Unlimited World of Possibilities: A Conversation with Joe Morris (Part One)

As if it were not enough for many to so willingly force music into genre-labeled boxes, the division does not stop there. Intra-category distinctions often serve only to further divide and categorize. The best example would be the imposition of the mindset that there are certain schools of performance within a particular category. For instance, the insistence upon there being a “John Coltrane school of saxophone” or a “Duke Ellington school of piano.” To some extent, the origin of these forced lineages is understandable. It is sometimes easy to see historical trends that pass from generation to generation. It is sometimes helpful to see a lineage of artistic ideas to review their development over time. But like any classification system, this perspective’s greatest flaw lies in its overbreadth. The “school” mentality implies that the deepest influences are tied to a specific combination of wood, string, and metal. In reality, artists find guidance in the works of musicians who are not limited to their own instrument. Sometimes, influences even transcend sound itself, whether from visual art, literature, or personal connection. Yet we seldom speak of the “Charlie Parker school of piano.” Multi-instrumentalist Joe Morris is an excellent case study of an artist whose inspirations reach beyond the forced status quo.

Principally a guitarist and upright bassist, Morris draws as much from saxophonists as those who master his own instruments. The shadows of Jimmy Lyons, Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Albert Ayler are as evident in the sounds of his strings as those of Charlie Christian. Viewed from a broader lens, Morris takes primarily from the central facet they all share: an emphasis on innovation. Morris’ focus on artistic expansion has made him one of the most significant improvising musicians of our time. As Will Montgomery noted in The Wire, the autodidact Morris is “one of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” His countless duos have opened new frontiers in recorded musical dialogue. His INSTANTIATION project even aims to change how we perceive and approach free music. But his scope of artistry reaches even beyond performance and composing to include teaching, producing, and organizing, all of them fitting together as a holistic whole.

Other artists are certainly aware of Morris’ contributions. His list of collaborators could go on for pages. But to name a few, Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, William Parker, “Butch” Morris, David S. Ware, Evan Parker, Matthew Shipp, and Dewey Redman have all called upon his skills. And that is not even getting into his incredible pupils like Mary Halvorson and DoYeon Kim. The point is that those in the know know Morris and do so well. But far too often, genius goes underappreciated. So is the case for Morris. Perhaps it is his high level of output; he has over a hundred and fifty recordings as a leader. Maybe it is the hard work and dedication he has put into cities with rich creative music scenes – his native New Haven and Boston, to name two- that often get pushed aside in terms of national attention compared to the behemoth that is New York. Or it could be his emphasis on craft over attention. Whatever the case, one cannot help but sense that Morris deserves wider recognition than he often receives.

And this backdrop is what makes Arts for Art’s issuance of a Lifetime Achievement award to Morris so special. The recognition’s presentation on June 23, 2026, reflects the esteemed organization’s ability to look deep beyond the hype to someone like Morris who is truly pushing music forward. And those who will be in attendance for the event, a part of the annual Vision Festival, will get to witness Morris’ contributions firsthand through a variety of performance contexts, from a duo to an octet.

What follows is, in two parts, an extensive conversation with Morris from nearly a year ago, August 2025. Originally framed as a discussion of his newest album at that time, the stellar Abstract Forest (Relative Pitch, 2025),  it ended up going deeper into his mindset and experiences as an artist. We ultimately covered much wider ground than a single album. We hope it provides some greater insight into who he is as a creative mind, as he is about to receive recognition for his life’s work.

PostGenre: Going back to the beginning, you had a rough childhood, and music saved you. Interestingly, if you go through the history of music, there are many similar stories of music saving young lives. Louis Armstrong is a good example. What do you think it is about music that inherently holds that kind of power?

Joe Morris: That’s a good question. I think creativity has the power to give you an outlet for how you feel when you deal with tough stuff. As a kid, you become hyperaware of everything going on around you, or you’re going to be totally lost. You have to be very observant, and I believe artists are people who need to express those feelings somehow. I think creativity is a very good way to deal with how you view the world. And again, if you’re a kid going through some stuff, your view of the world is going to be heightened.

With my own kid, who’s an artist, at about seventeen, he was struggling just with being a kid. I said to him, “Maybe you’re an artist” because I understand that. With music, for me, having examples like Louis Armstrong meant a lot. Though, really, the totality of the broader community of African-American musicians went through tough times.  Even though I went through tough stuff, I never had to deal with racism. I had more opportunities provided to me even though my family was broke and had other things going on. I looked at the music being created out of people who were born into struggle, and it was incredible. I  thought it was the ultimate thing to get involved with; to participate in.

The creative impulse can result in many different disciplines. Music is, in some ways, the easiest because you can do it without a producer. You can do it without a theater. You can do it without any money. Making music is the most DIY thing a person can do. You don’t have to sell a painting. You can play on the street and make some money. I think the convenience of musicmaking lends itself to people who don’t have a lot but do have a lot to say.

PG: Do you think that is why you have been able to play so many different instruments professionally – guitar, upright bass, drums, whatever- because when expressing yourself, the medium isn’t necessarily as important as the expression itself?

JM: All music is invented by people. I don’t believe specific technique is a constant. Some techniques work for everyone, but I think in the area of music I’m interested in, inventing it is far more interesting. Anthony Braxton, Sunny Murray, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington. Every single one of those people invented their own technique, which is why they have such an identifiable sound.

I think if you’re playing off how you feel but with knowledge of the history of technique and the musical engineering that goes on in every era, you’ll know enough to not do what other people have done, but instead to attempt to try to do something that is as dynamic as what they’ve done.

PG: Does being self-taught for the most part, as you were, make it easier to find your own voice compared to someone who closely follows a more traditional musical education?

JM: I don’t know. When you’re self-taught, you still have to do “acceptable” things. I had to play scales. I had to learn how to read music and understand the basics, like chords and rhythms. But again, my objective has never been to be an interpretive musician. I think a lot of musical studies intend to get students to do things “correctly” based on what their teachers, or who they’re trying to impress, believe is the right way to do things. I believe the right way to do things isn’t to simply match what your teacher thinks is best but to be innovative and original. And there is a long line of innovators you can look to whose work will inspire you to sound like yourself. As the AACM used to say, it’s a “tradition of innovation.”

As a teacher, part of what I do is to make sure people have the facility to engage with their instrument in a way that’s very fluid and under their control. I then help students find the things that work. Things that connect with their own sensibilities, their own beliefs, and the way they want to engineer the music. I often say to my students, “I don’t know, what do you think?” Sometimes that attitude is shocking to people. But there are so many students out there who use perspective to do something unique. I’m pretty confident that it works. And it’s worked for me.

PG: It is interesting too, because that perspective forces students to focus on their own narratives and approaches and less on certain schools of approaches on their instruments or particular historical lineages.

JM: I was fortunate to be friends with a brilliant, very well-known thinker named Margaret Hamilton. She invented the term “software engineer.” I had long conversations with her, and she pointed out to me that there are both linear and non-linear thinkers. One of the  fundamental problems I encounter with free music is that many musicians think linearly. They try to move the needle along the line little by little in terms of how much they change things. My feeling is that we should instead open everything up. There is an unlimited world of possibilities.

PG: Does the prevalence of the linear mindset you describe make it more difficult to teach people?

JM: Well, there is more than one group of students. Some really want to do things the way they believe is right, which is often interpretive. They play like Charlie Parker or like a combination of Charlie Parker or [John] Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. Sometimes Wayne Shorter is the default. Or they play like Herbie Hancock and maybe a little like McCoy [Tyner]. They’re happy doing that. I consider that to be stopping at interpretation. That’s fine. That’s art. That’s creativity.

But then there are some who are really eager to continue their own invention. Those are the people who come to me. For them, the possibility of making their own decisions is so liberating that once I help them open up the door to creativity, they just run with it. I’m lucky that I’ve been able to articulate how they might do that, and it works. I can tell you it works.

PG: The emphasis on lineage also seems to focus too heavily on particular instrumentation. But your guitar performances draw not only on the guitar but also saxophonists like Jimmy Lyons and John Coltrane. People who stick to linear thought tend to overlook those other musical influences that aren’t directly related to their instrument.

JM: Sometimes, yes. It’s weird, too, because if you read about Charlie Christian, which I did when I was a teenager, he was trying to play like Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. There was no example of his approach to guitar before he created it himself. He couldn’t play like Ike Robinson, Lonnie Johnson, or even Django Reinhardt. Though he did take inspiration from Django to get the sound he wanted. Charlie Christian didn’t have to invent everything he did on the guitar, but he did invent a way to play his own original phrasing on the guitar. And I took that as an example.

I often ask guitar students who they think is the best jazz guitarist of all time. They will often name Jim Hall, which is fair. But they fail to realize that while he doesn’t sound like Charlie Christian, he was still influenced by him. Similarly, Wes Montgomery doesn’t sound like Charlie Christian but is influenced by him. Same with Jimi Hendrix. Over the years, people have criticized me and tried to compare how I sound to another person. I gradually learned to be grateful for that, because that’s what I’m trying to do. They don’t go, “You suck because you don’t sound like Pat Metheny.” And to me, no offense to Pat; I’m glad people pick up on the fact I don’t sound like him. They’re identifying that there’s something different, even if they can’t quite identify what it is that differentiates us. I don’t want to sound like any guitarist but myself, even as I learn from others.

And thank you, by the way, for hearing Jimmy Lyons in my sound. He’s a huge influence on me. Going way back, I was listening to Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Lyons, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Roscoe Mitchell, and Charlie Parker. I’ve heard other people trying to play the guitar in a way- not very well, though- that sounds like Charlie Parker. But I’ve never heard anyone playing the guitar like Eric Dolphy and Jimmy Lyons. Derek Bailey noticed and told me that I sound like Albert Ayler, and that made sense because Ayler is one of my biggest influences. I took it as a high compliment that he noticed. And that is also how he meant it. So some people understand and see those connections.

PG: It makes sense that other highly skilled improvisers would understand that, but maybe not the average listener or people solely on the business side of music-making.

JM: When you say you freely improvise, people often lock you into some other expectation. There is a constant challenge of feeling like I’m saying something that hasn’t already been said and using a non-linear approach to find other routes to go there. I feel that’s worked for me really well as a creative person. Though I don’t think it has necessarily worked for me as a professional musician. It hasn’t given me the kind of status that some other people have received. But in the long run, I would rather be thought of as an artist who creates something that might offer a thoughtful perspective to those who listen to me than receive acclaim. The listener might have a new idea or a new experience when they listen to me instead of just comparing me to somebody else.

PG: But even with some of the higher-profile artists, often their full brilliance gets lost in the conversation. Some people point to the spiritual side of Ayler’s music, as if that were the sole thing he was reflecting in his music.

JM: From working in academia, I know people who teach the music and still have no understanding of what someone like Ayler did. People will say that his music is very emotional and very spiritual. But rarely do they consider him a brilliant thinker. They never approach him on an intellectual level. They also say that Mozart made very passionate, very spiritual, religious music and don’t hesitate to acknowledge that he was brilliant. But when Albert Ayler comes into the conversation, they go, “Well, you know, he’s raw,” as if he had no intellectual capacity. From the day he started making music professionally to the day he died, all of the music he made still has an incredible lingering effect. Yet many of the people who follow him just view his work as some ritualistic thing they should try to imitate. Instead, as Anthony Braxton said years ago, “don’t play like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. Do something that’s as strong as what they did.”

PG: Do you think the reason many people overlook the brilliance of someone like Ayler compared to Western classical composers is that they can’t fully understand what he did, or is it primarily driven by racism?

JM: I think it’s ultimately racism. Most academics cling to certain rules of Western harmony to get their degrees. That makes them feel that those things are necessary to make a “correct” form of music. Of course, jazz studies look heavily at the harmonic innovations of Black musicians. No one’s studying Beethoven’s harmony in jazz school. They’re studying Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Miles Davis. But those also incorporate things that are different from Western classical. Many academics ignore the contributions of so many African-Americans and others who have their own musical history and ancestry. My ancestry is Irish, and we have our own music too that doesn’t meet those “correct” forms.

Henry Threadgill once said to me that “when everything’s been taken away from you, to get access to anything you use, you take whatever you want and use it any way you want.” To me, that’s very American. The new world had people already here before so many others moved here. And we’ve had so many waves of immigrants since. Throughout our country’s history, other people came and reconfigured everything already here into something else instead of people here going back to their old rules.

We need to approach music with an ethical sensibility about what’s right, what’s just, and fair for people. If you do that, if you calibrate every decision you make based on those criteria, you’ll come up with something worthwhile. Whether everybody likes what you create is a different consideration because those ideas are complicated. But they would at least make sense. I don’t think there’s a right way to make music. I think it’s all a sort of reaching. You are  trying in the perpetual frontier. You try and then try things a different way. I never go, “This is the music,” and disregard anything else. I also try to teach my students to avoid following a similar impulse. Instead, let’s talk about what’s actually going on in a particular piece of music and see what it means to us. I think that’s where we find opportunity.

Stay Tuned for Part Two with Joe Morris where we discuss some of his recordings, improvisation and composition, and the hidden creative music gem that is New Haven, Connecticut. He will be receiving Arts for Art’s Lifetime Achievement Award on June 23, 2026 at the Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan as part of the Thirtieth Vision Festival. During the evening, he will also be performing in a variety of duo (with Nicole Mitchell), trio (with William Parker and Matthew Shipp), quartet (with Tomeka Reid, Melanie Dyer and Solomon Caldwell), quintet (with Rob Brown, Hery Paz, Matt Rousseau, and Hidemi Akaiwa), and octet (with DoYeon Kim, Dan Blacksberg, Jonathan Paik, Selendis Johnson, Nick Neuberg, Noah Campbell, and Lemuel Marc) settings. More information is available on Arts for Art’s website. You can learn more about Joe Morris on his site.

Photo credit: Rob Miller