The Other Side of Life and Roots 101 African-American Museum are proud to present a very special performance by the:
JOE MCPHEE/KEN VANDERMARK/CHRIS CORSANO TRIO
Friday September 4th, 2026
at Roots 101 African-American Museum
121 N 1st Street
Louisville, KY 40202
ALL AGES WELCOME
$25 advance tickets, $30 day of show
Advance tickets available online at TicketLeap at 12 PM on Friday July 3rd;
Physical tickets available for in-person purchase Friday July 3rd at:
ROOTS 101 AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM, 121 N 1st Street, Louisville KY 40202 (cash or card)
10% discount for this event for all ROOTS 101 AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM members! Applicable when purchased at the museum only.
Better Days Records, 921 Barret Ave, Louisville, KY 40204 (cash or card)
Surface Noise, 600 Baxter Avenue, Louisville KY 40204 (cash only)
7:00 PM doors
8:00 PM music
JOE MCPHEE (b. 1939, USA) is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, known for his pioneering work in avant-garde jazz and experimental music. Primarily recognized for his virtuosic saxophone playing, MCPHEE also performs on trumpet, pocket trumpet, and a variety of other instruments. His career spans over five decades, during which he has collaborated with leading figures in the free jazz and experimental music scenes, including William Hooker, KEN VANDERMARK, Pauline Oliveros, and Roscoe Mitchell, among many others. MCPHEE’s work blends elements of jazz, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music, marked by emotional depth and innovative approaches to sound. Throughout his career, he has maintained a commitment to pushing the boundaries of music, both in solo performances and collaborative projects.
KEN VANDERMARK (b. 1964, USA) is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer whose unique history has given him the opportunity to perform extensively and record with key figures of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), New York’s Downtown scene, Free Music Productions (Germany), the English improvisation scene, post-punk, Ethiopian music, and Japanese free jazz. He’s been the director of the Catalytic Sound musician cooperative since 2012, has run Audiographic Records since 2014, in 1999 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music, and in 2024 he curated the Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria. VANDERMARK moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989 and has worked continuously from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America, Europe, Latin America, Japan, and Ethiopia, recording in a large array of contexts, with many internationally renowned musicians.
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CHRIS CORSANO (b. 1975, USA) is a drummer who’s been active at the intersections of collective improvisation, free jazz, avant-rock, and noise music since the late 1990’s. He’s worked with JOE MCPHEE, Bill Orcutt, Björk, and many others — appearing on over 200 albums and touring constantly in an ultra-wide array of collaborations. CORSANO has built an inventive and highly personal musical language through extended percussion techniques and creative augmentations to his kit, with circular-breathed reeds, bowed strings, and resonant materials expanding the drums’ melodic and textural possibilities in addition to their rhythmic ones.
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The trio of JOE MCPHEE (sax/voice), KEN VANDERMARK (reeds), and CHRIS CORSANO (drums/percussion) will be performing together for the first time in a limited series of concerts in Louisville, Cincinnati, and Lexington, concluding their tour at the Sound & Gravity Festival in Chicago on September 6th. Though this is their initial music as a group, there have been a number of previous collaborations from these musicians, some of them longstanding: JOE and KEN first played together at the recording session for A Meeting in Chicago in 1996. Since then, they have worked together many times, most notably in the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. Their latest album performances together are as a duo and documented on Musings of a Bahamian Son: Poems and Other Words by Joe McPhee, released by Corbett vs. Dempsey in 2024.
JOE and CHRIS have worked together extensively for more than 15 years, with many recordings and concerts as a duo and in groups with important figures in the music like Eddie Prévost, Evan Parker, Lol Coxhill, and Steve Swell. KEN and CHRIS have also played together in many configurations, beginning with a trio concert at the Festival Germinal in Mexico City with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier during November of 2014 and, since then, they have continued to develop a special musical rapport.
Though the music from this new trio by MCPHEE, VANDERMARK, and CORSANO will be completely improvised and spontaneous, it will be informed by their collective histories, a background which includes decades of work with a variety of musical aesthetics and artists that has taken place during hundreds of concerts and dozens of recordings, at home and abroad.
Founded by Lamont Collins in 2020, the ROOTS 101 AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM is a place where visitors can see themselves in history, explore the African-American story in its entirety, and gain a greater understanding of the achievements, cultural contributions, and experiences of our community.
Special thanks to Lamont Collins and the ROOTS 101 AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSEUM staff.
Live music events in Louisville, KY. Show announcements, music and news, and other ephemera at: https://bsky.app/profile/theothersideoflife.bsky.social.
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