SLAMCD 268
Album Title: A PARALLAX VIEW
Artists: JOE McPHEE & PAUL HESSION
Track 1: TIPPING POINT
Composers: Joe McPhee (ASCAP) & Paul Hession (MCPS/PRS)
Artists: Joe McPhee - Tenor sax & Paul Hession - Drum set
Recorded: 21st January 2003 at The Adelphi, Leeds by Geoff Clout
Concert arranged by The Termite Club
Track 2: BLUE COAT, BLUE COLLAR
Composer: Joe McPhee (ASCAP)
Artist: Joe McPhee - Tenor sax/voice
Recorded: 20th January 2003 at The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Concert arranged by FRAKTURE
Track 3: FROM EREMITE TO TERMITE
Composers: Joe McPhee (ASCAP) & Paul Hession (MCPS/PRS)
Artists: Joe McPhee - Tenor sax & Paul Hession - Drum set
Recorded: 21st January 2003 at The Adelphi, Leeds by Geoff Clout
Concert arranged by The Termite Club
Track 4: EVOCATION
Composers: Joe McPhee (ASCAP) & Paul Hession (MCPS/PRS)
Artists: Joe McPhee - Soprano/Tenor sax & Paul Hession - Drum set
Recorded: 20th January 2003 at The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Concert arranged by FRAKTURE
Track 5: LOVE IS (LIKE WALKING NAKED ON A RAZOR BLADE)
Composers: Joe McPhee (ASCAP) & Paul Hession (MCPS/PRS)
Artists: Joe McPhee - Tenor sax & Paul Hession - Drum set
Recorded: 20th January 2003 at The Bluecoat, Liverpool
Concert arranged by FRAKTURE
Track 6: WHAT CAN WE DO? (For Peter Brotzmann and Michael Zerang)
Composers: Joe McPhee (ASCAP) & Paul Hession (MCPS/PRS)
Artists: Joe McPhee - Soprano/Tenor sax & Paul Hession - Drum set
Recorded: 21st January 2003 at The Adelphi, Leeds by Geoff Clout
Concert arranged by The Termite Club
From the beginning, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee has had a tendency to go against the grain and more often than not, has recorded in non-standard jazz group formations. It’s clear that he must view this as one essential way of continually reinvigorating his art. Additionally, he has always seemed game for new and unexpected musical partnerships. These two releases feature McPhee in anomalous situations and both add slightly different wrinkles to his ever-expanding discography.
McPhee and British drummer Paul Hession had played together once when the drummer was in America in 2002. That one date indicated they were kindred spirits, so Hession booked a small UK tour the following year. A Parallax View is the resulting document. Hession is a polyrhythmic drummer who accompanies McPhee (who plays soprano and mostly tenor) with wave-like swells that comment, surround, sometimes skitter around and sometimes prod McPhee but never overpower him. McPhee’s playing, especially on tenor has that rapturous, almostspiritual quality that infuses his best and mostinvolved playing. "Blue Coat, Blue Collar" is a McPhee solo track where his control over the extended range of his instrument is a marvel to behold. Equally gripping is his soprano work on "Evocation . When he enters after Hession’s drum solo, he bends and twists his phrases around Hession’s rolls, sounding almost like a nadaswaram, before eventually leading into an affecting version of one of his favorite songs, "Goin’ Home". McPhee’s duet with drummer Hamid Drake, Emancipation Proclamation, is one of the finest in his discography. This one comes pretty close.
Robert Lannopollo, AllAboutJazz – New York, April 2007
Joe McPhee - Paul Hession
A Parallax View
SLAM CD 268
A 50th birthday gift to himself, in 2003 Leeds-based percussionist Paul Hession celebrated by inviting American soprano and tenor saxophonist Joe McPhee to England for duo concerts. The notable results, reproduced here, show that rather than hogging the figurative spotlight the birthday boy gave the mercurial reed man almost disproportionate prominence.
Not that McPhee doesn't deserve it. Now 68, the saxophonist's playing amalgamates Mainstream tradition, go-for-broke Free Jazz and the extended techniques of Free Music into an incomparable package. On these Leeds and Liverpool dates with the nimbly inventive Hession - who also works many sides of the Improv/Jazz divide - both men communicate their superior talents.
The most evocative testimony to this occurs on "Evocation". Following an a cappella exposition on soprano saxophone that in nasality and muted transience evokes the ephemeral boundaries of atonality, Hession's extended solo of cymbal sputtering plus shuddering snare accents, evokes another McPhee persona on tenor saxophone. Staring with a legato, Swing Era obbligato, the drummer's now parade ground rat-tat-tats reinforce the reedist's harsh, guttural yowls, allowing McPhee to conjure up the spirit of Albert Ayler with wide vibrato flourishes that reference "Ghosts", "La Marseillaise" and other Ayler favorites. In a little more than 14½ minutes the duo accesses more than three generations of improvised music.
"Blue Coat, Blue Collar". McPhee's solo tenor feature is even more spectacular. Declaring that "our music comes from people not tape machines", he alternates tangy and mellow tones, chirping and whistling like a Turkish mizmar at one point; blowing colored air through his horn at another; expelling melodious Coleman Hawkins-like harmonies in-between.
Altruistic, Hession's celebration confers sonic presents on us all.
Ken Waxman
CODA Issue 333
Musicworks, June 2007
Joe McPhee/Paul Hession
A Parallax View
Slam CD 268
These duo performances by American saxophonist McPhee and English drummer Hession come from 2003 performances in Liverpool and Leeds, following a first-encounter the previous year in Amherst, Massachusetts. It's music by improvisers with some familiarity with one another (if not too much).The primary focus in a saxophone/percussion duo is usually on the saxophone, and that's certainly true at the beginning here, with Hession supplying support from the tradition jazz trap-set, providing rhythmic impetus, coloristic expansion and counterpoint. From the outset McPhee is all burly bustle, mounting a gruffly passionate tenor saxophone onslaught that immediately invokes the jazz tradition from Coleman Hawkins through Sonny Rollins to Archie Shepp. After a brief pause he plays a beautiful scalar phrase from John Coltrane's "Meditations" then takes the improvisation in a very different direction, focusing on a gospel-like motif in his horn's lowest register. In many ways, a McPhee performance is a kind of testifying. He is a major performer in a specifically African-American improvisational style that owes something to the Holiness Church as well as jazz, with gospel tunes as apt to arise as references to jazz standards. "Blue Coat, Blue Collar" is all McPhee-following a brief spoken poem with a dirge-like tenor solo that travels ever-further inward to high pitched harmonics and continuous circular breathing until his singing voice erupts through the horn. "From Eremite to Termite" (the title evokes both the Eremite record company associated with the Amherst performance and the Termite Club of the Leeds performance) is a glacially slow, wailing tenor improvisation in the style of an Albert Ayler ballad, played with a wide vibrato against Hesion's rolling and thundering drums. Hession's most prominent moments come on the CD's longest track, the 14-minute "Evocation," where his drumming takes on a speech-like force. For all its tumult, there is something ceremonial and elegiac in Hession's playing here, picking up and amplifying a central aspect of McPhee's work which is the commemoration of liberation, the ceremony of free jazz, as much as it might be free improvisation. "Evocation" includes lengthy quotations and paraphrases from Ayler's "Ghosts" as well as gospel songs. The collective spirit is also apparent in the final "What Can We do?" with McPhee's whistling, upper-register soprano leaving the middle and bass ranges to Hession's skein of dense, prodding phrases.
Stuart Broomer
AAJ - NY April 2007 Robert Iannapollo http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=25007
Joe McPhee has had a tendency to go against the grain and more often than not, has recorded in non-standard jazz group formations. It's clear that he must view this as one essential way of continually reinvigorating his art. Additionally, he has always seemed game for new and unexpected musical partnerships. These two releases feature McPhee in anomalous situations and both add slightly different wrinkles to his ever-expanding discography.
McPhee and British drummer Paul Hession had played together once when the drummer was in America in 2002. That one date indicated they were kindred spirits, so Hession booked a small UK tour the following year. A Parallax View is the resulting document. Hession is a polyrhythmic drummer who accompanies McPhee (who plays soprano and mostly tenor) with wave-like swells that comment, surround, sometimes skitter around and sometimes prod McPhee but never overpower him. McPhee's playing, especially on tenor has that rapturous, almost spiritual quality that infuses his best and most involved playing. "Blue Coat, Blue Collar" is a McPhee solo track where his control over the extended range of his instrument is a marvel to behold. Equally gripping is his soprano work on "Evocation". When he enters after Hession's drum solo, he bends and twists his phrases around Hession's rolls, sounding almost like a nadaswaram, before eventually leading into an affecting version of one of his favorite songs, "Goin' Home". McPhee's duet with drummer Hamid Drake, Emancipation Proclamation, is one of the finest in his discography. This one comes pretty close.
Jazz Review March 2007
A Parallax View (Joe McPhee, Paul Hession) SLAM CD 268
In April 2002 Hession played a number of gigs in the US, ending with one in which he was partnered by McPhee and Paul Flaherty. On the strength of this he arranged for McPhee to come to the UK for four concerts. Two of those, in Leeds for the legendary Termite Club, are represented here.
McPhee uses his tenor alongside the soprano here, calling on the entire feasible range of the instrument, and sometimes just beyond, engaging with Hession's splendid drumming in a way that explains why Hession was so keen to arrange these re-matches. It's more abstract than the Trio-X album, but still it's another disc to get out to refute accusations that improv is self-indulgent and esoteric, or that it can't stand up to the close examination of repeated examinations on record. This is music that is communicative, warm, human and consistently absorbing. AT the start of "Blue Coat" McPhee says "those of us who remember before sampling was the fashion, know our music comes from people - our songs are meant for singing, dancing and celebrating life. When the studios are silent, vacant relics of the past we will still be here". Somebody say amen.
Barry Witherden
The Wire February 2007
Drummer Paul Hession first played with multi-instrumentalist improvising veteran Joe McPhee during 2002 in the U.S. A year later, McPhee visited the UK, and this album documents his duo sets with Hession in Liverpool and Leeds. The latter was where the percussionist grew up, and its venue, the Termite Club, was partly set up by Hession in the late 1980s.
The opening "Tipping Point" slips straight in, as though already in progress, McPhee's tenor enjoying a ragged bite, a shaggy, mane-shaking articulation. Hession's touch is both heavy and light, tattoo figures glancing around the kit, light cymbal strikes maintaining a perpetual motion. Halfway through, activity dips down to near-zero, then the tune's main line develops, rising up again. Even though these pieces are probably improvised, most of them possess a linear, rhythmic flow and a strong sense of instant composition.
"Blue Coat, Blue Collar" is a solo meditation, complete with intoned words by McPhee, ending with his vocalisations resonating directly into the horn. The late 1960s saw his arrival on the free jazz scene, and that old vocabulary remains ingrained to the present day. "From Eremite to Termite" opens with a drum solo, then, as McPhee enters, a stately fanfare develops before quietness returns, the soprano emitting tiny breath flutters. When he switches back to tenor, the old Albert Ayler vibrato resonates deeply. There's a great weight to Hession's strikes, but they're delivered with supple grace. "Love Is" features his most impressively detailed work, on dulled skins and tiny woodblocks.
Martin Longley
SGUARDI IN PARALLELO di Cosimo Parisi
L`incontro tra due esponenti importanti del free odierno è qui documentato con molta cura e perfetta scelta delle tracce da pubblicare e sequenza. Il sassofonista tenore afroamericano Joe McPhee ed il batterista inglese Paul Hession si erano incontrati durante un concerto in USA e da lì seguì una collaborazione concretizzatasi in alcune serate in duo in Inghilterra: da quelle di Leeds e Liverpool sono state tratte le tracce di A Parallax View.Insieme celebrano la musica improvvisata ed il free, alla ricerca di momenti espressivi intensi, non solo come dinamica sonora: nelle loro note e nei ritmi frastagliati di Hession prevale la voglia di dire qualcosa, anche sottovoce, che abbia forza proprio perchè risulta così all´ascolto. Il sax tenore di Joe McPhee viene da lontano, dalla rivoluzione del free degli anni sessanta e adesso arriva, senza radicalità, ad essere un elemento che quasi infonde tranquillità alla musica, la cui saggezza antica si riallaccia ad un passato ormai tradizione. Al sax soprano ha momenti estremamente lirici, come quando, in "Evocation" fa riapparire il fantasma di Albert Ayler attraverso una sua melodia.
Paul Hession lo accompagna con perizia, con la sua grande capacità di controllare al meglio intensità, timbri, volumi, passando dal brulichio sommesso al ritmo, dal bagliore improvviso alla combustione permanente. La sua lunga esperienza con i migliori esponenti della musica improvvisata inglese si fa valere in questa situazione e il dialogo fra i due risulta spontaneo, fra due che, nonostante la distanza geografica e la diversità del contesto in cui hanno sviluppato il proprio linguaggio, hanno trovato il modo migliore di esprimersi insieme.
MusicBoom November 2006.