Joe McPhee and Monster
Cafe Oto, London
★★★★★

OF all the musicians that I love to hear live, the nonpareil of saxophone freedom and commitment to creative sound must be Joe McPhee. 86 now, Florida-born, New York State-domiciled and beloved by listeners Stateside and Europe-wide, hearing him again at Cafe Oto with his deepest bass heartbeat, John Edwards of Hounslow, London, is always an experience of real sonic moment. “Protect our cultural quarter! Wake up and start to dream!” declared a large canvas placard in Ashwin Street, outside the Dalston venue, and that’s what McPhee does to my consciousness, and that of thousands, although we must add the verbs ”resist” and “organise,” for all of us in Trump-and-Starmer times, both sides of the Atlantic.

Tonight McPhee and Edwards are playing in a quartet dubbed Monster, with two virtuosi women, Austrian bass clarinettist Susanna Gartmeyer and drummer Maria Portugal from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was lucky enough to be sitting two yards from Portugal with her myriad of sticks, mallets, rods, gold and silver metal brushes and bars, a handsaw-like bow, tambourine and two boomerang-shaped organic shakers, all ready on a small table next to her drums.

She began with Edwards, making a symphony of scraping and sawing on her rims, with the horns of McPhee and Gartmeyer playing in a visceral unison. Gartmeyer’s subterranean notes sounded mournful while McPhee blew as low as low gets on his tenor saxophone. It was like a New Orleans funeral function on a Dalston night, going home to the very provenances of jazz, before Edwards’s bass began to twang with excitation and Portugal’s sticks rebounded off all her nearby surfaces.

I don’t know how many years and generations separate McPhee from Gartmeyer and Portugal, but the four played like close family, siblings of improvisation all, with Edwards’s deeply growling arco bringing together the closest unity of sound. Portugal sang softly in Portuguese, with beautiful and inspired breath while the two horns all but sang beside her, before Gartmeyer’s fleet and runaway solo suddenly radiated a burst of musical athleticism. The sounds Edwards made from his instrument were like those of another human voice: humming, throbbing, lamenting, plucking, lyricising — all from the strings and mellowed wood of his aged, companion bass.

Their third piece began with an astonishing drum solo by the Brazilian right next to me: polyrhythmic, full of volcanic fire and earth, switching from sticks to fingers with her drumsticks clenched between her teeth, she swirled the tambourine and small cymbals on the skins of her snares, becoming a drum orchestra in herself, before the octogenarian griot McGhee blew a solo like his hero Paul Robeson’s voice, full of story, history and hope for now-times, truly the future in the present, for those lucky listeners here, and those passing humans in the seething London streets outside.

Yes, monstrous! And here more of it at Cafe Oto on July 15 and 16 with Edwards again, drummer Mark Sanders and arch-saxophonist John Butcher in their Last Dream of the Morning trio, and on July 18 with The Eternal Triangle — Yorkshire altoist Trevor Watts, Cornish pianist Veryan Weston and drummer Jamie Harris. Monsters all!
   
Joe McPhee and Monster perform tonight at Cafe Oto and can be livestreamed here