Sound and Vision Orchestra, 2007
Photo: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society
“The music of Bill Dixon maintains such a
powerful flavor, it is one of those things where you inevitably remember the
first time you taste it. For me, it was his mid-career landmark recording November 1981. Within the one minute and twenty six seconds of Webern, the opening track, I realized I had to
completely rethink the possibilities of the trumpet as an improvising
instrument. By the end of the album, I realized I had to examine my assumptions
about the nature of creative music in general.”
Cornetist
Taylor Ho-Bynum included this statement at the beginning of an essay inserted
in Tapestries For Small Orchestra
(Firehouse 12, 2009), a double Cd plus Dvd documenting Bill Dixon’s residency
at the 2007 NY Vision Festival. The line up features four of Dixon closest
collaborators and disciples, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes, Rob Mazurek and Ho
Bynum, along with double bassist and contrabass clarinetist Michel Côté,
cellist Glynis Loman, bassist Ken Filiano and drummer and vibrafonist Warren
Smith.
Aged 84 at
the time of those live performances, Dixon’s
work in the last decade is marked by a musical activity that spreads its wings
well beyond the world of NY contemporary jazz. Or, better said, that enjoys the
widening of the stream of what the avant jazz environment, and audience, is nowadays. Not by chance one of his last students, one of the few granted with
private, individual lessons, was trumpeter, composer and visual artist Rob
Mazurek.
Rob Mazurek - Photo by Jim Newberry
Born in 1965 inJersey
City, Mazurek started playing in a quartet in the early 1990s in Chicago, where after
three albums he also founded the collective Chicago Underground with guitarist
Jeff Parker, drummer Chad Taylor, bassist Noel Kupersmith and trombonist Sarah
Smith. While recording for Delmark and other labels as a Duo, Quartet, or
Orchestra, Mazurek often collaborated with combos coming from experimental rock
such as Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Stereolab and Sam Prekop.
This was
one of the first generations of musicians newly aware, after the grunge/indie
limelights, of the possible connections
‘outside of their mainstream’, to gain curiosity and then consideration into
the avant jazz/contemporary milieu, as happened abut twenty years before with
DNA’s drummer Ikue Mori and guitarist Arto Lindsay, or in Europe with guitarist
Terry Ex, just to name a few.
Close at
hand with the new millennium, Dixon’s
releases featured a quartet album for the German label FMP titled Berlin Abbozzi. With a line-up similar
to some of his Soul Note records – two basses, Matthias Bauer and Hans Koch, his trumpet and Tony Oxley on drums – it features a 60 minutes long composition,
structured in three parts. At the change, Dixon
will be on duty to carry his musical legacy with his younger acolytes.
Taylor Ho Bynum, Wadada Leo Smith, Stanton Davis, Stehpen Haynes
at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem - Photo by Richard Conde
As Tapestries, its, posthumous, follow up Envoi (Victo, 2011) enjoy the same line
up, the same instrumental colors, and the same extended form. Clearly at that
point in time, after his long teaching status, and the previous decade outputs,
Bill Dixon is finally ready to affirm himself as one of thw most important contemporary
composer. As Clifford
Allen aptly wrote, Dixon’s
music at that point in time can be compared to such contemporary composers as
Toru Takemitsu, Lucas Ligeti and Morton Feldman.
Responsible
of sharing Dixon’s heritage in the present, revisiting Envoi at a memorial in New York’s St. Mark’s Place in 2010 with Joe
Morris added as a second double bassist to the original band, or with the same
year exhibiton at the Antwerp-based Follow The Sound festival with Dixon
collaborators Franz Coglmann, Jacques Coursil and Barry Guy, or again in New
York’s Rubin Museum of Art collective concert with Wadada Leo Smith, Taylor Ho
Bynum, Stanton Davis, William Parker and Warren Smith, trumpeter Stephen
Haynes, since 1973 former Dixon student at Bennington College and one of his
closest collaborators, points
at:
“His limning of the unexplored areas of the
trumpet through consistent, controlled usage of multiphonics and extended range
alone earns Bill the mantle of trumpet innovator. […] his mapping and
harnessing of the lower, ‘off the horn,’ pedal register […]; his use of
electronics, delay and reverberation, as well as his employment of extreme
modality of attack and articulation […]. Dixon’s
currently decreased employment of upper register multiphonics reflects organic
change and the artist’s use of what is available to create new work.”
Taylor Ho Bynum at the Vortex Jazz Club
London, Oct. 2011 - Photo: Gian Paolo Galasi
And while
2008 AUM Fidelity 17 Musicians in Search
of a Sound: Darfur, issued not that much after being hosted into Rob
Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra ensemble (Thrill Jockey, 2007), is dedicated
to the military-drive genocide in the African country, its ten movements –
mostly short, with the central Sinopia
as the only composition to oversize 20 minutes - features four trumpets, two
trombones and one tuba, bassoon, three saxophones and one bass clarinet, double
bass, cello and percussion.
The most
extended of Dixon’s large ensembles to date, it follows the results achieved
with Bill Dixon 7-tette and above all
Intents and Purposes, while finally
grounding in the same area of musicians involved in the music of composers such as
Anthony Braxton in the same years another great composer and multi-reedist,
Henry Threadgill, is finally being acknowledged as a true master of
contemporary music.
Related discography:
Berlin Abbozzi (FMP, 1999)
17
Musicians in Search of a Sound (Aum Fidelity, 2007)
Bill Dixon
with Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey, 2008)
Tapestries
for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)
Bill Dixon/Aaron Siegel/Ben Hall: Weight/Counterweight (Brokenresearch,
2009)
Time to get
a little deeper into Dixon’s
discography from 1980. As reported in the previous post in this blog, about all
the material of the period was issued by Italian label Soul Note, with a couple
of exceptions. The Lp Bill Dixon 1982
was released as a limited edition - probably 450 copies – as accompaniment to
an exhibition catalogue of the trumpeter’s paintings in Verona at the Ferrari Gallery. While a couple
of trumpet solos will feature in 1996 Odyssey
box set, the three part Relay was
written in collaboration with improviser dancer Judith Dunn, whose
collaboration with Dixon is extensively narrated in Ben Young Dixonia – A bio-discography of Bill Dixon
with a small excerpt on part
2 of this article.
The
relationship and reciprocal influence between Dixon painting and music is complex. English
journalist Graham Lock provided a full exploration with Dixon himself for an online interview on Point of
Departure, added with a beautiful photo gallery, and while my strong
advice is to enjoy it in its entirety, the following lines can be a good introduction
for the curious listener:
GL: Do you see any similarities in the way you
prepare and perform your music and the way you prepare and present your
artwork?
BD: Not now. Perhaps at one time. Don’t forget,
in the performance of music now, for me, the whole preparation is being able to
play the instrument. If I was going to play tomorrow, whether solo or with a
trio or quartet, I will practice the instrument based upon trying to maintain
flexibility, so if in the process of playing I need to execute something, I
will have traveled that route before and I can execute it. I don't try to
practice things that I can play. I don’t try to practice sequences. When it’s
time for me to play, I don’t know what I’m going to do until the minute I play
the first note, and the first note I play will dictate what I’m going to do.
What I try to do is be a blank slate upon which things can be imprinted.
With painting, with the other artwork, I can
work on something and it can be finished; but I can look at it again the next
day and if I don’t like the way it looks, I’ll take a part and move it around.
I move things around when I write music.
In 1981, photo by Hans Kump
With this
in mind, try to listen, again or for the first time, recordings such near in
time as Bill Dixon 1982 and Bill Dixon in Italy vol. 1 - on Soul Note,
1980. One thing that is really clear to me as a listener, is that the solo
exhibitions on the first record, as the excerpts from previous recordings you
can get to at the end of my
previous post, were realized using the same idea of space, of abstraction,
than in the Soul Note’s, while at the same time the timbres and echoes are here
more raucous, dissonant; since this is a characteristic of the material
featured in the Odyssey box, one can think at first sight about an expressive
shift at the turn of the eighties, while this 1982 record shows that possibly,
Dixon changes of nuances both on trumpet and piano can be assigned to the
different temperature of playing completely alone – even if with overdubbed
parts - or with a group of musicians.
It is
difficult to say if this shift was conscious or unconscious, while the effect
is that of a musician that, in solitude, try to occupy the background space and
shift on the foreground, and viceversa, by himself, whereas while accompanied
by another musician or a more or less extended group, the levels shifting is
realized through superimpositions from the different players.
Firenze piano introduction on the 1980 Soul
Note release has brighter nuances, while Arthur Brooke and Stephen Haynes
trumpets, Alan Silva’s double bass nods, Stephen Horenstein’s small, dark
strips on baritone saxophone, and Freddie Waits’ interventions on drums are all
creating a constantly fluctuating pattern that gives the music its pulse shifting,
in an exchange of rhythms and colors. This is a constant in Bill Dixon works or
that period, and we can extrapolate the wider meaning of his work as a composer
and instrumentalist from that.
Bill Dixon on 'Jazz Hot', December 1973
Something
Clifford Allen well noticed on his AAJ comprehensive article on the musician,
as quoted on part
one of this series, but now’s the time to go a little further. If Dixon, as
some of his contemporaries and next generation followers, worked extensively on
both the aural and visual paradigm – as an example, Anthony Braxton and Wadada
Leo Smith do this, as clearly evident even from the interview
the AACM-rooted trumpeter gave me last year, and as will be from my following
writings on the multi-instrumentalist, composer and ‘tri-axium’ writer, it is
also true that in this he was only making the same effort of many contemporary
artists, which is to go beyond the divisions in the world of the art we suffer
in Western culture since the separation of music from other arts and
disciplines, as from the half of 1700 on.
While
inviting to read Davide
Sparti’s writings on the subject, I’d love to contextualize more Dixon’s place in the
evolution of Black Creative Music. If, as Bill Dixon openly suggested to Graham
Lock, music is the less segregated of the forms of art disposable to self
expression, and if in New York in the Sixties there were complex relationships
between Black and White artistic milieux, involving notions of race, gender,
identities, political visions, ideals, Dixon attempts to create a music able to
incorporate improvisation, contemporary composition, dance and painting, was
possibly the only alternative attempt to the post-modern collagistic and
interpenetretional strategies that in the Seventies took ground from the
Chicago-based AACM migrations on the NY ‘loft’ scene.
As much an
outsider as sopranist Steve Lacy, possibly the nearest figure, since both were
working ‘on the border’ – of sound, on the most imperfect of the reeds instrument
family Lacy; of music, painting and teaching/composing Dixon - the trumpeters’
was one of the most vivid efforts to create an organic expression and artistic
vision. Going on in listening to his Soul Note recordings, this will become
irremediably clear.
Bill Dixon in Italy, Soul Note 1980
Both the
volumes od Bill Dixon
in Italy
stress the continuity and the constant progress from his 1967 masterpiece Intents and Purposes. Three trumpets - while
Dixon sometimes
passes on piano, tenor or baritone saxophone, double bass, and drums. This
ensemble of musicians, and the music as its result, is an evolution of the
attempt to both transfigure a brass palette echoing the ‘third stream’
orchestras and transform the original free-jazz pantonal polyphonies into a
multi-layered plane-shifting.
Alan Silva
was taking part of Dixon environment since their Cecil Taylor Unit and Jazz
Composers Guild days, and if you listen to his ESP and BYG records, Silva’s –
also a painter, as Dixon - conductions, inspired by the history of the
African-American music from Louis Armstrong to Sun Ra and Albert Ayler, with
whom he directly collaborated, passing through his teaching, go into a similar
direction – the use of permutations so to create structures out of notes, his
love for Xenakis’ steps ahead in written music and his clashes with Pierre
Boulez’ IRCAM after creating his own IACP school.
Cornetist,
trumpeter and composer Stephen Haynes, is still today the direct witness and
creative legacy-sharer of Dixon’s
inheritance, through both his music and writings. Defining himself ‘a
product of the historic and fertile Black Music Division at Bennington College
directed by Bill Dixon’, he’s responsible of a continuity that through records
as Parrhesia (Engine, 2010) with
bassist/guitarist Joe Morris and drummer Warren Smith is still enjoyable in the
very present.
Back cover of Bill Dixon in Italy vol. 1
L-R: Stephen Horenstein, Stephen Haynes, Bill Dixon,
Freddie Waits, Alan Silva, Arthur Brooks
Arthur
Brooks, former student at AntiochCollege in the Sixties,
is another undervalued hero of the Taylor-Dixon-October Revolution connection.
Also a Bennington teacher until 1997, his music is inspired by both painting
and Sufi mystics – the sound as an element coming from the soul, a direct
reflection of the natural environment as a stream of energy.
Freddie
Waits, father of drummer Nasheet Waits, is well known for having played with Max
Roach and his M’Boom Collective, pianist Andrew Hill, and a theory of post-bop,
modernistic Blue Note-based acolytes as Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard and Lee
Morgan. Stephen Horenstein, composer and multi-reed player, born in Boston but
at the time of those recordings migrating in Israel to study at the Music and
Dance department of Tel-Aviv University, and Dixon’s student at Bennington, was
active in many festivals both in Italy and New York, and recorded with German
drummer Gunther ‘Baby’ Soemmer between many others.
If the
music on this couple of record can be described as ‘pastoral’, in a way that
reflects another similarity between personalities as different as Bill Dixon
and Miles Davis, the following November
1981 (Soul Note, 1981), featuring a quartet composed by Dixon, Silva,
double bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Laurence Cook, push the music into a
more nervous, nocturne flow. One of Dixon’s grooviest outputs, and possibly the
nearest to what we can expect from a NY-rooted musician, is in some way
extended by his follower Thoughts (Soul
Note, 1985), with the double basses of Peter Kowald, William Parker and again
Mario Pavone, while the reed section is completed by Marco Eneidi on alto and John
Buckigham on tuba.
Bill Dixon, Thoughts, Soul Note, 1985
It features
a photo shot by Dixon himself of a trumpet near a window, with its reflections
on the standing wall, while on the back cover one of Dixon painting is exposed
on a semi-opened bathroom door, with the column of what can maybe be taken as a
fireplace at the other side of the image, in a sort of triptych emanating
directly from the division of the space. The music on this record is kind of a
sum of Dixon’s small ensembles previous experiences, with the sinuous pulsing
of Thoughts, the meditating layers of
piano and horns of Windows, the
contemporary dialogue of silence and sound in For Nelson and Winnie (a Suite in Four Parts), with Eneidi as the
proper inheritor of Robin Kenyatta and Byrd Lancaster and a wider use of spacey
extensions of sound as always in Dixon’s music.
Son of Sysiphus (Soul Note, 1988) is possibly the most
‘classical’ Dixon
of the 1980s. Again a quartet, composed by Dixon with John Buckingham on tuba,
Mario Pavone on double bass, and Laurence Cook on drums, while the paintings on
the cover mark a shift from the isolated, naked figures on the front to the
‘target’ painting on the back. Among the compostions, Mandala for Mandela, with Dixon typical short statements/brushes strenghtened
by tuba’s lumpy support, and Sumi-e,
dedicated to Dixon’s mother, featuring a piano that, as quite as usual, use its
projections through space in a way similar to Mal Waldron, even if enjoying
shorter, direct statements.
But none of
Dixon’s records
or compositions are ‘classic’ in any way. The two volumes under the title of Vade Mecum (both Soul Note, 1993), introducing
drummer Tony Oxley as one of the last, long-time trumpeter partners – it will
be featured again on the following volumes released by the Italian Label, and
on a trio performance with Cecil Taylor, certificating a continuity between
American and European improvised music. I suggest the reader to give an eye to
the important Derek Bailey book “Improvisation:
Its Nature and Practice in Music”, firstly published in 1980, revisited and
expanded in 1993, where the UK guitarist provided the reader with an
enlightening interview with Oxley himself and its evolution as a musician.
Drummer Tony Oxley
Vade Mecum sees also the double basses of William Parker
and Barry Guy, reaffirming a practice of music in which, as in Anamorphosis, the trumpet, surrounded by
the two bass pulses and the particular Oxley’s drumkit, his playing acquires an
extended use of both lighter and lower tones, while the two following volumes
of Papyrus (Soul Note, 1998) see
Dixon’s piano, as on Silver Point: Jeanne
Phillips, as both melodic and rhythmic instrument, even if the texture of
the compositions is always far from both dramatic, Eurocentric constructions,
and African American percussive references; while since Papyrus # 2, the trumpet gains a more pre-eminent role through
space as never before on a record. And if Oxley percussions are more
environmental than ever, with a consistency that reminds of the contemporary
evolution of electronic music, what both the musicians give life here is
something not that far from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening project for music and arts.
Gillo
Dorfles, one of the most important and interesting art critics in Italy, wrote in
2006 about the ‘lost interval’ in contemporary art, meaning "the gradual
disappearance of the traditional elements of separation, interruption and pause
that have been present in literary and artistic creation since time
immemorial...". This couple of Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley releases can be seen
as an indirect, but important attempt, to put the listener in a space in which
he can finally gain his ability to restore his proper, personal perspective on
what he’s listening.
As part of
Cage/postmodern heredity, as a link between discovery, spontaneity and memory,
Oxley self built set of percussions and Dixon half-valves, and sometimes
electrified and manipulated extensions of sound through space, are one of the
most important and conscious attempts coming from improvised music to put
together an idea of expression related to the notion of individuality and
self-discovery. Their album released in 2002 through label Victo featuring Cecil Taylor
on piano, is one of the most delicate, intimate recordings featuring the
pianist, in some way also destabilizing and uncanny, as reported in Kurt
Gottshalk review of the record on AAJ website linked here above.
