(In response to my last entry, Detroit music critic Mark Stryker sent along this polished and informative piece from 2005. I immediately asked him if I could reprint it here as a guest post. New Yorkers: tonight's your last night to catch McPherson at the Standard.)
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REMINISCING BY EARBy Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press
CHICAGO -- Armed with a portable CD player and a small stack of discs, I set up shop in Charles McPherson's hotel suite here in the Windy City, where the veteran Detroit-bred alto saxophonist is in the midst of a recent weeklong stand at the Jazz Showcase. McPherson, one of the headliners at this week's Detroit International Jazz Festival, is one of the most potent musicians to emerge from Detroit's mid-century cauldron of bebop. He has had a major career, working extensively with giants like Charles Mingus and recording prolifically. Still, he remains a musician's musician rather than an industry star.
McPherson is not an innovator but a profound stylist instead, who has etched his own distinctive identity within the template of classic bebop. He is revered for the luminosity of his tone, the rapturous momentum of his improvisations and the cliche-free purity with which his phrasing channels the spirit and language of Charlie Parker. At 66, he's playing the most expressive and startling music of his career.
McPherson agreed to forego a typical interview in favor of an informal listening session -- an entertaining way to get inside the head of a jazz musician. Not only do you get an insider's view of the art, the discussion inevitably opens a window on aesthetic priorities and triggers memories of former associates and war stories. I chose recordings that mirror the broad arc of McPherson's career, from his Detroit roots and deep understanding of Parker to a landmark 1971 LP with Mingus and a late '90s CD that documents the current state of his art.
We meet at noon as McPherson's wife and 13-year-old daughter are leaving to explore downtown Chicago. McPherson settles into the sofa. He is of medium height, athletically built and, despite salt-and-pepper hair, looks a decade younger. The prodigious afro he once sported has been scaled back, but the bushy mustache remains. He is an enthusiastic and lucid conversationalist, his thoughts unwinding in complete paragraphs.
Barry Harris Quintet -- "Burgundy" from Newer Than New (Original Jazz Classics/Riverside) Sept. 28, 1961
No one was more responsible for McPherson's life in jazz than Barry Harris, the Detroit-born pianist and bebop guru who mentored countless musicians in Detroit and later in New York. McPherson was 15 when he began studying with Harris, who was 10 years older. McPherson made his recording debut in a small role with Mingus in 1960, but this 1961 date with Harris was his coming out LP. He was 22.Harris' breezy original "Burgundy" opens with Latin rhythms before shifting into a swinging groove for solos. A look of concern falls across McPherson's face. "I haven't heard this in 30 years," he says. "I'm scared to listen to me."
A suave piano solo draws praise, and so does 21-year-old trumpeter Lonnie Hillyer, another Harris disciple from Detroit. Little known, Hillyer died of cancer in 1985. "He wasn't a bravura trumpet player," McPherson says. "But he played as well or better than a lot of others in terms of the loftiness of the musical statement."
McPherson's playing lacks the sagacity, strength and individualism of his mature work, and he grows increasingly uncomfortable listening. He makes me stop the disc halfway through his solo. "I hear so many things that are immature in my sound and the timidity of the playing," he says. "I hear too much caution, which speaks of an insecurity. It's not easy to sound good young, and some of it has to do with the equipment - the mouthpiece, the horn. I can tell my mouthpiece is too small. I didn't know any better."
McPherson grew up on Detroit's west side, near Harris and the Blue Bird Inn, the epicenter of Detroit's modern jazz scene in the 1950s. McPherson soaked up the sounds nightly in front of the club "Barry would come out on the break and one day he said to come by his house where he'd hold court. We'd ask questions like, 'What do you play here and what scales go with this kind of a dominant 7th chord?' He was exploring for himself and showed us what he was finding.
"Pretty soon I was going over there every day. There was an aura of intellectuality in Barry's house. Barry would do the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, and he'd zip through it. He was a reader. One day I came home from school and I had my report card, and he asked to see it. I was a C student; I didn't try for anything more than that. He saw the C's and he said, 'You're quite average, aren't you?' I said, 'Well, I'm passing.'
"He said, 'You can't be average and play the kind of music you're trying to learn. There's too much going on. Charlie Parker is not average. Your heroes are above average.' It was like a little epiphany. It totally changed my life. I put in more effort and instead of being a C student I got A's. I started getting interested in literature. I read Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Capricorn,' and I started reading philosophers, for instance, Francis Bacon, Kant, Schopenhauer. In Detroit, in this bebop niche we had, to be considered hip meant that you had to know about Charlie Parker and people like that, but you also had to know about Kant and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell, and you had to know about art. We were like 17.
"People like Barry and (baritone saxophonist) Pepper Adams were so smart that we learned about bebop and all that. But they were able to say, 'Oh, Marc Chagall painted that.' That influenced us."
Charlie Parker -- "Willis" from The Washington Concerts (Blue Note) Feb. 22, 1953
Fifty years after his death in 1955 at age 34, alto saxophonist Charlie (Bird) Parker remains a pervasive influence. Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk were the architects of modern jazz (or bebop) in the 1940s, but Parker was the movement's Prometheus and its defining virtuoso. Musicians gravitate toward Parker's bootleg nightclub recordings because, unshackled by the constraints of the 3-minute record, he stretches out for thrilling chorus after chorus. The best performances reveal streaks of demonic inspiration, and freedom he rarely matched in the studio.
Parker's one-nighter with a Washington, D.C., big band finds him soloing brilliantly without benefit of a rehearsal or music, coping on the fly with unexpected key modulations and breaks in the arrangements. His ears are so sharp he hears around corners, soaring over the pedestrian charts like an Icarus immune from the sun. McPherson's delirious style is rooted in this wilder Parker. He is enthralled by the solo on "Willis," a bebop tune based on the harmonies of "Pennies from Heaven." Parker's sly quote from Stravinsky's "Petrushka" brings a knowing smile, and McPherson marks the end of startling double-time passages by saying, "Beautiful!" Parker's phrases grow daringly long and asymmetric, notes explode from the horn like fireworks and his tone thickens into a songful wail.
"What can you say?" begins McPherson. "It's virtuosity. It's musicality. It's imagination. It's intellect. It's emotion. It's perfect instrumental playing and creative spontaneity."
What do you hear in Bird's playing that others may overlook?
"I hear the rhythm. Now, people hear technique and virtuosity, and I certainly hear that. Charlie Parker was so proficient in so many ways you can take your pick. But to me, the area of rhythm and phrasing is what is so spectacular. There are two things that give you variety: sequence and rhythm. When you think about musical phrases, sequence and rhythm give you animation. When you're improvising, you want a balance of tension and release rhythmically but also harmonically and melodically.
"Bird does all those things really well. The balance of tension and release gives you surprise. Starting phrases on odd parts of the beat creates tension -- not starting on a downbeat because that's what people expect.
"You can slice the beat into little bitty pieces and start a phrase at the 16th note or 32nd note level. Bird is great at that. This is what I want to do, and this is what great players do. I like to be totally rhythmically free. I like to think like a drummer. Harmony is a given, but the main event is how I phrase the harmony. More important is how I put everything together and the story I'm telling. The main event is the human soul being expressed."
Charles Mingus -- "The Chill of Death" from Let My Children Hear Music (Columbia) Nov. 18, 1971
McPherson joined bassist-composer Charles Mingus in 1960 shortly after arriving in New York. He and Hillyer were recommended to Mingus by former Detroiter Yusef Lateef. Mingus auditioned them at an afternoon jam session at a coffeehouse, hired them on the spot and had them report to work that night. Mingus' aesthetic was gloriously chaotic. Lush Ellingtonian colors collided with roiled textures, searing intensity and extended forms. Mingus also loved Charlie Parker and in McPherson found a fresh disciple to fold into his sound world.
Let My Children Hear Music, a masterpiece with an expansive ensemble of winds, brass and strings, includes a Mingus recitation of his own heart-of-darkness poem to dense and brooding accompaniment. McPherson then improvises freely against a hallucinatory backdrop. "Oh, wow," McPherson says softly at the sound of Mingus' voice: The chill of death as she clutched my hand/ I knew she was coming so I stood like a man.
McPherson was given no music and told to react to the abstract sound around him. "This is pretty good," he says. "It didn't make me cringe. What I'm consigned to do is not easy. There's no (standard harmony) or sequential construction. And look what this is about: The emotions are foreboding, mystery and fear. How do you play that? I don't know if melodicism is what you need. Dissonance might be what's called for. I did some of this fairly well, but there were some areas where I think I get too tonal. If I did this now, I'd be less concerned with trying to be melodic. I'd think about how to melodically handle dissonance."
McPherson worked with Mingus off and on for a dozen years, and it was often stressful. Mingus was a large, Buddha-shaped man and famously volatile, known for firing musicians at will, carrying a knife, berating audiences and resolving conflict with his fists. "Our first night on the gig at the Showplace, Mingus proceeded to tear up a Steinway grand piano because the club owner owed him money. He went in and pulled the strings out of the piano one by one.
"And then he wanted to kill (saxophonist) Eric Dolphy because he was quitting the band. He reached in his pocket and got his knife, and said (imitates Mingus' gruff rumble): 'Eric, get your knife out.' And Eric who was a very sweet and intelligent person, said, 'Aw, Mingus, I don't have no knife.' Mingus says, 'Well, wait a minute. I'll buy you one.' And he goes to a store across the street and buys a knife and comes back and says, 'OK, we're each going to kill each other right now.' Eric says, 'Oh, Mingus, c'mon.' Of course nothing happened. That was my first gig."
Charles McPherson --"Fire Dance" from Manhattan Nocturne (Arabesque) April 1997
McPherson recorded three CDs for Arabesque in the 1990s, teaming with front-rank rhythm sections and essaying original songs, jazz classics and standard ballads. A whirlpool of Afro-Cuban rhythms defines McPherson's "Fire Dance," and his solo unleashes a tsunami of melody on top of a propulsive vamp. "I'm glad I stopped before I ran out of ideas," he says. "I've heard things where I thought it would have been better to stop a chorus or two earlier. If you compare this to that first solo you played, at least I can say that there is a progression toward better playing of the horn and just playing music better.
"You gotta have the wedding of head and heart. Your technique has to be up to par so that when inspiration fails, technique saves you. And you may have inspiration but you gotta have the technique to execute. It's left and right brain, intellect and emotion. The combination makes for the best art. When you practice, that's the conscious mind. You're learning mundane things: academics, the idiom, instrumental technique. But when you perform, you should play from the unconscious mind.
"The act of playing is an act of humility. The conscious mind has to sit to the side and observe the show. When you learn to do that you are no longer a prisoner of your own empirical experiences - I am a man. I am a white man. I am a black man. You're no longer restricted. Now you can plug into what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious.
If you can plug into that, you can play above your empirical experience. The connections are already there. The real act of creation and genius is when you can do that."
