interesting but also worthwhile. Joe McPhee is not your regular saxophonist / multi-instrumentalist and this album is a great example of the feats he can achieve with a simple tenor sax. 

Starting off with probably the grooviest song, the deeply blues influenced "Knox" creates an atmosphere reminiscent to the approaching dusk of a hot, humid rural Georgian day. As he starts to fade you're hit back again with an intensity that only a drunken and destroyed man could provide. "Good-Bye Tom B." starts with a lyrical fragment that is mysterious and almost mouth wateringly attractive. If that makes any sense. But these two tracks are about as safe as you'll have it on this album.

"Sweet Dragon" sounds like a journey of a person discovering himself, through facing his greatest fear of course. How cliché. But that doesn't matter much, as "Tenor", the song right after, is probably one of the greatest solo sax pieces I've ever listened to. And at 24 minutes long it's probably the longest duration sax solo I've listened to. There's this repetition that slightly deviates throughout, not only in intensity but in texture as well. And the immediate thing I can relate it to when closing my eyes and taking it all in, is a preacher delivering his  sermon. But this is the last sermon he'll ever give and the last this crowd will ever receive. Their emotions continue to stream out of them and the preacher responds accordingly. 

Ending with the separate date recorded "Fallen Angels", you're finishing this compelling and challenging meal with something quite raw. Not only regarding the recording quality, but McPhee's style in general. It's looking around, concerned for its own safety and you end with this sense of the unknown. What really happened? Anyways I'm happy to have been exploring these Hat Hut records. 

Favorite Song: Tenor

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