Joel Futterman & William Parker - Why (Soul City, 2024)

There are albums or pieces of music that must arrive at the right time to touch your heart. That's why, even though I've known about this music for a couple of months, I decided to write about it only today. "Why" is a short but compelling title. It challenges listeners to think beyond conventional boundaries, immersing them in the flux of past and present while transcending societal norms. In essence, it embodies what every piece of improvised music should aspire to achieve. 

Joel Futterman, like William Parker, is a veteran of free jazz. Born in Chicago in 1946, Futterman was influenced by Clarence Eugene Shaw, a trumpeter and student of Gurdjieff's Fourth Way. Musically, Futterman was a devoted student of Coltrane, Dolphy, and Monk. One striking aspect of his style is that, while sounding contemporary, his melodic approach—even when pointillistic and abstract—sets him apart from Cecil Taylor and other contemporary piano masters. 

It has often been said that Taylor played the piano as if it were a drum set. Futterman, however, plays the piano as if all these techniques, borrowed from Monk, Cage, and others, were honed to fit his own unique vision. After playing in Chicago from 1964 to 1969, the pianist moved to Virginia Beach in 1972. His first album as a leader was released in 1979, and his many collaborators have included Jimmy Lyons and Richard Davis. 

Following a period of musical inactivity, Futterman returned to collaborate with various artists, including Kidd Jordan and Alvin Fielder. It's not surprising to see him playing in this set with William Parker, who, after a period of playing with musicians of his own generation in the supergroup The Commitment, began collaborating with veterans like Cecil Taylor and Peter Brötzmann. Listening to the "Why" album, it's clear that Futterman and Parker fit together remarkably well. 

I've mentioned pointillism, and indeed, Futterman's style of attacking with short phrases and notes, their effect prolonged through subsequent phrases, matches perfectly with Parker's bass playing, both plucked and bowed. There are moments when their interplay is almost telepathic (as it should always be in this music), and you can sense that the two are playing after dismissing all rational thoughts and practices, relying instead on intuition and more emotional skills. 

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Gurdjieff and his 'Fourth Way.' One of his most important statements is that we tend to love as we count, using our rational mind. However, he proposes a new way—the fourth—in which we can learn to be different, more complete human beings. In this sense, love, like art, is both a territory in which to enjoy this new self and a doorway to it. 

Even the most skeptical listeners can appreciate this music and be captivated by the beauty and density of this dialogue. While Parker, playing with Taylor and English drummer Tony Oxley in the so-called "Feel Trio," was accustomed to playing independently from the other musicians, here the 'interdependence' between the two musicians is clearly enjoyable. 

I've recently listened to many free improvisation albums that have both highlights and lowlights, but this album consists entirely of 'highs.' Therefore, I wholeheartedly advise listeners to experience and enjoy it in its entirety. "Why" is not just an album; it's a journey into the depths of musical intuition and emotional resonance.

Tony Oxley has left us on Dec. 26, 2023

Born on June 15, 1938 in Sheffield, UK, Tony Oxley left us, sadly, two days ago. Founder of Incus label, present with his name on The Baptised Traveller (CBS, 1969), one of the very first record of European Improvised music where he is drummer and leader followed by Evan Parker on tenor, Kenny Wheeler on trumpet, Derek Bailey on guitar and Jeff Clyne on bass, Oxley was a self taught pianist as a young child and only at 17 he started studying drums.

In 1963 after playing with a military band he gave life to a trio of musicians including Gavin Bryars and Derek Bailey, before moving to London where he became sideman for the Ronnie Scott’s. There he played with musicians like Joe Henderson, Charlie Mariano, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins and Bill Evans, and with local glories as Alan Skidmore and Gordon Beck.

In 1969 he played on Extrapolation by Miles Davis’ ex guitarist John McLaughlin and then he formed the above mentioned quintet. Pivotal and key figure for the London Improv scene, at a certain point he inaugurated a long time collaboration with pianist Cecil Taylor and bassist William Parker in the famous Feel Trio. I had the opportunity to see them play live in Italy and the music was outstanding: every musician was playing indipendently from the other twos, but listening to the three as a whole was an enormous experience. They were in fact matching exactly together.

Skimming through his vast discography one can only admire the varius contexts, from due to large orchestra, in which Oxley played with some of the most important avant-gardists of his own time. Strangely underappreciated by the critics who come to jazz from other musical worlds – strangely because Oxley rarely was ‘swinging’ so his approach to drums full of middle- or micro- rhythms would seem appealing to them at least theorically – he was a musician’s musician, but he was also very appreciated by the audience.

Difficult as it was to be an avant garde improviser in Europe since the 1960s – no easy melodies nor easy rhythms to approach, and the will to get rid of anxiety with only a sincere will to be yourself while playing – Tony Oxley always tried to learn new tricks and tips, curious to put himself in difficult and out-of-the-comfort-zone positions in order to understand better the essence of the music he was playing and he was in love with.

 

Andrew Cyrille William Parker Enrico Rava @ Teatro Carcano, Milano, 11/04/2023

On a rainy night I finally encountered some of my heroes from my youth, drummer Andrew Cyrille and bassist William Parker, accompained by trumpet player Enrico Rava in an interesting concert in a full occupied theatre in my city of birth. Not their first effort together, since the three released a record in 2022 titled Too Blues for Cecil (Tum Records), an hommage to pianist Cecil Taylor with whom under different circumstances the three played together and played together in different occasions.

Andrew Cyrille, in effect, was one of the first drummers to appear near the NY born pianist in two beautiful records by Blue Note label who sanctioned the maturity for Taylor: Unit Structures and Conquistador (both released in 1966). William Parker was part of the Cecil Taylor Feel Trio along with drummer Tony Oxley – I had the opportunity to listen to that trio: everyone was playing his own thing almost separately from the other twos, but it all worked so fine together.

As far as Rava, finally, in 2022 was distributed through bandcamp a recording from 1984 originally recorded in Warsaw by an ensemble comprising the Italian trumpet player and Taylor – and William Parker – commanding one of his large ensembles he was famous for. But this is not the only occasion the two played together: it’s only a good advice for you in order to find out incredibly interesting music from the past.

A magnificent concert the one I attended yesterday night, with a couple of Monk themes – Round About Midnight and Straight No Chaser – put one in the middle, the other almost at the end of the exhibition, echoing not only the pianist from Rocky Mount but also the phantom of Miles Davis who recorded those themes, and the rest as pure improvisation. Rava in a Miles mode with short sentences to which drummer and bassist responded with their instrument.

Not a telepathic interplay as the one offered by Mingus – the only bassist I can compare Parker, not by the techniques they use but as far as feeling even if their personalities are far from each other – bands, particularly drummer Dannie Richmond, but an intriguing way to underline every phrase from one musician to another. At a certain point Rava made a gesture with his hand indicating a circle to Cyrille, if this recalls something in your mind.

Cyrille is able to create complex polyrhithms, but in this occasion he also gave a lession in swinging to younger drummers. Parker didn’t use that much his famous bow on his bass, only in few point to underline the music in some passages. One might wonder where the spiritual charisma from groups as In Order To Survive is finished – but the theme from Criminals at the White House was beckoned yesterday night at a certain point – but I believe it has been transformed into a new kindness.

Dense up to a certain point, but gentle as Cyrille’s brushes on the skin of the drums, varied as you can exspect from seasoned musicians, full of nuances and not only of thick textures, the music did not pay hommage to the letter to the music of Cecil Taylor but was nonetheless a sum of the experiences of the three musicians involved, and so an indirect hommage to the late great pianist.

If I have to find a defect to what I heard, this resides not in the music but in times. William Parker would subscribe the phrase by Coltrane “I want to be a force for the good”, but with wars all around the world these three musicians who were ‘only’ playing music were seeming to me so small in comparison to what they have around in terms of conflicts and climate change, as an example. But I believe if I had in mind more than the music itself, this has to be credited to them, since music yesterday night was still, as it has to be, more than just a sum of sounds. 

 

Tristan Honsinger has died

Sadly passed away on August 5, 2023, Tristan Honsinger was a hidden gem in the vast ocean of free improvisation. Known mostly for his work with pianist Cecil Taylor and guitarist Derek Bailey, but an accomplished musician on his own, Honsinger during his career collaborated also with post punk bands such as The Pop Group and The Ex. This remarkable folding of collaborations can give you also an idea of his style, that span from nervous glissandos to melodic quotes traken from Albert Ayler or classical music.

Born in 1949 in Burlingon, Vermont, Honsinger had music lessions at a very early age, so he gave concerts on a weekly basis with other members of his family since when he was 12. After he studied classical cello first in Boston then in Montréal, where he became conscious and interested in free improvisation. In 1974 Honsinger moved to Europe, particularly in Amsterdam where he became a pivotal figure of Netherlands improvised scene.

A musician that, according to the Dutch ‘Volkskrant’ journalist Erik Van de Berg “hasn’t lost his childhood fantasy entirely”, Tristan Honsinger can be taken as a representative figure for what European Improv scene is: for such musicians in fact ‘playing’ means not only expressing yourself through music, but also to take risks. While many would cite irony as a main topic for such improvisors, more than that their attitude is that of a child curious about what sound he can obtain from his instrument.

Spanning through his discography, a must have are his records with pianist Cecil Taylor, but there are also interesting collabortions with conductor Butch Morris, records for solo cello and duos with Derek Bailey and saxophonist Sean Bergin. The more adventurous listeners can try and find a copy, as a mere example, of his record with Steve Beresford, David Toop and Toshinori Kondo for Double Indemnity issued in 2001.  

 

 

Peter Brotzmann, Cecil Taylor, Roscoe Mitchell: The Last Masterpieces?

A couple of years have passed since I grabbed my copies of three records I wanna review even if some other years are passed after their release. The point is that these albums have marked the passing of time and maybe they have put the word ‘End’ to the possible evolution of a musical genre like jazz. A jazz contaminated with both contemporary music and tradition, but it’s not by chance that this backlash comes from three aged musicians – one, Taylor, died four years ago.

In fact, I can’t hear novelties in the world of free and contemporary jazz, even if there IS interesting stuff – search in this blog for any – from younger musicians, but they are quite often incomplete. Some are missing the developing of a personal language, some are missing the developing of a structure that can sustain their personal language, some lack vision. So, since these three discs have collected enthousiastic reviews, I wonder if by chance they are the last word on a world of sound, on a vision, on a musical practice.

Let’s start with Cecil Taylor’s At Angelica 2000 Bologna. I’ve written extensively about Taylor’s music through this post so I ain’t gonna repeat myself. Taylor was the most important pianist to mix contemporary music and jazz music, and still is nowadays. Every contemporary pianist, from Andrew Hill to Matthew Shipp, owes him something, even indirectly. Angelica, instead, is an important and renowned festival that takes place in Italy since 1990 and that hosts the most interesting music in the fields of contemporary jazz, contemporary music, experimental music.

I remember when I had the opportunity to listen to the precious music by Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury and Wadada Leo Smith in 2011 on May 8, on various combinations. Angelica not only gives us the opportunity to hear such music, but also releases on CD and vinyl some of the most intriguing performances. In 2020, the I Dischi di Angelica label released an intriguing double album by Cecil Taylor. The first disk features the solo performance held at Angelica 2000 by the maestro, while the second features a one hour long interview with Taylor.

The music in this album is Cecil Taylor at his best. Not only you can hear the melodic and the strumming phrases he is well known for, but also the structure of the music – do you remember when Taylor talks about Calatrava bridges? – is quite audible and comprehensible. Obviously one pays the price for Taylor fire, for his poetry, for his mastery in mixing hints of stride piano and contemporary structures, but this is in my opinion, after hearing many of his records and having seeing him also live with his Feel Trio (with Tony Oxley on drums and William Parker on bass), his best performance ever, his spiritual and musical will.

To accomplish this mission there’s also a beautiful libretto with the text of the interview, for those of you who don’t understand english as native language and can have difficulties in listening to an american man talking. The second album for this collective review is another solo, Peter Brotzmann’s I Surrender Dear. Apparently less iconoclastic, noisey and harsh than his usual outputs, this solo album released by Troast Records in 2019 with a beautiful cover by Brotmann himself with crayon on cardboard is like an intimate confession.

I still remember a concert I attended in Oslo in 2011 where he played with pianist Masaiko Satoh but leaving us with a beautiful coda of solo tenor with all our tears spread along the road of our listening experience. This album is different because in a way we can hear, as someone wrote in another review, Brotzmann in an intimate situation, playing standards of jazz but giving them new shape and blood, on the other hand this operation will push us to ask ourselves what is an intimate act – this is, in fact, the Fluxus side of Brotzmann.

In fact we all are accustomed to listen to solo standards as something personal – paradoxically: as far as it seems, in jazz you are yourself the most when you play other people’s music, and the oldest as possible: it is a true topic or it is a convention? – and this is what Brotmann tries to do, but transcending the pieces of music in a personal way, even if renouncing to his usual confrontational approach. Surprising as it can be, a similar attitude will leave the listener with many questions more than with the pleasure of a ‘beautiful’ sonic experience. And this is Brotzmann at his best, conceptually and practically.

And now for the third album, another double: Roscoe Mitchell’s Bells For The South Side, released by ECM in 2017. The oldest of this trio of albums, is also possibly the most fascinating. I still remember when I was reading in my own language the books by philosopher Davide Sparti, who was applying Foucault theories to jazz music. According to him, jazz music is the music of musicians who know where they start but don’t know where they will arrive to, and who they will be at the end of the performance.

But in listening to this trio performances of compositions by Mitchell, who sometimes acts as a musicians and sometimes lead the trios, you don’t hear such trasmutation, but something new: like a Zen quality of being, immutable and eternal, like the definitive expression of a pure soul. Described by some critics as the best compositions of music after Beethoven’s last quartets – I ain’t joking, the review is available through the internet although written in Italian – Mitchell’s pieces of music represented here were mysterious to me at a first listening, but they have this quality of reproducing sound cells and expressions in a way that really remind me the Zen meditation process.

This way, Mitchell pushes jazz faraway over its boundaries. From a research for a new identity to the affirmation of pure being. Pianos, trumpets, reeds, electric guitars, percussions, drums, noise, all is worth to create a realm of sound that give the listener the sensation of being absorbed in something that is out of time or fully in time, for what is worth. We will not hear easily music of such beauty as the one contained in these three records. So I really believe they are a milestone in contemporary jazz and it’s time for youngest musicians to get over it but starting from it. Unluckily it’s not time for enthousiasm in the realm of music, I can hear more struggle to tell the truth ... 

 

 

Vasco Trilla "Unmoved Mover" (Fundacja Sluchaj. 2021)

There is people who made the history of improvised music and who is well exposed in the temple of criticism or in the pantheon of the mind of music lovers, then there are musicians who gave their entire life to find out new paths in articulating a personal language, and then again there are creative guys who want only to risk and give new lymph to a ‘tradition’, that of the avant-garde, and that therefore are taken by many people as redundant, while in fact they’re essential as the other cats.

Read what Andrea Centazzo said about Vasco Trilla, the musician we want to explore in this post: “Being one of the first solo percussion improvisers in the ‘70s, I paid special attention to Vasco work. This fresh music is a blossoming of ideas and sounds. Vasco is a minimalist in percussion, each sound is accurately chosen and explored to an extreme end. A world of larger horizons and open skies where the percussion trigger the most inner intense feeling in the listener”.

Born in Barcellona, Vasco Trilla started playing drums at the age of 19. Initially into progressive rock and metal, he developed an interest for improvised music, but this is really cutting short and I want to give you more cues on Trilla’s work. After all, knowing about one artist life and tastes can help in enjoying better his own art. So, the first thing I want you to be aware is that Trilla studied art history and was passionate about Polish and Russian cinema and music.

So he studied at university the movies of Wojciech Jerzy Haas, Andrzej Waida, Andrzej Munch, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, and Krzysztof Kieslowski while he listened to the music of Lutoslawski and Penderecki. On the other hand he was into the experimental metal scene of that country, with bands like Decapitated and Kriegsmachine. It is quite common for the younger generation of experimental musicians to be able to skim through such different sources of inspiration, and it’s good because you can develop your own voice made of fragments of different previous identities without belonging to anyone of those.

Between the many collaborations of Trilla you can find the names of Andrea Centazzo, Jamaladeen Tacuma, Cecil Taylor, Peter Evans, Marshall Allen, Lotte Anker, Wilbert de Joode, Mette Rasmussen, Ilia Belorukov, Axel Dorner, and this is only a small part. His last solo album is titled “Unmoved Mover” and it is issued by the label Fundacja Sluchaj. The seven minutes title track opens with small cymbals and noise interruptions here and there, but the intent of the music is to create into the listener a space where he can be aware of everything that happens as an event, as you can listen through some of the old and recent AEOC records.

Gongs and drumsticks rubbed against the cymbals give substance to the atmosphere with bold but delicate statements. Then a huge amount of small bells appear, giving the music some solemnity and the sacred tone it deserves. An openly percussive texture so to give the listener the feeling of a path through sound is experimented in Hylomorphism. Ousia is dominated by a more preeminent cymbals sound, and natural echo effects, while Living Bodies is constructed on a dialogue between thicker and denser sounds, before an explosion of little bells.

Nous – how many of you care about gnosticism or Philip K. Dick novels? – is more dominated by dynamics of sound and silence, leaving you with this presence of a vast unexplored space in your mind, where different volumes and densities of textures are also present building a fascinating climax, and if Hylozoism can seem only a subtle pause made of other bells chiming, Celestial Spheres is like listening to thunders and the natural elements in a primeval brew, interspersed with the sound of the bells.

We can get this way to the end of Causeless Cause, almost seven minutes of summary of Trilla’s art as a scultpor of sound through bells, a set of chimes activated in different moments, as if each one of them is giving life to the following. And while this album is becoming one of my favourite releases of the year, discovering my gentle side and knowing something more about myself, I can only recommend you to give Vasco Trilla the chance to become one of your favourite young players. 

 

Being a part of the whole (when I play it, I mean it): Bill Dixon [pt. 4]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Cover of 'Bill DIxon 1982', Ferrary Gallery, 1982

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 Antioch College 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.

Related discography:

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

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

November 1981 (Black Saint, 1981)

Bill Dixon 1982 (Ferrari Gallery, 1982)

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)

Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley (Victo, 2002)

[Part one, two and three. Fifth part coming soon]

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

Cecil Taylor: inner creation

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor

“The eye looks, mind deciphers, hands attack, ear informs”. This is one of the methodological indications the New York City-born pianist Cecil Taylor gave the listeners through the liner notes to his 1966 milestone “Unit Structures”. Since his first 1956 recordings with his own band, and next year appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival, the pianist stands up in his own right as one of the pivotal figures of last century contemporary music.

“I immediately felt that I would be able to figure out my own universe from his propositions: they were really brilliant; his way to develop monumental improvisations from little melodic cells was gifted with so much structural strength […] I sincerely think that Cecil Taylor is one of the great geniuses of our times as the creator of a real synthesis, as Anthony Braxton, between jazz and Western tradition” [Marilyn Crispell interviewed by Stéphane Ollivier, Jazz Magazine, Dec. 2009]

Born in 1929 and active in R&B and swing bands before giving life to his first quartet featuring soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Denis Charles, whose concerts at the Five Spot Café in 1957 have been taken as Ornette Coleman’s two years later as the beginning of the ‘free jazz’ movement, in 1964 Cecil Taylor also created with his alter ego trumpeter Bill Dixon the Jazz Composers Guild.

Andrew Cyrille

“Playing with Taylor I began to be liberated from thinking about chords. I'd been imitating John Coltrane unsuccessfully and because of that I was really chord conscious.” [Archie Shepp, from the liner notes of 1964 Impulse! Record “Four for Trane”]. If one listens to the ‘Involution/Evolution’ movement of Alms/Tiegarten (Spree) recorded with a large ensemble in Berlin, more than a relationship with Iannis Xenakis music can be found. Not by chance, since Taylor’s way to relate music to architecture is something he has in common with the Greek born composer.

In 1961 Impulse! Records issued Gil Evans’ Into the Hot, a record split between the two pianists bands and visions. For the first time, Taylor left off traditional notation and started to develop his own modus operandi. With a band featuring Archie Shepp and Jimmy Lyons on reeds, Ted Curson on trumpet, Roswell Rudd on trombone, Henry Grimes on bass and Sonny Murray on drums, on rehearsals Taylor was repeating the lines for the musicians, so to prevent “western notation blocks total absorption in the ‘action’ playing”. [from Unit Structures liner notes]

In the few years following ‘Pots’ and the other compositions for the album, Taylor developed the rhythmic aspect of the music thanks to drummers as Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille. Conscious of the developments in Cage’s piano music, Taylor imagined another way to step away from ‘classical’ culture. As in A.B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business: “[talking about David Tudor, Cage’s main collaborator on piano] He's so detached he ain't even there. Like, he would never get emotionally involved in it; […] it's a mental exercise in which the body is there as an attribute to complement that exercise. The body is in no way supposed to get involved in it.”

John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley

Cecil Taylor developed a music based on physical experience of playing, whose basis are “regular and irregular” rhythms. Rejecting the “transformed symbols thru conductor” of the Western modern and contemporary music practice, Taylor practiced both the reintegration of  “all body’s limbs” and the “ultimate communion” between human beings. Also a dancer, Taylor was conscious that from the limbs all body movements emanate; "At the controlled body center, motors become knowledge at once felt, memory which has identified sensory images resulting social response." It’s the same idea underlining Indian classical music and its philosophical premises, Shivaism, as many other non-Western cultures and music practices.

Unit Structures, first Cecil Taylor Lp for Blue Note, recorded in 1966 at Rudy Van Gelder studios in New Jersey, and his first fully accomplished work, saw the application of his creator’s “form is possibility” program as rhythms, pitches, shapes and contents “arises through the individual experiences of the performers, their personal history as contained in memory.” [Matthew Goodheart, Freedom and Individuality in the music of Cecil Taylor]

Cecil Taylor Unit is at that point in time composed by trumpeter Eddie Gale Stevens, Jr., altoist Jimmy Lyons and multireedist Ken Mc Intyre, bassists Henry Grimes and Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. The following Lp Conquistador! was recorded in October the same year always at Van Gelder’s studios and issued by Blue Note; here Jimmy Lyons’ alto sax is finally placed side by side with Bill Dixon’s trumpet on a record. Actually collaborating with the pianist since 1951, and involved during his career in projects involving many of Taylor closest partners such as Archie Shepp, drummer Tony Oxley and bassist William Parker, in 1966 Dixon was also issuing for RCA Victor his first accomplished masterpiece Intents And Purposes, starting the recording sessions four days later Conquistadors!’s .

Bill Dixon in Italy, 1980

His wide intervals, not implying a specific key or mode while relying on timbre and tone-colors – Dixon was also a painter, as many album covers can directly testify – were the perfect counter altar for Taylor’s dense cluster, percussive figures. And while the two basses (Silva’s bowed lines, Grimes lower registers) generate contrasting parts instead of dictating a pulse whose sense is suggested through contractions more than using a ‘rhythm section’, Andrew Cyrille’s textures and Jimmy Lyons rooted in bop melodic phrases are completion for a music that through the following decades is still at his creative peak.

This is highly exemplified by a series of astounding, beautiful records that, since the 1970s, Taylor released for labels such as Arista/Freedom and New World in the US, Black Saint in Italy and FMP in Germany. While attaining a wider popularity through the praise of the critics, a concert for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, and then a Guggenheim and a McArthur fellowships through 1973 to 1974, the albums Cecil Taylor issued in this period are highly explicative of his musical practice.

Some notable releases are 3 Phasis (New World, 1979), featuring again Jimmy Lyons, Raphé Malik on trumpet, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Sirone on bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, the two-Lp set Historic Concerts recorded at the Columbia University in 1979 with Max Roach and released in 1984 by Black Saint, Alms/Tiegarten (Spree) recorded in Berlin in 1988 and released on FMP featuring the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra – Enrico Rava on trumpet, Hannes Bauer and Walter Wierbos on trombones, Louis Sclavis and Peter Brotzmann on reeds, Tristan Honsiger on cello, Peter Kowald and William Parker on bass and Han Bennink on drums amongst the others – while the solo practice is widely witnessed through records as Silent Tongues (Arista/Freedom, 1974), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival and exemplifying perfectly Taylor’s percussive approach to piano, once described as a Santeria’s altar, and 1987 For Olim on Black Saint, that is one of his most lyrical statements.

William Parker

While containing a dedication to Julian Beck, For Olim – Olim being an Aztec hieroglyph meaning movement, motion, earthquake – as 2004 Algonquin, issued by Bridge and featuring Mat Maneri on viola, suggests a direct connection with ancient cultures and rituals. Joseph L. Enderson, follower of C.G. Jung and author of one chapter of his mentor’s The Man and His Symbols, talks of the Algonquin archetype of Red Horn, a semi-divine character usually associated with a thunder bird as the main figure of some rites at the end of which the beginner was becoming a fully responsible human being. Archetypes are predictable patterns of inner conditioning that lead to essential changes and shows between individual development and the ancient initiation rites.

In the 1990s, Taylor activity sees the preponderance of the Feel Trio with long time associated bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley, beautifully documented in the 2 T’s for a lovely T 12 Cd FMP box set, without dismissing his larger ensembles and solo performances. Matthew Goodheart issued a beautiful essay on how the music of Cecil Taylor is going to develop through rehearsals. But it is also possible to listen directly to Taylor’s own words on documentaries such as 1981 Imaging the Sound, directed by Ron Mann and digitally restored in 2007, or Chris Felver All the Notes, released on DVD in 2006.

“I was young when I met Cecil Taylor: 24 years! […] For me, he was an intellectual as much important as James Baldwin. He opened my eyes on the meaning of black music: our music was something more than dance, vaudeville music, our music had a history, it was coming out of slavery, from struggle.” [Archie Shepp with Samuel Thiebaut]

Bibliography

Nat Hentoff Jazz Is, New York: Random House, 1976

Amiri Imamu Baraka Black Music, New York: Apollo, 1968

Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz, Vienna: Universal Edition, 1974

A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, New York: Pantheon, 1966

Valerie Wilmer, Jazz People, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1970
Sessionography