The Book Cooks Straight Up, Without Wings: The Musical Flight of Joe McPhee
I love noise. Noise interests me because it’s everywhere, and it can be organized to make what we think of as music. Everybody has access to it, and everybody can fashion it anyway they want to. They can determine if it’s useful to them or not. It can be used as a weapon or it can be used to bring people together. I think my love of noise was always in the process of becoming. I remember one time being in New York on about 43rd Street where there was some construction going on, and I heard this pounding noise, but in between the pounding was a honking noise that reminded me of dinosaurs. They had these big horns on their heads and I stood there for a long time imagining that maybe they were still there, in the middle of New York City with all of those buildings. That’s a little bit crazy. I thought, What if I was in a prehistoric time and I heard that, what would I do? Would I run away from it or would I be drawn to it? I was drawn to it in this case. I was not thinking about improvising when I was younger. I was thinking about pleasing my father. Playing it correctly or playing it as close to what he was showing me as possible. It made him happy. It made me happy if he was happy. I learned all the rest of that “messing around” later when I could find what was useful to me and incorporate it into whatever I was doing. Originally, I was just trying to do what was expected of me or what I thought was right. I learned the fundamentals and then, as soon as possible, unlearned them to make music. I grew up in an Episcopal church and the Episcopal hymn book was not that interesting to me. 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, form 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.
© 2025 Joe McPhee
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