Joe McPhee with the Thing

Haven't heard of the Thing? Don't worry, all your favorite musicians have.

Related Content

• Low Down: Do Bands Need Bass Players Any More?
  January 9, 2012
• Zoo Station: A Noah's Ark Of 75 Animal Songs
  June 14, 2011
• Music's Top 10 Most Fashionable Women Right Now
  April 22, 2011
• Sex and Spacemen: The Weirdest Christmas Songs We Could Find
  December 22, 2011
• Top 10 Most Underrated Music Video Artists
  July 28, 2011

More About

• Joe McPhee
• Paal Nilssen-Love
• Mats Gustafsson
• Peter Brotzmann
• Ken Vandermark

Scandinavian jazz experimentalists the Thing consists of three guys whose names you've never heard of and can't pronounce anyway (Mats Gustafsson, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Paal Nilssen-Love). But, rest assured, many artists you do know — Sonic Youth, the Boredoms, the Ex — have heard of and have worked with those guys and all the vowels in their names. Collaborating with them on this show is 68-year-old free jazz legend Joe McPhee, who began working with the Thing in 2001. McPhee's lofty résumé could carry the weight of a bill on his own — he can be heard in more than 70 recordings, is a recipient of the 2005 Resounding Vision Award (it's a jazz thing) and has made some of free jazz's most groundbreaking works with (here we go with the names again) Ken Vandermark and Peter Brotzmann. Add him to the Thing for some mind-bending, genre-defying covers of acts as diverse as Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, the White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Lightning Bolt, and it's sure to be an exciting, if slightly hard-to-pronounce, show.