Uno dei protagonisti dell'Unlimited 38 a Wels - forse meno presente in cartellone di quanto si potesse attendersi, tuttavia quasi un habitué dell'Alter Schlachthof negli ultimi anni - è stato certamente Joe McPhee, che con Ken Vandermark ha offerto un appassionato saggio di musica e poesia nel corso dei concerti pomeridiani: un po' come nel recente album a due voci Musings of a Bahamian Son, che prelude a un'importante pubblicazione di suoi scritti per Corbett vs. Dempsey, Straight Up, Without Wings.
Joe McPhee is one of the great multi-instrumentalists of contemporary improvised music. His instrumental battery has included saxophones, clarinets, valve trombone, pocket trumpet, sound-on-sound tape recorder, and space organ, but another arrow in his quiver is text. McPhee has been writing poems since the 1970s. He occasionally introduces one into performance, as an introduction or afterword to music, and in recent years he's been known to do full-on readings, text only, featuring his inimitable sense of dramatic timing intoned in his rich voice. The poems range from the observational to the political to the surreal. They're composed in rhyme or according to an internal rhythm, sometimes utterly prosaic, sometimes fantastic and flamboyant. A few of them capture the immediacy of improvised music more acutely than any critical writing on the subject, his half-century immersion in the craft of free music having given him a bottomless cup to draw on and his sensitivity to the nuances of language providing a host of palpable metaphors and metonyms, similes and strophes.