Joe McPhee (saxophones, trumpet)
Peter Brötzmann (saxophones, clarinet, tarogato)

Since his emergence on the creative jazz and new music scene in the late 1960s, Joe McPhee has been a deeply emotional composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a thoughtful conceptualist and theoretician. Born on November 3, 1939, in Miami, McPhee first began playing the trumpet at age eight. He continued on that instrument through high school and then in a U.S. Army band stationed in Germany; during his Army stint, he was first introduced to traditional jazz. Clifford Thornton's Freedom and Unity, recorded in 1967 and released in 1969, became the first recording on which McPhee appears. In 1968, he began playing the saxophone and since has investigated a wide range of instruments (including pocket trumpet, clarinet, valve trombone, and piano), with active involvement in both acoustic and electronic music.

Over the course of his forty-plus year career, German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann has never compromised his distinct aesthetics. As one of the true founders of what has become known as European Improvised Music, and through his revolutionary trio of the seventies with Han Bennink and Fred Van Hove, right up to the present day and his continued work with his large ensemble: The Brötzmann Chicago Tentet; he continues to reinvent himself, his music, and the approaches of every artist around him every time he takes the stage.  Possessing an instantly recognizable sound that has almost certainly affected every reedist that has ever encountered it, Brötzmann is legendary for reaching climactic heights on whatever instrument he picks up, but he is also the rare improviser equally capable of an original, introspective and near-blues sound.  Throughout his storied career, Brötzmann has appeared on well over 150 recordings, and performed all over the world in a myriad of settings with such legendary musicians as Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Sonny Sharrock, Evan Parker, Misha Mengelberg, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, to name a select few.


Natural Information Society:
Joshua Abrams (guimbri)
Lisa Alvarado (harmonium)
Emmett Kelly (guitar)
Frank Rosaly (drums)

Bassist Joshua Abrams is best known as a consummate sideman on the local jazz scene, where he’s been a steady presence for the last two decades. But he’s a proven versatilist, as evidenced by stints with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and even the Roots, with whom he plucked upright years before they became a fixture of late-night television. Abrams continues to diversify, making the leap into soundtrack work with The Interrupters and Bill Siegel’s in-progress The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which he’s currently scoring. For the last few years he’s also increasingly committed himself to the guimbri, an African lute.

On his latest, Natural Information, the scene standby gives us something more in line with his avant-garde experiments as a member of Town and Country, as well as that group’s drone descendent, DRMWPN. It’s the first of his solo efforts to showcase his growing body of work on the guimbri: an African lute-like instrument tuned low like a bass. Loping grooves recall the loose, undulating cycle of West African praise songs minus the griot.

The hypnotic, harmonium-driven pulse of “Abide in Sunset” plies African grooves in an expansive psych-folk improvisation, coursing with the spidery guitarwork of Emmett Kelly and colorful textures of drummer Frank Rosaly. -- Areif Sless-Kitain, Time Out Chicago