Lines away, Captain! No hold barred, full steam ahead. Rough seas? Yeah, who cares? Who can stop us? If »Black Magic Man« weren’t a free jazz record, it would certainly be a novel about seafaring. The massive sound waves, marked by tritones and other diabolical harmonic transgressions, go left, then right, up, down, but always with unbridled lust. The way Joe McPhee tortures the tenor saxophone for the first six minutes of the title and opening track is breathtaking in the best possible way.
Admittedly, like only Coltrane, Coleman, Ayler and Brötzmann, McPhee stands for exactly the musical escapades on the sax that are meant to be overwhelming in their most powerful form. But McPhee can also do things differently, as the almost elegiac, dreamy »Song for Lauren«—tenderly expressed on the soprano saxophone—proves. It only gradually loses its form and ends up resembling another excursion into the raging sea. On the B-side, McPhee experiments with exuberance: He lets Tyrone Crabb shoulder the electric bass to test the »free electric jazz« connection. A successful experiment with a stiff breeze.
Black Magic Man
