The Defiant Jazz of Joe McPhee

I’ve been enjoying the Apple TV+ series Severance since it started in 2022. There’s an episode toward the end of Season 1 called “Defiant Jazz.” That episode’s “Music Dance Experience,” a surreal perk for Lumon Industries’ severed employees, led me to search for the composer of the music in the scene. (For context, Severance follows Mark, Helly, Dylan, and Irving, who willingly undergo a procedure dividing their work and personal memories. When the characters are at work [known as “innies”] they have no knowledge of what their lives are like outside of work).

Since the episode “Defiant Jazz” was released, the music used in the dance sequence has been on my mind as I’ve rewatched that scene a number of times. I thought, wrongly, that it was composed for the show. Only later did I find out it’s a song by jazz musician, Joe McPhee, and the title of the song is not “Defiant Jazz,” but rather “Shakey Jake.” The album “Shakey Jake” comes off of is Nation Time, and it was recorded live on December 12th and 13th (1970) at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The venue was Chicago Hall at the Urban Center for Black Studies.

I’m not the biggest fan of’70s era jazz, but what Joe McPhee and his bandmates do on this record is quite excellent. Some of the solos are very avant-garde, but what makes them interesting is the freak out quality of the sax solos adds an effective contrast to the groove the band’s rhythm section keeps. It reminds me a bit of what composer Angelo Badalamenti did on the song “Red Bats with Teeth” from the Lost Highway soundtrack.

“Red Bats…” starts out with a 4/4 rock feel, but the sax solo starts to get more deranged and chaotic as the song reaches its climax at the end. Something similar happens at times on “Shakey Jake” leading me to think McPhee was an inspiration for Badalamenti’s music on the Lost Highway soundtrack. And while that film was about a character who goes through a fugue state and becomes another person, “Shakey Jake” and the other songs on Nation Talk, are reflective of the time this album was recorded. Specifically, Black Liberation movements as embodied by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) — who the album is dedicated to. Those movements in the ’70s could be chaotic, innovative, and transgressive. They challenged the mainstream in both political and cultural ways. So, when McPhee chaotically solos around a funk groove, he’s also challenging the listener by pushing them out of their comfort zone. 

While Miles Davis was moving into fusion with the release of In a Silent Way in 1969 (only a year before Nation Time), what McPhee is doing on this record is far more a boundary-pushing work than Davis could create in this era of jazz. Is the album a masterpiece? I think it falls a bit short for that kind of pronouncement, but it is certainly an extraordinary performance by a musician who can make the listener feel both comfortable and uneasy over the course of a 13 minute funky jam. It’s no stretch of the imagination to see why this music was chosen for the Severance dance sequence. The song’s gradual shift from funk to tension-filled moments mirrors the scene’s progression towards on-screen chaos and violence. And the subtle detail of Helly choosing a maraca for her dance—a nod to the maraca heard at the end of “Shakey Jake”—adds another layer of depth.