Joe McCarthy is an American drummer, percussionist, bandleader, producer and educator, and the founder of the Afro Bop Alliance, the Afro-Cuban jazz ensemble he has led since around 2001. He took a Master's degree in percussion performance at the University of North Texas in 1992 and has held adjunct teaching appointments continuously since, at Texas Wesleyan University, Georgetown University, George Mason University, Washington College and, most recently, the University of New Haven.

The long spine of his working life was the military band system. McCarthy spent twenty years with the United States Naval Academy Band in Annapolis, retiring as a Chief Petty Officer, where he was principal percussionist of the wind ensemble and the chief in charge and drummer of the band's jazz group, the Next Wave. That posting is what anchored him in the Washington DC and Maryland scene, and it is where the Afro Bop Alliance came from: a band assembled out of Naval Academy Band players, Washington freelancers and Baltimore-area horn players, working the bebop repertoire over Afro-Cuban, Afro-Caribbean and Brazilian rhythm.

The group recorded first as a septet. Encarnación (2004) was its debut, made in the DC area with trumpeter Ray Vega and pianist Arturo O'Farrill as guests. The big-band edition followed on Camino Nuevo (Mambo Maniacs Records), with Poncho Sanchez and vibraphonist Dave Samuels guesting; the Washington Area Music Association voted it Latin album of the year for 2006. Over the following decade the Afro Bop Alliance collected four Wammie awards from that organization. In parallel McCarthy co-led the Vince Norman/Joe McCarthy Big Band with saxophonist and arranger Vince Norman, recording Words Cannot Express (2007) and Bright Future (2010) for Origin Arts' OA2 imprint.

The Samuels connection produced the record McCarthy is still best known for. Afro Bop Alliance was cut at Bias Studio in Springfield, Virginia, and released by Heads Up International on March 25, 2008, billed on the sleeve to the Caribbean Jazz Project featuring Dave Samuels. McCarthy played drums and percussion and worked as assistant producer; the big band on the date is his. The album won Best Latin Jazz Album at the 9th Annual Latin Grammy Awards in November 2008, an award credited to the Caribbean Jazz Project and Dave Samuels rather than to McCarthy or the Afro Bop Alliance by name. The same record was then nominated in the Best Latin Jazz Album category at the 51st Grammy Awards in February 2009, where it lost to Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra's Song for Chico. The distinction matters, because the win is routinely described as a Grammy: it was a Latin Grammy, and the Grammy was a nomination only.

McCarthy kept the band running through Una Más (2011), which brought Samuels back on vibraphone and marimba, Angel Eyes (2014), a chamber-strings and steel-pan date with Paquito D'Rivera guesting on clarinet, and Revelation (2016). He then relocated from the DC and Maryland area to New York and rebuilt the group as Joe McCarthy's New York Afro Bop Alliance Big Band, staffed with New York players. Upwards (ZOHO, 2019) is that band's first record: pianist Manuel Valera, bassist Boris Kozlov, guitarist Vinny Valentino, percussionist Samuel Torres and a saxophone section that includes Israeli baritone specialist Eden Bareket, playing originals by Valera, Valentino and Kozlov alongside Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan," John Lewis's "Afternoon in Paris" and Samuels's "Five for Elvin." Reviewing it for DownBeat, John Murph credited McCarthy's rise as one of the strongest practitioners of Nuyorican Afro-Latin jazz working, and noted the band's Art Blakey habit of building programs out of its own members' writing.

The Pan American Nutcracker Suite (2022) is his most ambitious project: Tchaikovsky's suite rewritten across a range of Latin American dance rhythms, with "Waltz of the Flowers" set to a Venezuelan joropo. McCarthy composed it during a residency at the University of Texas at Arlington, working outward from the grooves before the arrangements existed, and Vince Norman shared the arranging. It came out on Angelface Records, McCarthy's own label, and its "Waltz of the Flowers" was nominated for Best Arrangement at the 2023 Latin Grammy Awards. Alongside the bands he has published Joe McCarthy's Afro Cuban Big Band Play-Along Series through Alfred Music and, in 2020, an online drum-set curriculum called BASIC Training. He endorses Zildjian, Yamaha, Remo, Latin Percussion and Vic Firth, which makes his MJC2 signature stick.

McCarthy's playing is built on the join between a bebop drummer's ride-cymbal time and clave, and he moves between the kit and hand percussion inside the same set rather than treating them as separate jobs: on Una Más he is credited with drums, bells and timbales, and on the earlier Afro Bop Alliance dates with drums, percussion and congas at once. As a bandleader he works from rhythm first, which is unusual for a big-band writer. He has said of The Pan American Nutcracker Suite that he wrote all the grooves before anyone arranged anything, the reverse of the normal order. The band's programming reflects the same instinct: standards and bebop heads ("Caravan," Thelonious Monk and Denzil Best's "Bemsha Swing," John Coltrane's "Naima," Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments," Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo's "Soul Sauce") recast over Afro-Cuban, Afro-Caribbean and Brazilian rhythm sections instead of new material written to be exotic.