JOE MORRIS

Joe Morris, born in 1955, in New Haven, Connecticut, started, early on, a career centered on self-learning – firstly, taking on the trumpet, followed shortly by the guitar, the banjo, and more recently, a decade ago, approaching the double-bass with seriousness. It was with the guitar, though, that he built a unique path in the context of free jazz: he is, without over-stating it, one of the most important and influential guitarists in the scene since the legendary Sonny Sharrock, though his preference for a ‘clean’ sound, without resorting to distortion or effects, puts him together in a more accessible lineage for the non-initiated. To this have surely contributed his confessed influences – more than guitarists, they came from great sax players such as Eric Dolphy or Jimmy Lyons, and a close attention and affection for Western Africa string music and composers as Olivier Messiaen or Charles Ives.

He has played and recorded, since the late 70’s, with practically everyone involved in writing the history of jazz in the past forty years, from William Parker, Matthew Shipp or Andrew Cyrille to Ken Vandermark, Joe McPhee, Eugene Chadbourne or Hamid Drake. At this year’s OUT.FEST we’ll have the rare opportunity to witness a solo guitar performance and a two-day workshop on which he’ll focus on the ideas contained in his recent book ‘Perpetual frontier: The properties of free music’.