Joe McPhee
Straight Up, Without Wings, The Musical Flight Of Joe McPhee
Corbett vs Dempsey Pbk 170 pp

“I love noise. Noise interests me because it’s everywhere, and it can be organised to make what we think of as music. Everybody has access to it, and everybody can fashion it anyway they want to.” So begins Joe McPhee’s memoir, Straight Up, Without Wings. It’s a statement that captures the artistic curiosity and generosity of spirit that has driven the multi-instrumentalist, composer and poet since the 1960s. McPhee’s interest in noise becomes a leitmotif throughout the book. His childhood superhero was the cartoon character Gerald McBoing-Boing, a boy who speaks through sound effects rather than words. “He could make any kind of sound – airplanes, cars, trains, anything,” McPhee relates, “I don’t know if I was thinking of noise in those terms yet but I connected with him.”

Later, he recalls attending a Moog synthesizer demonstration in the mid-60s, sparking an interest that would lead to his celebrated collaborations with John Snyder. Two more recent episodes speak to McPhee’s love of noise, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Recording at home during Covid, he becomes so fascinated by the sound of the kitchen tap dripping on a pie tin that he makes a piece out of it: “I thought, that’s an interesting rhythm.” Inspired by neighbour Graham Lambkin’s collection of tape recorders, McPhee takes to documenting his walks through the airport on his phone. “I said, ‘Hmm. I’m going to go in the john and take a whiz.’ I recorded that and it’s called “A Piss Before Flying”. I’m nuts, so why not?”

Unfolding in broadly chronological order, Straight Up, Without Wings is presented as an oral history, as told to Mike Faloon, whose previous book The Other Night At Quinn’s (reviewed in The Wire 414) is a warm account of an improvised music series at a diner close to the musician’s home in Poughkeepsie in upstate New York. Given his part in this community, Faloon is an ideal interlocutor, and for the accompanying reflections from friends and collaborators he’s savvy enough to interview lesser known local musicians alongside major figures like Ken Vandermark, Jeb Bishop and William Parker. Bookended by the gorgeous poetics of Fred Moten (“mcphee speaksinging elegant, angelic tat and bookspill on your skin”) and Moor Mother (“to start with noise and end up a panther”) it’s a rich and inspiring assemblage, centred on the great man’s voice: funny, wise, modest, perceptive.

It’s a portrait of McPhee in many colours: the nerdy kid obsessed with comics and electrical engineering, the teenage jazz fan whose Miles Davis records are stolen at a party, the young trumpeter earning his chops in military bands, the free jazz head who hung with Ornette and attended John Coltrane’s funeral, the Black hippie who bought a Volkswagen van and named it Afro-1. Ultimately, the McPhee that emerges is an artist who carved out his own space one step removed from the New York loft scene, making fruitful connection across the US and Europe. Discussing key collaborators and influences, McPhee offers wonderful personal anecdotes alongside insightful artistic commentary. He describes Pauline Oliveros as “a karate expert, a philosopher, a poet, an artist, and the most wonderful person in the world”, and fondly remembers their first meeting: “She was drinking bourbon like a sailor on leave. Oh my God, I love this woman.”

McPhee avoids hagiography in his accounts of Cecil Taylor and Peter Brötzmann, acknowledging their mercurial natures while showing the utmost respect for their art. As a testament to as serious as your life improvisation, the section on Trio X with Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen – arguably McPhee’s most important ensemble – is particularly vital. Responding to a producer’s jibe that they couldn’t improvise on a stone painted like a watermelon, the trio countered, “We can improvise on anything”. The result was 1999’s brilliant The Watermelon Suite.

As Chris Corsano puts it, one of McPhee’s great qualities as an improvisor is his situational intelligence: “This is what this situation calls for acoustically, or this is what these people need or this is what I’m feeling… give him anything and he can make it work. Joe is the instrument, right?” Long may he fly.