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Soloist trumpets his musical wares

Joe McPhee As Serious as Your Life (Hatology 514) Review by Chris Searle

THERE is no hideaway here in this record, no sanctuary except the soloist’s pure musicianship. For there is no respite in a solo instrumental performance — even more so if that performance is multi-instrumental.

Born in Miami in 1939, Joe McPhee (pictured) began to play trumpet at eight years old, but hearing Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman in the ’60s turned his musical life around and he began to learn saxophone when he was 32.

In 1974, while McPhee was playing and recording in New York, the visiting Swiss record producer Werner Uehlinger was hugely impressed by the power and scope of McPhee’s sound and the tapes of a performance at the Free Music Store.

Uehlinger founded his hugely influential labels hatHut and hatArt to record the combustive and brilliant McPhee and set down his unique sound an ocean away in Basel, Switzerland — his notes blowing back over Alps and Atlantic to the US.

McPhee’s now reissued solo album of 1996 As Serious As Your Life was named after the book of the same title — one of the greatest and most perceptive books about jazz, written by the British jazz historian, critic and photographer Valerie Wilmer.

In it she opens up the world of John Coltrane and the new wave of ’60s and ’70s jazz in words and photographs with an epochal insight. I have a very powerful memory of viewing her exhibition Jazz Seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1973 and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of its black and white images of jazz musicians at work and creation, and also by the incredulous contradiction between their message and the venue where they were coming to such intense life.

Through this album McPhee is alone with his saxophones, his pocket cornet, the Connecticut studio piano and some electronics. His purpose was to pursue his Project Dream Keeper and create a second solo album some 20 years after his first in 1976, called Tenor.

This opener is McPhee’s The Death of Miles Davis. Davis had died in 1991 and McPhee declares in his liner notes that the trumpeter “had a profound effect on my life and music,” as he did for more than one jazz generation.

McPhee’s slap-tongue breathy tenor and aching brass notes denote “the moment of passing from one plane to another.”

“Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one gets filled up fastest.” These were the words of McPhee’s grandmother, and A Wish in One Hand is his tenor piece remembering her.

Its story is elemental, with evocative narrative and an array of saxophone sonics. As are the dark and wind-filled notes of Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, dedicated to the blues singer Guitar Shorty, telling a story of the US South and its cruel madness.

The nine minutes of the album’s title song send you directly back to Wilmer’s luminous book, of which McPhee writes: “She reached out and embraced an area of US classical music rarely explored and which is in some quarters held in utter contempt. Thank you, Val!”

His tenor speaks like a griot, bursting with history while tracing entirely new roads of music and life.

McPhee tackles the Gershwin ballad The Man I Love as “a conundrum of our time.” Electronic percussive sounds bed his tenor’s squelching notes while the drum machine omits its repeating kalimba voice. Gershwin is reinvented in theme and timbre, yet the song’s essential skeleton shakes with verve and rhythm.

McPhee transforms his saxophone into percussion in Tok, with breath and the sound of opening and closing valves making reed into drum.

The intensity of the Coltrane theme After the Rain peals from McPhee’s naked tenor, its every note a lyric echoing around the studio and across the earth. Its echoing sound is created by using the studio piano (formerly the piano of the Village Gate Jazz Club in New York City, and played by some of the great jazz pianists) as a sound box, with McPhee blowing into the piano with the sustain pedal held down. It is as if every sound is a message of now-times filtered by the struggling past.

This is a powerful record of diverse beauty in solo performance. It stirs the blood, excites the consciousness and provokes reflection and action in its every note.

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