When a well-known musician shows up at a big rock gig, they’re just a face in the crowd, at best fodder for the next day’s gossip column. But when the same thing happens at a jazz club, it creates an electrifying tension—everyone’s wondering, Will they sit it? The latter scenario played out last night at Zebulon, as veteran saxist Joe McPhee (second from left above)—a veritable great white in the small pond of free jazz—strolled in toting his horn case right before the Scandinavian group The Thing, his frequent collaborators, began playing.

Following an outstandingly tight and vicious set by local noise-jazz quartet Little Women, the Thing began in its usual format, a trio with Swedish saxist Mats Gustafsson (a globe-trotting improv powerhouse who regularly collaborates with the likes of Thurston Moore), Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who performed a stirring set at Monkey Town a few weeks back) and Flaten’s countryman, the commanding drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. On record, the Thing—named not after the Marvel Comics character or the John Carpenter flick but after a piece by the late free-jazz trumpeter Don Cherry—makes a habit of covering rock songs (Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Art Star,” Lightning Bolt’s “Ride the Skies”), but as the musicians quickly proved, they don’t really need much outside assistance when it comes to asskicking. They improvised with a rare kind of controlled fury, each one simultaneously attacking and caressing his instrument. Gustafsson stomped, crouched and writhed as he played—there was a certain theatricality to his movements, but his burly, fragmented lines more than justified the apparent exertion.

After the first piece, Gustafsson offered the much-desired intro, crude yet immensely heartfelt: “And now I’d like to bring up Joe McPhee, a man who—well, there’s not really words for what this man has been doing for music all over the fucking planet.” As expected, McPhee’s presence brought a special kind of gravitas to the proceedings. During his initial solo he brought to mind the steely majesty of late Coltrane—sounding rough-edged but patient and even prayerful—offering a perfect balance to the band’s muscular fireworks. The band eventually worked its way into the Lightning Bolt tune, and McPhee had no problem adjusting to the piece’s clipped, stabbing rhythms—pretty impressive for a man born in 1939.