Recently I interviewed legendary free
jazz saxophonist Joe McPhee at Café Oto for the first issue of Cesura // Acceso. McPhee
has been recording and performing for over forty-five years, playing both as a
solo artist and in an impressive number of collaborative units including Peter Brötzmann’s Tentet and The
Thing. In particular I wanted to ask him about his approach to collaboration and the politics of music and
improvisation. Here are some excerpts from that interview
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| Survival Unit III @ Cafe Oto |
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Stevphen Shukaitis: The first thing I wanted to
ask you about is collaboration. How do you approach collaboration, not just in
terms of particular projects, but in the way projects affect your approach to
music more generally?
Joe McPhee: I really like a lot of what different people do,
people whose music I really appreciate. But collaboration, it starts with a
real personal kind of relationship. For example I’ve played for long time with
a guitarist in France, Raymond Boni. I was in a trio with Raymond Boni and
Andre Jaume. I’ve had a long time relationship with another trio in the States
called Trio X; we’ve been going on now about fifteen years, it’s been almost
ten years with Survival Unit III. And each one brings a different perspective
to the music; different instrumentation. Tonight you’ll hear Fred Lonberg-Holm
with the cello and the electronics.
…
SS: Do you think the kinds of collaborations you have change as they
continue for ten or fifteen years? Another band that has played Café Oto a
number of times and impressed on that level of long term collaboration is the
Sun Ra Arkestra, where a number of the members have been playing with each
other for 30, 35, 40 years. And when you watch them you can sense they have
this immense repertoire of material that they play, as well as a depth in
flexibility in playing developed over those many years. Do you find that you
can play differently with people that you play with in longer-term
collaborations?
JM: Yes, each collaboration brings its own, unique qualities. It’s quite
different, for example, playing with a cello that’s amplified and with
electronics and also with with Fred Lonberg’s extensive musical experience. It’s
very different from say, playing with a bass player, or when I have a
collaboration in a trio with a guitarist, it brings a different kind of thing.
In the trio with Raymond Boni we didn’t have a drummer because he’s so rhythmic
that it wasn’t necessary. And I got a reputation for hating drummers because of
that. It wasn’t true, not at all. And then when I change instrument – if I play
the trumpet, valve trombone, soprano or the alto it, brings another dimension
to whatever that collaboration is. I don’t come with a set of fixed ideas
because I hope I’m learning all the time.
SS: In a recent issue of Wire you
had an article about the reissue of Nation
Time (1971). And at the end of the piece you’re speculating that perhaps
Parliament and Janet Jackson might have been influenced by that record.
JM: Could have been! You know, with music of Parliament-Funkadelic. Yes,
why not? In terms of speaking about nations, Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989) and so forth.
Why not? It was talking about community, that’s what I was getting at.
SS: Could you imagine, musically, what a collaboration with Parliament or
Janet Jackson might look or sound like?
JM: Yes – because I played for many years about the time when this was made
with a group locally where I live that was called Ira and the Soul Project. It
was soul, jazz and Marvin Gaye, James Brown, all that kind of stuff. We had an
organ, a B-3, Hammond B-3, a guitarist, a vibes player and a drummer and
another saxophone player. We’d be very comfortable. And I don’t see the
difference between that and playing with Sun Ra or playing with Archie Shepp’s
group at that time or Ornette’s double quartet. In fact, one of the tracks on Nation Time called “Shaky Jake” is
played by a double quartet, which certainly comes right out of Ornette’s idea
SS: In the different projects you’ve been involved in, how much do you see
yourself as influenced by the context you’re in? And I mean that both musically
but as well as more broadly, the political and social context.
JM: It’s all a part of it. Probably less focused and orientated as it was
here. This was about a period of events that were happening in the United
States at the time in – the 70s – with the civil rights movement and all that
kind of thing, and black nationalism and so on like that. But it’s expanded now
much beyond those kinds of limitations to thinking about a larger human
community.
SS: It seems as though your early recordings from the 70s are very much
coming out of the political moment. Would you say that has changed for you or
is it just a different moment? What was the relationship between your work and
the politics?
JM: The politics and all of that? It’s absolutely essential. There’s no
separation. It’s a part of who we are and a bit of why we exist. We’ve got to
be involved. It’s a process, it’s about change. It’s about flux and so on. But
I think my music, no matter what has transpired since then, it’s always
involved some aspect of politics and history. The early recordings that were
titled, for example, the first one that I made was called Underground Railroad (1969), which had to do with this network
which brought slaves from the south in the United States to the north, to
freedom. And I thought if I never get a chance to make another recording I
wanted it to be about that. And that’s why the second one was about Nation Time (1971). But after that it
began to expand. Trinity, which was
the fourth in this series also touched on the blues but another way of looking
at the blues. There’s a piece in there called “Delta,” which is not a
twelve-bar blues but is blues in feeling. And then the fourth in the series of
CJR recordings was called Pieces of Light,
which had to do with a bit about knowledge and also a bit of Zen philosophy and
introduced me to electronic music, which opened up a whole new world... outside
of jazz, into a larger room of music and sounds.
SS: It’s interesting that on the cover of Nation Time you’re standing in a Zen garden.
JM: Yes, that was by chance. It was a great place. It’s a curious
coincidence and there’s a lot of food for thought in that. I hadn’t given it as
much thought as perhaps it deserves. Yes, it was a very peaceful place.
…
SS: Would you say that the artists who have the most influenced you have
changed over time, over the past forty years? Or are there periods when you go
back to certain things?
JM: I think it’s a natural progression in the music. It has flux and
changes and is the essential aspect of jazz. Then you listen to some really
early jazz pieces and they sound like the avant-garde. Of course, in their own
time, they were. What does avant-garde mean anyway? Of its time? You can only
be in your time, whatever time you’re in. And you do whatever you can do and
you have to break rules. It’s good to learn the rules before but you don’t have
to; do whatever you want as far as I’m concerned. And out of that, you know,
you can discover something.
SS: When you were doing the PO music, were you influenced by Arte Povera?
JM: No, it was a concept of PO music coming from a kind of philosophy of
Edward de Bono, who wrote a book called Future
Positive (1979). And it was a way of rethinking one’s approach. One example
he gave was: say you’re driving down a road and you know your destination is
north of where you are, but you come to a hole in the road, which means you
have to change your direction. You might have to go west or sometimes maybe
even south – in the opposite direction from where you’re going – to get around
that hole to get to where you want.
Now when you’re
making this detour you’re going to make a whole other bunch of discoveries
along the way, which will perhaps influence you and change your original ideas
about where you wanted to be. And that’s what I wanted, that’s PO. The PO is a
language indicator to show that it’s provocation: don’t take things to be what
they seem to be. I used that to say, well, if I’m playing something that seems
to be jazz (whatever that is) maybe by going in some other directions with
other collaborations, I can discover something else: new instruments, new ways
of approaching the music, new ways of listening. So that by the time I get to
this destination I’m a different person, and the music’s different.
…
SS: Did you work up a conception of politics from improvisation? I don’t
mean politics, like a capital P sense, like elections and all this, but some
sense community as formed through improvisation, or a form of being social
which isn’t so fixed. Do you think you can get that out of improvisation?
JM: Yes, but you know, it’s on such an individual basis. I don’t know how
it would work for everyone. Everybody would take from it what he or she would
like to find. I don’t know. I don’t look at it like that. I don’t examine
anything too closely except after the fact when we have a recording – and I
have a hard time listening to my own recordings, a really hard time. Because
that’s something that happened. I’m off somewhere else by then.
SS: So for you is there a sense that if it’s over, why go back to it?
JM: No, not so much why go back to it, because you can always learn from
what you’ve done… but I’m just in another place and that was then and this now.
In the process of doing it, it’s very interesting because that’s a time when
everything is really live. Now is the only place where things can actually
happen. The past, it’s over, and the future we don’t know. Now, when it’s
happening. And you have to be really fast, and slow at the same time because
while it’s happening it’s… someone said to me it’s like trying to repair a car
while it’s rolling down a hill: dangerous and difficult but it can be done.
…
JM: In that period for me, I was working for 18 years. I worked in an
automotive ball bearing factory. I mean, that supported me, not that music
supports me all that well now but I get to play more and I get to travel a bit
and I get to play with people I like. So in that respect it’s much better for
me now. I’m exposed to a lot of different situations and contexts and I like it
a lot more.
SS: Do you think the factory influenced how you play?
JM: Yes because I wasn’t going to do that forever. Once the people I worked
with asked me about my music and I had made some recordings. They said “oh, can
we hear it?” So, I said, yes and let them hear it and they gave it back to me
and said “you mean people actually pay you to play that shit?” So I said, okay,
then I don’t do that anymore. I hardly ever play where I live. If you want to
hear me play you can come where I rehearse, in my toilet, or you can come to
Paris.
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