“Well, this is the shit, got get it” – “Straight Up. Without Wings. The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee”

Joe McPhee
“Straight Up. Without Wings. The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee”

By Joe McPhee as told to Mike Faloon. Foreword by Fred Moten, Afterword by Moor Mother
Chicago 2024, Corbett vs. Dempsey

Text: Markus Müller /Photos: Cristina Marx

Joe McPhee is a living cultural World Heritage. This book is one of a great trio of autobiographies, on par with “The Andy Warhol Diaries Edited by Pat Hackett” and “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz. Born in 1928 (Warhol), 1939 (McPhee), and 1943 (Babitz) respectively, all three are foremost representatives of the American 20th Century with McPhee the only one left to translate that heritage into the future. “Straight up. Without Wings.” certainly carries the most poetic title of the three volumes and it reads like the most honest and heart-wrenchingly real books of all times. It is a multi-prismatic introduction into the lifes, musics, and poetics of a man, who started his recording career with the maybe most interesting and under the radar records of the last 60 years. And yes, thanks to the efforts of John Corbett from Corbett vs. Dembsey some of us do now know of his four CJR LPs beginning in 1969 with “Underground Railroad”, followed by “Nation Time” (1971), “Trinity” (1973), and “Pieces of Light (1975). If you haven’t yet, listen to “Nation Time” to readjust your musical universe and shake your tailfeathers.

Cafe OTO, London, Joe McPhee 4 day residency, 2019 – (Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

The book is structured chronologically and is a very accurate oral history in the sense that Faloon has succeeded in transporting McPhee’s vibrant jive, which is entertainingly oscillating between matter of factness, poetry, and renaissance man nerdism. The main story is interlaced with seven reflections by fellow musicians, who represent different collaborations and times: Charlie Benjamin, Mack Williams, Bruce Thompson, Fred Lonberg-Holm, William Parker, Chris Corsano, and Joe Giardullo. McPhee himself takes extra time to share his memories of fellow travelers like Cecil Taylor, Pauline Oliveros, Julius Eastman, and Peter Brötzmann. This one biography is about many, it contains multitudes.

McPhee is a certified man-catcher. Two record labels were explicitly founded to document his music. CJRecord Production (CJR) by Craig Johnson in 1969, which kicked of the aforementioned quadriga of greatness. And in 1975 Hat Hut Records, which made its premiere as an independent record label with McPhee’s “Black Magic Man”, which was recorded 1970 as part of the “Nation Time” session by Johnson at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Werner Xaver Uehlinger, the founder of Hat Hut, was a record collector working for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and so enthused by CJR’s first productions that he got in touch with Craig Johnson while planning a business trip to New Jersey. McPhee joined them for dinner and Uehlinger’s question if there is anything else in the vaults was answered with the yet unreleased Vassar recording. Uehlinger followed suit and the first Hat Hut (hat HUT A) was published in 1975. Only after McPhee told him, “You can’t have a label with one person” , Uehlinger began to add others to the fold: David Murray, Baikida Carroll, Steve Lacy, Max Roach, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor etc. When things started to take shape, Hat Hut expanded to the USA, making Joe McPhee the Vice President for Production and Marketing.

Cafe OTO, London, Decoy (Hawkins, Edwards, Noble) with Joe McPhee, soundcheck, 2023 (Photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

McPhee, born 1939 in Florida, started off as a trumpeter, was drafted and spend time in an Army band in Germany, among other places. Back in the States, while spreading his wings, he worked at a ball-bearing factory, Schatz Federal Bearings, in Poughkeepsie, New York, for over 18 years to keep things afloat. When the workers of said factory went on a strike (that lasted two years!) McPhee, who was in his thirties then, took up the saxophone. Defying all dos and don’ts of the business, Joe McPhee was always open and ready to roll in whichever direction the good music might take him. The late in life saxophone-lessons took him quite far.

In accordance to his openness to consider adding new instruments to his pool, McPhee has shown a voracious multifariousness in his interest in all musics from his beginnings: Parallel to his CJR experimentations, McPhee played in a band called “Ira and The Soul Project”, straight up “Marvin Gay kind of stuff…” in his own words. His 1998 hatology Solo CD “As Serious As Your Life” was dedicated to Val Wilmer and Guitar Shorty. “Shorty is kind of a hero for me in the manner of Coltrane and Ornette. Of him it is said ‘…that Guitar Shorty, he don’t play nothin’ right.’” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJy5fUipblQ) Yes, Guitar Shorty, the Texan blues man, who did somersaults on stage while soloing. As unusual as the combination of these heroes might be, it is a typical McPhee. He always was and always will be above categories, smiling at the Jazz Police from higher ground.

München, Haus der Kunst, FMP.The Living Music, 2017 (Photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

Leaving Schatz Federal Bearing to join Hat Hut meant that he was suddenly part of an international business jet set network. A rather closed club in the early 1980ies. He set up Hat Hut USA shop in West Park, New York, with answering machine services ready to organize the time-difference workflow. Uehlinger, McPhee remembers, thought big: “He was thinking about being the CBS of Switzerland, or something.” That meant flying to meetings in Switzerland, London, Milan. The works. To my knowledge McPhee is the only living musician, who became a (paid) Vice President of a fledgling independent record company. When he left in 1985, he felt it was complicated. Getting “…shit from both sides, from musicians who thought I was being super slick and was denying them an opportunity, or from the other side.” McPhee is super slick in terms of graciously pussy footing around what kind of shit came from the “other side”, but he is crystal clear that he was grateful for the opportunity Hat Hut offered him and that he had to move on. Till 1985 Hat Hut had almost one hundred records out and was on the map. McPhee was involved in a lot of them and about ten bore his name.

This author must admit that he did not anticipate McPhees qualities back then. Hat Hut was a rather expensive to buy label with fancy cardboard box covers and I went for the now classical Sun Ra, Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy, David Murray offerings. Back in the days when one could not listen to “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, Joe McPhee was simply not ticking of the boxes that felt “safe” for me. A lot of solo work, groups with French musicians I had never heard of, records without drums but with synthesizers and guitars etc. etc. In other words: I was still in the process of freeing my mind and the ass was waiting to follow accordingly.

In 1997 John Corbett set the stage for a specific transatlantic mirror stage…in a single move he “reintroduced” Peter Brötzmann to the American and thus international audience and by inviting Joe McPhee to join Brötzmann’s Chicago Octett (together with Mats Gustafsson, making it the tentet that made history) he opened the door to my perception of this fabulous multi-instrumentalist. The Tentet kept touring and recording for almost 15 years and had its final curtain call in Wiels 2011, as a part of Brötzmann’s 70ies birthday bash. (https://www.trost.at/peter-broetzmann-long-story-short.html) McPhee dissects that story in extremely astute two pages, giving you an unredacted version of what it is like to move mountains. In 2000 Corbett re-released “Nation Time” for the first time on Atavistic. And thus, here we are today.

Yes, there are seminal “Jazz” autobiographies. Charles Mingus, “Beneath the Underdog” and Miles Davis, “Miles: The Autobiography” come to mind. These are good reads. But “Straight Up. Without Wings.” is in another category. It is in the category of the real, it reads as if nothing is strategically restructured or dramatized, it reads “just” real. Joe McPhee dedicates 5 pages in this book to his periodontal infection, which started to make itself felt in 2018 and eventually led to teeth loss and his inability to play the trumpet. “I’m a bit lost without my trumpet. It’s like playing with one of my hands tied behind my back. As much as I made a name for myself as a saxophone player, I’ve always considered my first instrument to be the trumpet, and I’m a bit lost without it. I have to get it back.”

München, Haus der Kunst, FMP.The Living Music, 2017 (Photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

München, Haus der Kunst, FMP.The Living Music, 2017 (Photo: Cristina Marx/Photomusix)

McPhee is the child to parents from the Bahamas, he grew up in Poughkeepsie and never fit into a box and never wanted to fit into one. “They did not want us to improvise in the Army. That was dangerous for the military because you are supposed to do only what you are told. That’s how they wanted to maintain discipline. Improvising and trying to play jazz in the Army didn’t come all that easily. We had to get around it, from a jazz band outside of the regular band to do that undercover. I found I could do things that were much more interesting if I went around those fixed situations. It gave me freedom to fly.
Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t work. It was interesting to learn the difference. What works for me may not work for you. There were people who would quickly tell you, ‘That’s not happening, man. That ain’t shit!’”

Well, this is the shit, got get it.

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Extra: great COVID quarantine interview, Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee, May 11, 2020