Intimate Conversations

A trio recording convened by American multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee — a revered elder of creative music — with Polish reedist Mikołaj Trzaska and drummer Jay Rosen, captured at the Alchemia club in Kraków in 2006. As McPhee's own notes explain, the album frames its twelve pieces as a series of intimate conversations, shared musical experiences expressed through the close call-and-response of two horns and drums. A defining example of the trans-Atlantic encounters that became the label's hallmark.

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The title of this recording, INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS, refers to the process which helped to generate the music. This is a series of dialogues, intimate in the sense that they involve shared and/or familiar experiences expressed in musical terms. It is a music of the moment, improvisations created in free space, in a first meeting. Like a drawing in ink on rice paper, it is what it is with out pretense, without correction, without apology. The titles of the pieces are suggestions for further conversations rather than descriptions. The music is a journey of discovery for the musicians and we hope for the listener as well. Labels like “free jazz “and “avant garde” are boxes which limits ones ability to experience discovery on its own terms. “Free jazz” has become and oxymoron and the “avant garde” a throwback style. We hope that the listener will find this simply art in its own time.

(Joe McPhee)