Best Ever
Free Jazz Album?

The gymnasium at SUNY New Paltz wasn’t designed for acoustic documentation. It was designed for basketball, for sneakers squeaking on hardwood, for the ambient roar of collegiate athletics. But on December 18, 1970, with the CPS label’s Craig Johnson operating a portable tape recorder, Joe McPhee transformed that reverberant space into something like a cathedral—or maybe a courtroom, or a town square, or wherever it is that testimony gets delivered when the stakes are ultimate.

Nation Time takes its title from Amiri Baraka’s poem, performed by McPhee as spoken-word incantation over the album’s opening and closing tracks. “It’s nation time, eye ime, it’s nation time…” The words blur into pure phoneme, into rhythm, into the same stream of consciousness that would fuel McPhee’s horn work throughout the session. This isn’t jazz as entertainment or even jazz as art—it’s jazz as civic address, the artist standing before his community (literally: the audience of students and locals audibly present on the recording) and testifying to the moment.

McPhee was thirty when he made this record, a latecomer to performance who’d spent his twenties working as an electronics technician while teaching himself multiple instruments. The late start freed him from orthodoxy. His tenor saxophone work on “Nation Time” owes something to late Coltrane—the sheets of sound, the spiritual urgency—but also to something rawer, less technically mediated. When McPhee overblows into the horn’s upper register on “Shakey Jake,” he’s not demonstrating virtuosity; he’s making the instrument scream because screaming is what the moment requires.

The pocket trumpet, McPhee’s secondary voice throughout the album, provides textural contrast without softening the intensity. On “Scorpio’s Dance,” he switches between instruments mid-performance, the trumpet’s more focused tone cutting through the gymnasium’s natural reverb in ways the saxophone’s broader spray cannot. The effect is conversational—two voices from one body, debating, agreeing, pushing each other toward revelation.

Mike Kull’s drums anchor without constraining. His playing understands that free jazz requires a different kind of timekeeping: not metronomic pulse but responsive presence, the drummer as witness rather than director. When McPhee accelerates into the ecstatic passages that define the album’s peaks, Kull follows without chasing. When McPhee pulls back into near-silence, Kull knows to breathe with him.

The recording quality—lo-fi by necessity, capturing room sound and audience presence alongside the music—turns out to be essential to the album’s power. You hear the space. You hear bodies shifting in seats. You hear, faintly, the outdoor world beyond the gymnasium walls. This isn’t a document of musicians in isolation; it’s a document of a community gathered to witness something, and that witnessing becomes part of the work itself.

Context matters: December 1970, the Black Power movement at its height, the Vietnam War grinding on, Nixon in the White House. “Nation Time” as concept meant something specific and urgent. But McPhee’s genius was understanding that political music doesn’t require explicit political content—that the act of free expression, of Black artists claiming space to make sounds unbounded by European harmonic conventions, was itself a political statement. The album’s emotional directness transcends its historical moment because the emotions it addresses—rage, grief, joy, determination—aren’t historically bounded.

The CPS label that released Nation Time was a tiny operation; the album went out of print almost immediately and remained a collector’s obsession for decades. When Corbett vs. Dempsey reissued it in 2015, a new generation discovered what the cognoscenti had always known: this forty-minute document from a college gymnasium represents one of the purest expressions of what free jazz can do when it stops worrying about being jazz and starts being free.

McPhee is still performing today, in his eighties, with the same commitment to emotional truth that defined this early masterpiece. But Nation Time captures something that only happens once: an artist discovering, in real time, that he has something to say and the means to say it. The gymnasium’s reverb carries his testimony outward. It hasn’t stopped echoing.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Corbett vs. Dempsey vinyl reissue restores the album to print with appropriate care—the packaging includes liner notes contextualizing the session.
• McPhee’s follow-up Underground Railroad, recorded the same year, extends the Nation Time approach with a larger ensemble.
• For deeper context, the Black Fire compilation on Soul Jazz Records surveys the broader Black Power jazz movement of which McPhee was part.