Joe McPhee / Ken Vandermark / Chris Corsano Trio

Joe McPhee/Ken Vandermark/Chris Corsano Trio

The trio of Joe McPhee (sax/voice), Ken Vandermark (reeds), and Chris Corsano (drums/percussion) will be performing a series of concerts for the first time in early autumn, highlighted by a show to conclude their tour at the Sound & Gravity Festival in Chicago on September 6th. Though this is their initial music as a group, there have been a number of previous collaborations from these musicians, some of them longstanding. Joe and Ken first played together at the recording session for A Meeting in Chicago in 1996. Since then, they have worked together many times, perhaps most notably in the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. Their latest album performances together are as a duo and documented on Musings of a Bahamian Son: Poems and Other Words by Joe McPhee, released by Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2024.

Joe and Chris have worked together extensively for more than 15 years, with many recordings and concerts as a duo and in groups with important figures in the music like Eddie Prévost, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, and Steve Swell. Ken and Chris have also played together in many configurations, beginning with a trio concert at the Festival Germinal in Mexico City with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier during November of 2014 and, since then, they have continued to develop a special musical rapport.

Though the music from this new trio by McPhee, Vandermark, and Corsano will be completely improvised and spontaneous, it will be informed by their collective histories, a background which includes decades of work with a variety of musical aesthetics and artists that has taken place during hundreds of concerts and dozens of recordings, at home and abroad.Joe McPhee: A legendary multi-instrumentalist (saxophone, trumpet) and composer who has been a pioneering force in creative jazz since the late 1960s. He is known for his highly expressive, deeply soulful, and exploratory sound.

Joe McPhee is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, known for his pioneering work in avant-garde jazz and experimental music. Primarily recognized for his virtuosic saxophone playing, McPhee also performs on trumpet, pocket trumpet, and a variety of other instruments. His career spans over five decades, during which he has collaborated with leading figures in the free jazz and experimental music scenes, including William Hooker, Ken Vandermark, and Roscoe Mitchell. McPhee’s work blends elements of jazz, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music, marked by emotional depth and innovative approaches to sound. Throughout his career, he has maintained a commitment to pushing the boundaries of music, both in solo performances and collaborative projects. [website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_McPhee]

Ken Vandermark (USA 1964) is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer whose unique history has given him the opportunity to perform extensively and record with key figures of the AACM (Fred Anderson), New York’s Downtown scene (Ikue Mori), FMP (Peter Brötzmann), the English improvisers scene (Paul Lytton), post-punk (Terrie Ex), Ethiopian music (Getachew Mekuria), and free jazz from Japan (Akira Sakata). He's been the director of the Catalytic Sound musician cooperative since 2012, has run Audiographic Records since 2014, in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music, and in 2024 he curated the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria. Vandermark moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians. [website: kenvandermark.com; insta: @ken_vandermark; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ken.vandermark.5/]

Chris Corsano (b. 1975, USA) is a drummer who's been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990's. He's worked with Joe McPhee, Bill Orcutt, Björk, and many others--appearing on over 200 albums and touring constantly in an ultra-wide array of collaborations. Corsano has built an inventive and highly personal musical language through extended percussion techniques and creative augmentations to his kit, with circular-breathed reeds, bowed strings, and resonant materials expanding the drums' melodic and textural possibilities in addition to their rhythmic ones. [website: cor-sano.com; Insta: @chriscorsano; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chriscorsano]

Photos below taken by:

Joe McPhee (Zig Koritnik)

Ken Vandermark (Christina Marx)

Chris Corsano (Massimo Calabria Matarweh)

Poster by Robert Beatty

https://robertbeattyart.com/