McPhee at The Stone

It's in the nature of Joe McPhee's art that every gig feels special, but last night's solo set was the stuff of legend. Even objectively it had historical clout as McPhee's first attempt at presenting a program of solo trumpet music, but subjectively it was a group of devoted improv listeners experiencing rare heights of rapture at the hands and lips of an international treasure, rapture that found outward expression in gasps and upward glances to the psychosomatic heavens.

On top of the deep private significance of the evening to McPhee and some of his devoted fans, I experienced a feeling of birth-celebration for The Stone, a new space in Manhattan's lower east side founded by John Zorn to host the the communion rituals of creative musicians and creative listeners. In its 6th day of public life, The Stone had an air of institutional gravity far outpacing its age, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who sensed it was the first of many sound-life pilgrimages to come.

Walking into the stark, unornamented room of wood, brick, freshly painted cement, and newly hung velvet curtains, the first thing that caught my eye, besides the familiar and elegant glistening of a piano, trumpet, and doublebass resting in readiness for the evening's first set, was a long horizontal strip of beautiful black-and-white photos dividing the longest wall. Each panel poeticized the familiar visage of a member of this polycephalic musical community who has been entrusted with a month's worth of curatorial responsibilities. There's no room for speculation about Zorn's vision in either methodology or content; this room will celebrate and nourish the music of a diverse, but well-defined community. Scanning the photographs on the wall, I can report that our ears are in good hands. Word is that Misha Mengelberg is handling the May festivities with himself on the bench throughout, but only for half the month; the space will be closed for the other half while some physical improvements are made. This inaugural month of April was curated by Ned Rothenberg and I was impressed by the vitality of the lineup, especially the inclusion of some of the lesser-known young improvisors trying to find their niche.

This was a night of storied heavyweights though; preceding Sir McPhee's 10pm revelation was an 8pm hit for Mark Dresser, Herb Robertson, and Denman Maroney. The fact that the room--larger than the Old Office but smaller than Tonic--was filled beyond seating capacity probably had as much to do with the fact that the Zeus of doublebass gods was visiting his erstwhile metropolitan haunt, as it did with the attraction of checking out the new venue in town. Yes, music lovers miss Mark Dresser gigs at their own peril, especially us East Coasters who have even less of an excuse to take him for granted now that he's calling San Diego home. The seating is split into two quite separate sections and I didn't think twice about picking my seat on the bass-side, a choice rewarded as I watched what I understand to be human hands effortlessly interweaving clear note-rivers and apocalyptic note-volcanoes about five feet in front of my eyes perched well below their lids and well above my lower jaw. I have a bad habit of saying that every Dresser gig I happen to catch is "the best ever", but I really mean it this time. Okay, okay, I'm still reeling from the last one, the legendary one-off free improv meeting of Dresser, Robertson, Tim Berne, and Jay Rosen (the latter two in attendance last night) a few months ago at Barbes, and that really was the best bass playing I've ever heard in my life. Er, well, there was that Barre Phillips set last spring... Okay, moving along.

Seeing Dresser and Robertson together again with such fresh memories of that grueling, transcendental quartet set was a lesson in what separates the thousands of great musicians in the world from the mere handfuls of true masters like these two, because the music was in a very different stylistic range this time but they played with indistinguishable immersion and naturalness, hinting at a huge range of possibilities in the space of mere seconds, as if all possible music was in finger's reach at all times. Listening to them slip in and out of just about anything that could be slipped in and out of, even if only for a split-second, it occurred to me that if there's anyone who fits Edwin Prevost's somewhat self-congratulatory self-description of "meta-musician", it's cats like Robertson and Dresser, not Prevost and his mates in AMM. I say this as a passionate admirer of AMM; my concern here is simply semantic accuracy. What kind of music could be more about music than a total mastery of the full periodic chart of musical atomic elements, expressed as spontaneous traversals up and down the scale of molecularity across an unbounded space of combinatorial vectors? I think Prevost is confusing his opening of new parametric doorways to music with the transcendence of parameter. The latter is certainly not a claim that can be made for Prevost or AMM, and probably not for anyone, but if anyone comes close enough it's the rare Dressers and Robertsons of the world. I can hear AMM buried inside the playing of a musician like Robertson or Dresser; I can hear Charlie Parker, Charlie Patton, James Brown, Bhob Rainey, you name it. On the other hand, there is little beyond AMM itself that I can hear in AMM. That's not a criticism and I'm not making any value judgements here; I simply wish to reflect on a possible case of abused terminology while calling attention to the special nature of these gentlemen who invigorated my senses last night.

With Denman Maroney in the trio, I was privately hoping for a set along the lines of the classic Dick/Dresser/Maroney/Hemingway project Tambastics, especially since Robertson is one of the elder statespersons of experimental trumpeting and a New Winds alumnus like Dick who can push his instrument to the nether regions of extended technique. While that facet of their musicality was certainly represented in the set, what we got in greater supply was tender melody, post-jazz pulses, and several fantastic scored pieces using conventional notes and straightforward interlocking parts, one by Maroney and the rest by Dresser. I love the way these guys can freely move between the feeling of American jazz and blues and the abstraction of classical European free improv; they own the entire continuum. Robertson has bridged these worlds in his career as much as anyone I can think of.

A gig like this is also an opportunity to celebrate community and history as it resides in a web of human relationships, and I know Robertson's presence meant a lot to Stephanie Stone, who's known Robertson longer than just about any other musician still around these days, a friendship that dates well into the 70s. But it's Stephanie's presence that probably meant even more to a lot of people, as she's the very living heart and soul of this space, which was named after her husband and equal partner in improv connoisseurship for decades, Irving Stone, who passed away on June 18, 2003 but will surely visit the thoughts of a great many people who visit The Stone. Starting in 1978, the Stones were among the very first people to offer their ears on a regular basis to Zorn, Chadbourne, and their gang of struggling, marginalized radical improvisors, becoming de facto parents of sorts for many in the downtown improv family, notably including Zorn, who, as the artistic director of The Stone, still has an unfaltering ethical commitment to this grass-roots community symbolized by the Stones, even with his long-solidified artistic status alongside the Stockhausens and Braxtons of the world. (And how many of those sorts of people are there anyway? 3? 4? If you say more than 5, I think you've missed the point.) Bruce Lee Gallanter was also at the gig last night, another pillar of this community who sat beside the Stones and the tiny handful of other people who spent countless evenings from the early 80s onwards opening their ears and hearts to the curious aesthetic volleys of the emerging downtown improv scene. I don't know how to explain this, but somehow the music just sounds better with people like Stephanie and Bruce in the audience.

And music simply can't sound better than Joe McPhee's solos did last night. Inspired by the 100th anniversary of his father's birth on March 27th, 2005, Joe J. McPhee Jr decided to pay tribute to the instrument that Joe J. McPhee Sr [pictured below] foisted upon him at the tender age of 8 in the unsuspecting environs of Poughkeepsie, NY. Tweaking the plurality of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father", Joe planned a suite of improvisations entitled "Songs for My Father" to be performed on his trusty pocket trumpet.

A human being and their instrument. That's what Joe's music is about. He has no aesthetic agenda besides beauty in the moment of sounding and listening. With little more than soft air massages to his mouthpiece for the first few minutes, he created a sacred space where any sound could become a conduit to his human experience at that moment in time, gradually varying his timbral palette and virtually crying through the trumpet as he touched upon more conventional voiced sounds. In the recent history of experimental improvised music, extended techniques on common acoustic instruments have become as entrenched and accepted as those dang-blasted twelve pitches we're still so hung up on, and genuinely new categories of aesthetic experience have been discovered by something like a decentralized global research team of obsessive instrumentalists who've gotten past the technical novelty of their craft and learned how to hear new sounds as music and not just new sounds. These categories of experience can't be reduced to vague chestnuts like "emotion"; the human mind is a tangled jumble of experiential gizmos with buttons and knobs just waiting to be discovered and fiddled with. The sorts of commonplace emotions emphasized by musicians over the millenia are just a small part of the story that can be told about sound and beauty. Yes, it's an exciting time in the history of music, but unless you've heard Joe McPhee you might never imagine that old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, unmistakable, raw emotional narrative can be conveyed with the same sorts of abstract alien sounds that genii like Greg Kelley and Axel Doerner have put to quite different purposes in recent memory. Who would've thought?

On paper it sounds too simple, even downright boring--a marriage of the naked and familiar passions of idiomatic improv traditions like free jazz or Azerbaidjani mughum with the timbral restlessness of the current avant-garde--but that's exactly what I was hearing last night in Joe's trumpet solos, and I felt some things I'd never felt before. Ecstatic introspection. "expression" has become something of a dirty word in many circles these days, and, sure, the mere thought of yet another skillful musician with good intentions and a good heart sends us running to escape with hands covering our ears. And if the "j" word is involved, then we're running even faster. Godspeed these feet to save these ears. But what's so bad about "pure expression"? I don't think the problem is anything inherent to expressionism as some overarching set of possibilities for connecting with a musician as a human being and not just a sound-generator, but rather that, in practice, we tire of being manipulated to feel the same emotions over and over again until it becomes some kind of routine that masks the irreducible buzzes and hums of our central nervous system at a given moment in time. When Joe plays, it's as expressionistic as it gets, but he's squirreling paths through emotional territory that simply can't be traversed by a casual stroll or steady jog. It takes concentration, hesitation, observation, and possible contortion at every step to follow him. No risk of numbed affect there!

Anyway, if reading my tedious and academic ruminations is taxing your patience, you might just want to hear what Jay Rosen said about the set: "He's just playing the blues". I can't argue with that, but the blues section in my record collection wouldn't be so small if that's all there was to it.

I had been primed for this event a few weeks ago when during a characteristically beautiful duo performance with Dominic Duval at Slought in Philadelphia, Joe surprisingly announced his solo trumpet agenda and proceeded to play a kind of music I'd never heard before, but I heard plenty more of last night. It was a single circular-breath for ten minutes or so of quiet pocket trumpet sounds mostly falling somewhere in between conventional extended techniques and conventional non-extended techniques, mingled with his trademark vocalizing as a simultaneous layer of sound. Joe wasn't messing around with this whole trumpet scheme of his! The audience, from neophytes to veterans, were in a state of total shock from that solo. He's been playing the thing for upwards of 60 years now, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but somehow I do wind up feeling surprised every time he plays.

His own celebratory glance towards the past prompted one of my own as I realized I'm now in my 10th year of Joe McPhee listenership, and that my very first time hearing him in the flesh was nothing other than a pocket trumpet solo! It feels like one of the endless succession of overlapping circles in life has closed for me. I still remember sitting in the Empty Bottle in Chicago amidst a packed house on February 14, 1996 anxious to find out what this whole McPhee thing was all about after so much hype from John Corbett and the other cats whose improv background dwarfed mine to the point of invisibility. It was the now-legendary first-ever McPhee concert in Chicago and the first day Joe ever played with Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler, soon to become staple collaborators as Joe's career was steadily revitalized in association with this new slew of worthy partners. Earlier in the day they'd recorded their very first meeting as a private studio session that became the classic A Meeting in Chicago on Okkadisk. So this unpretentious man walked on stage by himself with nothing but a pocket trumpet and played so softly that there were unpleasant reminders that the place was, after all, a bar and an evolving indie-rock club, but he played so meditatively and creatively that I was sucked into his world for good. He set the mood and pacing for the trio set that followed, which was full of eloquence and sensitivity.

My personal approach towards being a music fan is to focus in on a very small handful of musicians I'm consistently excited by, and try to get more and more fluent in their private musical language instead of aiming for breadth and trying to keep up with the ridiculous amount of music I'd love to indulge in if it were feasible. There's certainly a downside to this as I wind up neglecting a lot of incredible musicians, but the rewards have been priceless as I attend concert after concert and buy record after record of the same musicians without any loss of enthusiasm, without ever being disappointed, as I constantly discover new nuances in their work. Needless to say, Joe's on my list; in fact, the only musician who's been on the list longer is Tim Berne. (If anybody cares, the full list of musicians I make an attempt at completist fanhood for is: McPhee, Berne, Jack Wright, Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson, Michel Doneda, Bhob Rainey, Nels Cline.) So last night was a sort of a private celebration for me of a landmark in my McPhee fanhood, as I'd never seen him do a full solo set before; he's done a few over the years, but it's been rare.

This set revealed the naked essence of his love triangle with trumpet and saxophone. For all his attempts at focusing on trumpet for this concert, he put it down midway through, moved towards his tenor sax case, and warmly told the audience that he never leaves home without it. Sitting a few feet behind me, I could hear Margaret Davis gasp with delight as we all licked our ears with full awareness of what was about to happen. With the stark contrast gained from a context of solemn, softly played pocket trumpet solos, the sheer sonic force of his tenor playing was a kind of high-dosage spiritual medicine. One of things that sets Joe apart from other post-Ayler saxophonists is the way he has such control over the details of tone and phrasing even at full blast that he can make overblown catharsis feel like a tender ballad. With my ears mostly ranging between 3 and 5 feet from Joe's saxophone as he moved around, his small movements from side to side gave me a kind of stereo sound experience unlike anything else I can cite. Instead of a solo, for me, it was a duo between Joe and that acoustic prism.

After two pieces on tenor that left audience members sharing knowing glances with each other, he started a piece on trumpet for a few minutes and switched to tenor with a pause so small he lost no momentum in his development of a phrase. It was a rare and beautiful opportunity to hear the two instruments deal with similar material side-by-side, and he reversed the transition a few minutes later to give the piece a symmetrical form. He finished the set with another tenor solo and then a short piece of what he called "air trumpet", quiet breathing sounds related to the early portions of the set.

Spirits ran high as the crowd dispersed. Music Witness Jeff Schlanger, who had been invited by the musicians from both sets to do his inimitable paint documentation of the music, had his explosive creation turned around for our enjoyment. After relaxing in the audience for the evening, Henry Grimes shared in some of the exchanges of appreciative remarks on Joe's set. Gilles Laheurte, the intimate friend of Steve Lacy whose friendship with Joe goes beyond their mutual trepidation in playing soprano sax to embrace a similar multi-instrumentalism on reeds and brass, was warmly effusive in his gratitude for the inspiration the set gave him to try new things in his own playing.

It was refreshing to be part of a gathering based 100% on a musical experience without being awkwardly contextualized by alcohol like so many gigs are. Having greatly enjoyed life without a single alcoholic drink for my 28 years on the planet so far, I was especially comfortable free from any guilt or conspicuity not participating in the financial substrate of a music venue. While I'm probably in the minority in my enthusiasm for this unalcoholic social environment, I think it has a lot of significance for the creative music community because these kinds of gigs are often formative, life-changing experiences for young people who are making tentative forays into this marginalized musical culture and may be part of its necessary human renewal in years to come. It's depressing to think that a teenager might be ready for a vital spiritual pilgrimage to the real-time act of creation by one of their musical heroes, only to find a roadblock in the arbitrary impositions of a society where alcohol has lost any semblance of integration into the fabric of life like it enjoyed in traditional, pre-industrial societies. In fact, come to think of it, that special experience I had hearing Joe for the first time was due to sheer luck in my social context that allowed me to get past the door guy as a 19-year old at the Empty Bottle, where there was a fairly strict 21-and-over policy. It's pretty ridiculous that an experience that vital dangled by such a thin and arbitrary thread. So when Zorn says The Stone is about the music, not refreshments or merchandise, those are not empty words to me. (As far as merchandise goes, though, I certainly hope performing musicians won't be prohibited from selling their wares, such a vital and elegant economic adaptation for struggling avant-garde musicians.)

In its sense of philosophical focus on music and community and intimacy without any bar culture, The Stone has a similar vibe to my favorite place in the world to see a gig, The Red Room in Baltimore, even though the, uh, interior decor, couldn't be more contrastive! As a physical space, The Stone is beautiful, but rough around the edges in its opening days, especially the edge on the ceiling, above which the peripatation of the second-floor apartment dwellers can be quite audible. On The Stone's website there is an explanation of its financial structure and a call for donations, which seems entirely warranted given such matters as soundproofing the ceiling.

I think The Stone will fill a different niche than Tonic for the mainstream avant-garde improv and post-jazz scene in NYC, as Tonic has become more of a "hang" (not a bad thing!) than a locus for austere musical rituals. I've probably had more transcendental musical experiences at Tonic than anywhere else (even The Red Room, where I've gone far more often than anywhere else), so I'm relieved that they recently triumphed over a severe financial crisis and I certainly expect to have plenty more transcendental experiences there in the future (still feeling bad for not buying any drinks), but I'm thrilled to ponder the gap being gloriously filled by The Stone in a city with an absurd overabundance of musical talent and a paucity of suitable venues, though there are other vital spaces currently in service, like Location One, The Issue Project Room, CB's Lounge, and the The Vision Club series at Les Gallery Clemente Soto Velez.

~Michael Anton Parker
~April 7, 2005

Visit the Joe McPhee website and read an interview at All About Jazz.

Special thanks to Joe McPhee for sharing the photograph of his father.

Posted by maparker on April 9, 2005 3:09 AM