Being a part of the whole (when I play it, I mean it): Bill Dixon [pt. 3]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Bill Dixon started from 1968 to teach regularly music at Vermont’s Bennington College, where in 1973 he founded the Black Music Division, being active in there until his retirement in 1996. Founded in 1932 as a women’s college, and becoming later co-educational, Bennington was conceived a new liberal arts institute following John Dewey’s educational philosophy.

Involved in teaching since his New York years, Dixon scholars on his own instrument featured Eddie Gale Jr and Don Ayler, Albert’s younger brother, Rashied Ali, and even Ornette Coleman, while lessons on a different instruments were given to bassist Alan Silva, saxophonists Ed Curran, Marzette Watts and Byard Lancaster, drummer Clever Pozar. Following through the years, Marco Eneidi, Sam Rivers, Arthur Doyle, Steven Horenstein, Stephen Haynes and Arthur Brooks were joining the Division as visiting artists or adjuncts.

Bill Dixon portraited himself to Clifford Allen as a teacher. His greater merit was to give everyone the opportunity to align only with themselves and with the very present so to further develop: “You start from where you are. To write a novel, you don't have to study Charles Dickens—you'll do that in time. You'll exhaust your limitations first—don't forget, tradition is all around you. You're sinking in it, breathing it, and you can't escape it or resist it. To force it as a prerequisite—the most you can get out of it is that it presents you with such a phenomenal bunch of facts about how things are done that you're intimidated from ever doing anything. Art goes on forever, and my experience is that you start from where it excites you and if you're intelligent, you look from where the hell did this thing come? So you took a beginning person in the room and you stayed in the room till the thing was done. The one thing I tried to impress upon people was that if you are in the room, you are as important as anybody else. It's not about this overt virtuosity—it's about everyone being a part of the whole.”

While teaching and trying to preserve his incomes, Dixon developed further his liaison between aural and visual expression, being with his foot on both grounds. While working with his own classes or orchestras, even in recent years, he pushed his students and cohorts to think about music in terms of color, temperature of the color and collectiveness of the twos. Quite often, musicians are collected so to form a circle, while the old habit to arrange the notes more than the group’s personnel ran into a deepening of the abstraction already present since his major masterpiece Intents and Purposes.

Front cover of volume two of Considerations Lp, a series
of Vermont recordings issued from 1972 to 1975 by label Fore

Above all the material of this period available was collected partly by Fore and Cadence, then finally in almost its completion on the self-released limited 6 cd box Odyssey, provided with a 32 page booklet with Dixon painting, an interview, and essays by Ben Young and Graham Lock. Covering a period from 1970 and 1990, with tracks taken in New York, Jerusalem and Wilmington, the box was in 1996 the right tool to give a new life to Dixon artistry as trumpeter, pianist and painter. Mostly unaccompanied on those recordings, or accompanied only by few musicians – David Moss and Lawrence Cook on percussions and Lesslie Winston on keyboards, the output was coupled with 1998’s Ben Young’s Dixonia: a Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon, a definitive 418 pages attempt to put in order all Dixon recorded material – mostly unissued even today – the musician featured in more than 40 years of career.

While those relics kept the flame high almost at the same time a new generation of listeners was newly and heavily connecting with Dixon’s artistry through Rob Mazurek – a devoted and pairly creative alumnus, one of the few to deserve individual lessons – dedications and partnerships, it is time to get a little back in time. Dixon’s ‘90s and ‘00s were mostly documented through Aum Fidelity, Thrill Jockey and Victo labels, showing a musician able to involve both old avant garde jazz hard-ons and new post-rock amateurs . Only Anthony Braxton tried a similar connection of styles and public in recent times, calling the mutant noisers Wolf Eyes at the Victoriaville Festival in 2005 to play together, but to have such an enduring liaison we have think about John Zorn trashcorejazz experimentalism, only that Dixon, with his unique approach to sound, architectural and choreographic at the same time, was far away from the postmodernism of both the musicians/composers.

Giancarlo Barigozzi was a saxophonist, flutist, clarinetist
recording his music since 1953 for Columbia  

And if a new generation of half-valves trumpet players, of whom Mazurek is the prime mover along with Taylor Ho Bynum and the less directly connected horns of Axel Dorner, Nate Wooley and Peter Evans, are taking Dixon’s legacy to a possible further step in the future, if it wasn’t for Italian label Black Saint, there wouldn’t possibly be no testimony of Dixon’s developments and ties with the American and European improvised music world in the previous decades.

Being Italian myself I must admit that it is a pleasure and a honour to introduce on this writing such enlightened figures as Giovanni Bonandrini and Giacomo Pellicciotti. At the decay of American labels such as Arista/Freedom, Passing Thru and India Navigation, Black Saint (and later on its consociated Soul Note) gave to musicians like Muhal Richard Abrahms, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, David Murray, Andrew Cyrille, George Russell and later Steve Lacy, Bill Dixon and William Parker the opportunity to keep on developing their own heritage.

Think about Werner X. Uehligner’s HatHut, pairly established in 1975 and working on a similar base of passion and research, but focused also on the Italian shore of jazz and contemporary music through works dedicated to composer Giorgio Gaslini or pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, and you’ll get the picture.

The records for the label were recorded mosty at Giancarlo Barigozzi’s Studio in Milano, founded in 1974, initially raised for pop and advertising music, and during the following 20 years the reference point for the most important international jazz musicians – few names: Sun Ra, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Tony Scott, Art Blakey, Paul Bley, Lee Konitz, Franco Cerri, Renato Sellani, Franco D’Andrea – while its historic catalogue is now under reissue by London based Cam Jazz, through small monographic boxes with CDs provided with reproductions of the original artwork.

All of Dixon’s records were given new life last year, and with the most recent issues they’re the widely available – and of the most enjoyable, since the quality of the music. To understand the value of those recordings, think only about the fact that possibly, if it wasn’t for Bonandrini’s label, we wouldn’t hold now any direct account of how Bill Dixon evolved since 1980 through 1998. 

Related discography:

Considerations, Vol. 1 (Fore, 1972)

Considerations, Vol. 2 (fore, 1973)

Considerations, Vol. 3 (Fore, 1975)

Bill Dixon in Italy - Vol. 1 (Black Saint, 1980)

Bill Dixon in Italy - Vol. 2 (Black Saint, 1980)

November 1981 (Black Saint, 1981)

Thoughts (Black Saint, 1985)

Son of Sisyphus (Black Saint, 1988)

Vade Mecum (Black Saint, 1993)

Vade Mecum II (Black Saint, 1993)

Odyssey (self issued, 6 cd Box, 1996)

Papyrus - Vol. 1 (Black Saint, 1998)

Papyrus - Vol. 2 (Black Saint, 1998)

Collection (Cadence, double CD, 1999)

[Go to fourth part]

Being a part of the whole (when I play it, I mean it): Bill Dixon [pt. 1]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Bill Dixon in 1881. Photo: Stephen Haynes

That Bill Dixon is a remarkable musician, a peerless one, is something you can get to directly listening to Cecil Taylor’s Conquistador! (Blue Note, 1966). With (Exit), side B of the lp, is heavily marked by trumpet's brushes of notes from lower to upper registers, with Taylor answering to these increasingly long and raucous tides leaving his usual stumming for more varied figures. Dixon introduces here a kind of warm call, mostly half valves as typical of his style, that Miles Davis, using a more bright and muezzin-like tone, reran few years after in many of his electric records and live performances – I also think that a comparison between some of the two trumpeters musical statements would be interesting, also to put in perspective some of Davis’ allegations on the couple of ‘contenders’ via Leonard Feathers’ Blindfold Tests on Downbeat issues of the era.

“There is no music without order - if it comes from a man’s innards” said Cecil Taylor to Nat Hentoff, while in more recent times, for a beautiful overall gaze on Dixon’s works provided by Clifford Allen on Allaboutjazz.com, Dixon himself stated “I told people years ago, the funny thing about Cecil is that if you're playing with him and you bring something into the music that catches his attention, he'll pay attention.” As a passionate fan of Cecil Taylor music, I can confirm Allen statements: no one else had this kind of alchemic approach to the music of the now 83 years old maestro, maybe with the exception of violinist Mat Maneri, who recorded a date with the pianist for the Library of Congress in 2004.

Born on October 5, 1959 in Nantucket, Massachussets, and died on June 16, 2010, Bill Dixon was not only an accomplished trumpeter, pianist and composer, but even before that, an accomplished painter. Relocated in New York with his family when 7 years old, as a teenager he attempted to study visual arts, and became a musician only when discharged from the Navy. As Graham Lock underlines in an interview for Point of Departure, Dixon’s art can be seen ‘as a personal extension of the experiments with abstraction that were taking place in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s’, like Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and De Kooning.

Bill Dixon, 'Changes', pen ink and acrylic on paper

To complete the cadre, George Grosz, Otto Dix, architecture and design coming out of Impressionism can be taken as part of his panel of direct references. Former student with Earnest Critchlow, an African American artist that had a role in the Harlem Renaissance, and later, in 1969, founder of the Cinque Gallery and teacher at the NY University and the Art Students League, Bill Dixon left representation in 1960, almost at the same time he abandoned reading novels and started composing his own music, arranging notes more than group personnel.

“I would say it’s about as far as abstraction can go. In fact, it goes beyond abstraction. There is nothing to guide the viewer as to why those lithographs have anything to do with any of those people. Absolutely nothing. I was thinking about them consciously the entire time and, metaphysically, trying to place that ‘thought’ in the painting, if that was possibile.” Almost the same is the process when dedicating a piece to someone, as with Sumi E, a beautiful composition featured on 1988 record Son of Sisyphus and dedicated to Bill’s mother.

Dixon himself provided Clifford Allen with an aptly description for the music and the similarities with visual arts, due to the influence of both the artistic personalities of the musician: "I don't think vertically, but horizontally. If I follow a line I'm playing, I would have to turn around and look at the horizon—and what about the depth of the thing? It depends—shooting out a line and using delay or reverb almost has a cloud effect. You can put forth a phrase, the ensemble can come in, and they hover around each other.

I think of this as a cube-like thing, that if it were possible I could walk into the sound and play in it like that. It goes someplace and is a collection of something—why wouldn't it have a width, height, while also having all the instruments on the same level? Let your ear select where it wants to go, toward points where there's something up top, something behind, and you hear trumpets like they're inside the other thing. It holds another kind of responsibility on the ear; we draw out the soloist when we hear something. You walk into a party and if you want to hear what someone is saying, you focus on them."

Dixon’s first recorded compositions, Trio and Quartet, are featured on a record headed to the Archie Shepp – Bill Dixon Quartet and released in 1962 by Savoy in the US and by BYG in Europe under the title Peace. At that time, Bill Dixon was having embouchure problems, but his compositions are an evidence of the period, while Trio was subsequently reworked on the New York Contemporary Five albums. Way before, Dixon was heavily involved in the NY Art scene - the one described by Daniel Belgrad as 'aesthetic of spontaneity' - see his The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, University of Chicago Press 1998 - playing and composing, after attending the Hartnett Conservatory of Music in Manhattan. In 1951 he met Cecil Taylor for the first time, while working for the UN and founding in 1953 the UN’s Jazz Society.

Between his first compositions, there is a suite for jazz horns influenced by JJ Johnson’s Poem For Brass (featured in Gunther Schuller’s The Birth of The Third Stream, Columbia 1956) and Teo Macero, showing how far Dixon was departing from the classic post-bop combos, while at the same time refining his attitude towards the music business, liking better Greenwich Village’s coffeehouses than usual clubs as The Five Spots. Other declared influences on Dixon compositional palette were movie and radio soundtracks, as well as his experience of composing and playing for dance performances.

This way, Bill Dixon started to be accustomed to such places as Le Figaro since 1961, gravitating toward figures as tenorist Archie Shepp and altoist John Tchicai, that since 1963, coming in NY from Denmark, started collaborating with native musicians leading to the Ney York Contemporary Five. Bill Dixon became their arranger while the choice of the trumpet player fell on Ornette Coleman scholar Don Cherry. While Dixon influence on the band compositions decreased through their tour in Europe in 1964, since 1962 Dixon was teaching music to Marzette Watts, moving on the same building on 27 Cooper Square, above the Five Spot, in which the older altoist was living with Shepp and LeRoi Jones at the beginning of 1963.

East Village, the Five Spot

The Savoy sessions collected on the lp Peace, featuring Don Moore on bass and Paul Cohen on drums – but with Reggie Workman and Howard McRae on the Coleman cover Piece, were recorded just few months after the two musicians split up for the first time. Shepp started travelling the Soviet Union, while Dixon moved in Stockholm with Perry Robinson, introduced by the latter to Albert Ayler. Failed to arrange an album of standards for the tenorist since he was panicking, the two played on some dates, sharing also a night with some members of the Count Basie Orchestra. The record finally went out, but without Dixon’s arrangements.

While in Europe, Dixon started writing the pieces later collected when he and Shepp found themselves again together in New York. Responsible also for the cover of the album, from this moment on Dixon started playing only his own compositions, while reluctant before that experience. Meeting John Tchichai and writing for the wide intervals typical of his style meant also for the composer following his inspiration in writing for large ensembles, leading him to Metamorphosis, the piece ended in 1966 and opener for his first masterpiece Intents and Purposes (Rca Victor, 1966).

Through different stages, Dixon started in this period to develop his own idea of music, preferring a wider use of space, more than the classic NY jammin’ free jazz polyphonic practice of the period. While moving with Shepp on a Lower East Side Manhattan loft together with Billy Higgins, Henry Grimes and Don Cherry, they were playing for leftists and local church related organizations as such players as J.R. Monterose, Jackie McLean, Steve Lacy, Don Ellis, Randy Weston, and Booker Ervin.

LeRoi Jones and Diane Di Prima

Black conscience were turmoiling over the surface at the beginning of the new decade, and Shepp and Le Roi Jones were actively involved with the political Organization of the Young Men, leading then to 1965 philosophical oppositions between the Jazz Composers Guild and Jones’ Black Arts repertory theatre. It was time for Dixon, that in 1963 wrote only arrangements, without directly performing with this or any other band, for the New York Contemporary Five debut album Consequences (Fontana, 1963), as their previous Rufus, with the band still a quartet featuring only JC Moses on bass and Don Moore on drums, and hosted musicians for interviews on a local radio, to further evolve, while his old fellow/rival was publishing his fundamental Blues People the same year and presenting his play The Dutchman in 1964.

The New York Contemporary Five were hosting again Dixon arrangements in the Sonet live recordings captured in Copenhagen, and in the Bill Dixon 7-tette/New York Contemporary 5 Savoy 1964 release. Issued to honour a contractual obligation with the label, the lp featured for the first time a group of musicians that will evolve further two years after on Dixon’s milestone of the Sixties. The Sep-tette is finally a direct emanation of Dixon’s ideas and practice on composition. His attempt to evolve from the New York free jazz logic, borrowing wider colors from the ‘third stream’, soundtrack music, and postmodern contemporary dance, with an eye on Espressionistic painting, will lead him to become a forerunner of improvised music in Europe. But we’ll get back to this, later on.

Featuring Ken McIntyre on alto and oboe, George Barrow on tenor saxophone, Howard Johnson on tuba and baritone sax, David Izenzon and Hal Dodson on bass and Howard McRae on drums, the record featured only Dixon’s original compositions: Winter Song, divided into five sections, its small – only 31 seconds -  Coda, and The 12th December, that is a completely notated piece. Largely out of print, the record in its entirety is considered one of the seminal records of the experimental music of the era, and it is also Dixon’s first real play after his embouchure problems, though some difficulties here and there were affecting the resulting performances:

“We’d rehearsed a lot, but going into the studio I could not do any second take. There were false starts, but not complete ones. We had a couple of problems getting started and I could feel my strength going. Ultimately I had to call upon everything I knew to get through that. If you’ll notice, my sound wasn’t quite as secure as it might have been”, said Dixon himself to Ben Young for his Dixonia: A Bio-discography of Bill Dixon (Greenwood Press, 1998).


Go to second part 

Related discography as a leader:

Archie Shepp - Bill Dixon Quartet (Savoy, 1962)

Bill Dixon 7-ette/Archie Shepp and The New York Contemporary Five (Savoy, 1964)

Intents and Purposes (Rca Victor, 1967)

Related discography as sideman:

Cecil Taylor, Conquistador! (Blue Note, 1966)

Related discography as arranger/composer: 

The New York Contemporary Five, Consequences (Fontana, 1963)

The New York Contemporary Five, Rufus (Fontana, 1963)

The New York Contemporary Five, Vol. 1 (Sonet, 1963)

The New York Contemporary Five, Vol. 2 (Sonet, 1963)

Bill Dixon 7-ette/Archie Shepp and The New York Contemporary Five (Savoy, 1964)

Related Bibliography: 

Ben Young, Dixonia. A bio-discography of Bill Dixon, Greenwood Press, 1998

"Even so, the music is yet to come" (Lester Bowie)

Introducing the Loft Era - Pt. 1

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Sam Rivers at Studio Rivbea, 1976

One of the great misses in developing a written history of jazz is the so-called 'loft era', and the developing of his heritage through his many rivers. People like Rick Lopez and Ben Young are still making an important effort to organize a solid mass of documents, using the internet and the radio to share a well organized archival storage; but a complete, written, detailed and documented history of that 1972-1986 period is yet to come.

Some aspects of that history have come to the surface, though referred to music beyond avant jazz, thanks to books like "Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92" (Tim Lawrence, Duke University Press, 2009), Arcana: Musicians on Music. (John Zorn, New York: Granary Books, 2000) or Sonora. Itinerari Oltre il Suono (Carla Chiti - Walter Rovere, Materiali Sonori Italia - 1998), published with Italian/English text. But an extended analysis of the loft-jazz related scene has yet to be made. There is a section specifically referred to that issue in Fire Music: a Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990. (Gray, John; New York: Greenwood Press, 1991) and many information about its roots are detailed in As Serious as Your Life: John Coltrane and Beyond (Valerie Wilmer;  London: Serpent's Tail, 1977). This last couple of books are currently out of print, and available only through public libraries, or through remainders bookstores.

In 1972, " saxophonist Sam Rivers hosted, at his Bond Street loft, a counter-festival to George Wein's mainstream Newport in New York Festival. Shortly afterward, Rivers received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts for an ongoing series of concerts" (Peter Cherches). Before Rivers', there were the Bill Dixon experience called 'The October Revolution in Jazz' in 1964, but the 'loft era' was something different from the attempt to give life and shape to an entire movement out of a single's mind will. In fact, there were more than one subject actively involved, the spaces in which to rehearse, make gigs and record together were related to more than one person, and all of them were working together.

Lester Bowie's Sho Nuff Orchestra

Rivers' was one of the many places in which a musician could rehearse virtually day and night, and also get in contact with his fellows. So there were "Ali's Alley, run by drummer Rashied Ali; pianist John Fischer's Environ, Joe Lee Wilson's The Ladies' Fort, Studio We on Eldridge Street, on the Lower East Side, Warren Smith's Studio WIS and The Brook in Chelsea. Not to mention the Tin Palace, a club at Bowery and 2nd Street, Jazzmania Society, a loft in the East 20s, and La Mama theatre on East 4th." (Gary Giddins)

In the middle, as both Peter Cherches and Gary Giddins ("Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop", New York, Oxford University Press, 1981) recall, there were both AACM and BAG experiences, the many records issued by Nessa and Delmark, as long as Henry Threadgill's Air and Leroy Jenkins' Revolutionary Ensemble attempts to share the bill with other media as theater, dance, cinema.

In the loft-era, well up-to-date labels were "Lake’s Passin’ Thru and Bob Cummins’ India Navigation, the Steve Backer-directed Arista Freedom and, most important of all, Italy’s Black Saint/Soul Note, as well as hundreds of labels huddled under the umbrella of New Music Distribution Service, which had grown out of the 1960s Jazz Composers Orchestra Association". (Gary Giddins)

Unluckily, almost all the records are now unavailable. Passin' Thru, the label founded by Oliver  Lake, is still active and working on new material, but none of the old Lps were reissued. Gilles Peterson, BBC Radio 1 broadcaster, talks about some of the labels aforementioned and the records they produced for his "Freedom, Rhythm and Sound", a beautiful collection of covers of the era spanning through Strata East to India Navigation, from Delmark to Impulse!, from Flying Dutchman to BYG/Actuel. Companion of the book, a double CD was published by SoulJazz records, including music by Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Mtume, Joe McPhee, Phil Corhan, Gary Bartz, and many more. Not all of those artists were in close relationship with NY lofts, but they all come from the same era and their aesthetics and attempts to make new music out of jazz, soul and black consciousness is very similar.

Henry Threadgill

In "Wildflowers: Loft Jazz New York 1976", re-issued in 2009 on a 3 CD set, producer Alan Douglas put, originally on 5 LP all published in 1976, an important selection of the sessions that took place in Studio Rivbea. Artists featured are the likes of Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Anthony Davis, Randy Weston, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Dave Burrell, Ahmed Abdullah, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy  Lyons, Hamiett Bluiett, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake. Others good records to start with, Sam Rivers' "Crystals" (Impulse!, 1974), in which 64 musicians are playing compositions written between 1959 and 1972. This in fact wasn't the only effort in realizing a complex orchestral work (only Sam Rivers wrote more than 300 scores): think also about Lester Bowie's Sho Nuff Orchestra. Lots of critics point out at Dave Holland's "Conference of the Birds" (ECM, 1973) as the most important of the time.

What does this music sound like? Is the 'loft-music' different from previous and forthcoming free or avant jazz music done or to come? There are common references? According to Gary Giddins, "music was challenging without being ideological. It merged and fused jazz, pop, free improvisation, fastidious and “conductionist” scores (not since the 1950s had so many big bands sprung up) with instruments from around the world, employing swing, funk and rubato rhythms in a music of extraordinary range, seasoned with humor, irony, nostalgia, sarcasm and stubborn independence."

But, as Sam Rivers himself pointed out to Mark Minsker in 2005, "Leroy Jenkins, [Henry] Threadgill and Hamiett Bluiett […] like myself, we were already complete musicians. In the past, that didn't happen. Most of the musicians who came in were like Miles and Wynton - they learned on the job. […] And we were all playing our own music all the time. Not just a concert every once and awhile. That's what started us having concerts on Bond Street - being able to play anytime we wanted." So, more than a stylistic endeavour (that anyway exists and can be filed under 'synthesizing experiences coming from different sides'), the whole scene is marked first and foremost by the need to take control over shows and records and to manage an independent career, experimenting with structures and scores as much as with the gaining of a mastery on their instruments without the need to expatriate, as almost all musicians involved in the scene had previously done in order to have gigs or make recording sessions.

Downbeat, Nov. 1978

Another important effect, in order to understand the future development of experimental music in the famous 'downtown' scene, was well described by Rivers himself on an interview originally issued in 1978 on Downbeat: "there is no avant garde. There is no avant garde in European classical music, and there is no avant garde in jazz. There are modernists and there are traditionalists. […] We have reached a total access to all musical elements. I can't imagine another fundamental change in the music, unless we consider the electronic - and then how can we think of music more as an engineer than musician?".

Modernism is here a key word. To make it better clear, think that the producer of the Wildflower record series was Alan Douglas, who was also Jimi Hendrix mentor. It seems that Rivers and Hendrix had to make a record together, and were scheduled to have a rehearsal. Lots of musicians outside of the jazz community were also playing in lofts in order to reach full creative expression, survive and being accepted in artists' communities, and share their proposals with them.

So, as far as the end of the 1970s is near, the 'loft' scene starts to expand including musicians as Eugene Chadbourne, Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori, Arthur Russell. A melting between avant jazz, no wave, minimalism and so on. Probably the most complete musicians and composers to come out of this melting pot were John Zorn, Kip Anrahan, and Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris. Postmodern thinking starts to take the place of post-punk and afro-american communities efforts to enlarge musical and ethnic boundaries, reflecting the change that reaganomics imposed definitely on economy and politics in the United States since 1984.