I’m Just Say’n

Joe McPhee

“What time is it?” Joe McPhee asked a crowd at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York. The assembled students yelled back, “Nation Time!” It was 1970 and the multi-instrumentalist sounded like a hype man beamed in from the future, or a quarterback jazzing up his hometown throngs for a big game. Immortalized on McPhee’s iconic free-jazz LP Nation Time, this exchange was influenced by Amiri Baraka, who was increasingly embedding the political rhetoric of the period’s Black activists into his poems. The Black Arts Movement, which saw culture and civil rights as integrally entwined, was in full flower, and McPhee had invested himself in the liberation struggles of his day. But this fleeting concert introduction bore the seeds of the 85-year-old legend’s career in other ways, too: It showed literature and music feeding on each other, passing wisdom back and forth. 

McPhee’s work as an improviser, sometimes aggressive and loud, other times sputtering and tactile—on 1996’s brilliant As Serious As Your Life, for example—has only become more informed by literature over time. He’s incorporated spoken word on several projects, including a 2003 collaboration with his late friend Pauline Oliveros, Unquenchable Fire, that wove in passages from Rachel Pollack’s eponymous sci-fi novel. McPhee has slipped his own poems into a smattering of releases from across his wide discography; self-assured, theatrical, and coursing with both the quest of music and the desperation of everyday life, these poems might have their own place in the annals of American verse—that is, if they were presented on the page and not performed orally. But McPhee has tended to treat his full-throated, authoritative voice and lingual gift like just another instrument he can whip out on his one-man bandstand. It’s an appealing, romantic way to go through life as a poet.

This side of McPhee’s creativity finally took center stage on 2024’s Musings of a Bahamian Son, a CD of his poems decorated only with occasional soprano saxophone and Ken Vandermark’s clarinet. The first time McPhee had ever “collected” his verse, Musings was both a sprawling compilation and a swift, surprising aesthetic shift. Yet that disc fell short because it leaned too much on McPhee’s bardic skill and swathed it in a clean, quasi-sterile atmosphere, neglecting the aspects of a speech recording that can mold it into a musical document.

His latest, the chilling I’m Just Say’n, strikes a superior balance, fostering an eerie ambience of seemingly incidental sounds and sparing melody, courtesy of Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, that lends the readings an extra intensity. McPhee plays no instruments, but each cut is a feat of improvisation: The poems themselves are apparently extemporaneous, and the fact of being spoken, not written, means that they can never be delivered the same way twice. A couple of recognizable fragments, first heard on Musings, reappear here like familiar licks that a jazz player returns to during a solo. At a brief and engrossing 40 minutes, I’m Just Say’n transforms McPhee’s world-weary jottings into a gut punch. This curveball of a release takes aim at the rampant inequality of the present day and simultaneously feels like the culmination of a strain in McPhee’s art that has long hidden in plain sight.

Gustafsson, best known as a bruising bandleader, provides some judicious and anchoring horn parts, flutes, piano harp, organ and electronics. He knows when to lay a creeping drone over McPhee’s recitations, turning the poet’s tortured wailing at the end of “Disco Death” into a moment of haunting force, and punctuating “Words,” which bemoans the AIDS crisis, with soft brass gasps and whimpers. But I’m Just Say’n has such a stark and singular beauty in part because many of these arrangements are non-musical, at least not traditionally so. Opener “Short Pieces” begins abruptly with McPhee’s speech, only to shudder as though someone in the studio breathed on a microphone, and then swell and warp like a damaged analog tape discovered in a dusty archive. The sole accompaniment on “NYC Nostalgia Redux” is a score of arrhythmic, percussive thumps. Near the beginning of “They Both Could Fly,” a chord enters and its elegiac consonance feels huge and penetrating, because McPhee and Gustafsson have so far starved us of tonal rewards.

Still, McPhee’s poetry is plenty rewarding and doggedly unsentimental. Past Gustafsson’s severe, caustic soundscapes, McPhee sounds both inured to and appalled by his subject matter: the trials of living on society’s margins, the cycles of memory that pandemics dredge up in their survivors, and the glaring disjunction between the needs of the poor and the empty politics that screw them over. McPhee’s perspective is refreshingly skeptical of popular institutions and commonplace rhetoric. In one poem, the speaker says of a friend he theoretically admires, his regard shot through with slippery irony: “He finds humanity in a Republican/Or a Democrat/Or a dried rat dog.” “They Both Could Fly” describes a relationship with a “woman of the streets” he knew from around Manhattan, recalling, “Once they threw her from a bar on 2nd Avenue as I was passing/For simply asking if the restroom there was free/We collided/Then tumbled to the pavement in a heap/To the infinite pleasure of the redneck patrons of the bar.”

McPhee spikes his bleak content with humor, which comes through in his emphatic reading style and surprising allusions. He breaks into a parody of Crazy Eddie, the spokesman for a New York electronics store that became famous during the 1970s and ’80s thanks to its bombastic TV ads—McPhee goes full character in his imitation. The surrounding track, “NYC Nostalgia Redux,” is a comic takedown of New York’s recurring tendency to lionize its past. “Savor/The rich aroma of garbage/Putrifying in the mid-summer heat,” commands McPhee, “At least while there’s still garbage!” He applies the same cracked logic to dog shit.

It’s hard to separate this album from our ludicrous and dispiriting present, even if many of its references—to COVID and Mitch McConnell, for example—feel like headlines from half a decade ago. But McPhee can see past the stories that news media have deemed urgent in 2025; after all, both the virus and the execrable senator still wreak havoc. Problems don’t replace each other, McPhee tells us—if they did, we would have solved the earlier ones. They build, weighing on our daily lives, and persist when repression or compartmentalization convinces us that we’ve forgotten. As McPhee repeats on the closer: “This is crazy.” His statement is both inadequate and encompassing, a lament that, like the rest of I’m Just Say’n, fits a bottomless sense of absurdity and outrage within its sweep.

from https://pitchfork.com