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.

 

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. 2]

Words: Gian Paolo Galasi

Intents and Purposes was issued in 1967 on Rca Victor, headed to 'The Bill Dixon Orchestra' and  featuring Dixon on trumpet and fuegelhorn, Jimmy Cheatham on bass trombone, Robin Kenyatta on alto and Byard Lancaster on alto and bass clarinet, George Marge on English horn, Catherine Norris on cello, Jimmy Garrison and Reggie Workman on bass, Robert Frank Pozar on drums, Marc Levin on percussions and George Marge on flute. A true masterpiece of the era, it was critically acclaimed but soon out of print, with the exception of a couple of new appearances in Japan in 1972, and in France in 1976. Described by its creator as ‘my first crack at a fuller artistic expression’, while explaining that ‘the four compositions are philosophically and intrinsically linked’, I can only imagine a listener of that time grasping around in search for some references, if dealing only with the music closely related to the jazz environment. 


Taken as the 'missing link' between the New York and the Chicago avant garde, this record can be also considered as a precursor of the developments of the European free improvisation. Marc Levin percussions arent' that much different here from Tony Oxley's - in more recent times heavily involved in the music of Bill Dixon and Cecil Talyor, but between 1963 and 1966 part of the seminal English Joseph Holbrooke Trio with bassist and composer Gavin Bryars and Derek Bailey on guitar, in which influences from contemporary composers and innovations coming out of the jazz continuum were taken a step further. 

Robin Kenyatta

For last year CD reissue on Dynagroove, Francis Davis wrote on the Village Voice (July 12, 2011): “The mercurial, essentially romantic temperament revealed throughout Intents and Purposes begs comparison with Charles Mingus: Robin Kenyatta's deliriously sour dance-band-alto lead earlier on "Metamorphosis" calls to mind Mingus instructing Charlie Mariano to "play tears" on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, […] But unlike Mingus's romantic sensibility, '67 Dixon's expressed itself in abstraction; the emotional payoff is as great, but it requires a greater investment, because even as the dynamics swell and the tempo quickens, the underlying passions never quite bubble to the surface. 

[…] Dixon's approach to orchestration and thematic development bears closer resemblance to those of 20th century European avant-gardists like Webern and Gian Carlos Menotti, the composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors, forgotten now but a pervasive influence then). […] A more answerable question raised by Intents and Purposes regards Dixon's place not just in the jazz continuum but in the overall evolution of contemporary music.” 

           

The richness of the brass sound newly explored by ‘third stream’ colleagues in a period in which Cecil Taylor was splitting up an lp with composer Gil Evans, compositional tools borrowed by music for films as US Informations Agency Wealth of a Nation! and Gene Friedman’s Index 1966, composed by Dixon himself on request, almost complete the palette, while the music is the result of the team up with Judith Dunn, regular Merce Cunningham dancer at the Bennington College, that later on worked intensively also with avant garde singer Meredith Monk, at the time responsible for a class she and Dixon taught jointly at the Bennington College, after their artistic partnership at the Judson Dance Theatre in 1965.

Robert Morris and Judith Dunn, 1967

Since the previous decade, New York was nurturing bebop, free jazz and free improvisation, indeterminacy, the contemporary New York School, the Beat poets of the Greenwich Village, Expressionists as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Larry Rivers – the latter introducing saxophone improvisation as part of his work. Nonetheless in this period recollections, as in performance historian Sally Banes’ Greenwich Village 1963: Avant Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Duke University Press, 1993), jazz musicians in New York never appear as directly involved in aesthetic or political discussions.

As there was no exchange within white and black artists during the Bebop era, even if digging bebop was a sign of leftist radicalism, when Asian performers as Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Toshi Ichiyanagi lead a central role in the environment, works by European composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sylvano Bussotti, Giuseppe Chiari were regularly performed along with American artists' as John Cage, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, Max Neuhaus, and Robert Ashley, but African Americans kept on remaining at the border of the establishment, even if Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor were influencing artists all around the world.

At the beginning of the 1960s, this asymmetry between white and black artists and intellectuals led to a rift. Leroi Jones – one of the few African Americans accepted by the white intellighentsia – found himself relatively isolated after his trip to Cuba in 1959 to meet artists from the African Diaspora. Even if NY white avant garde of the 1960s never avoided completely any relationship with black issues, with artists involved in the civil right movements, its attitude was mostly individualistic, politically disinterested and even disempowered, while at the same time influenced by Theodor W. Adorno’s notion of the heroic function of new music as oppositional to mass culture, resulting as bipolar in its practice.

Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach in NY, circa 1965

As Sally Banes wrote, “white artists adopted, perhaps not always consciously, elements of African American art and performance. These included improvisation and the fusion of the arts usually considered separate in the Euro-American tradition”. And “the African American tradition of musical improvisation was translated into theater, dance, and other artistic practices of the white avant garde”.

On the African American side, what George E. Lewis explores in the second chapter of his A Power Stronger Than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago University Press, 2008), there were the “wide-ranging challenges to the conventions of improvisation that appeared at the onset of the 1960s […] rather than a single notion of ‘freedom’, various freedoms were being asserted across a wide spectrum of musical possibilities”. Following the list of musicians quoted by Lewis to set out his notion of ‘various freedoms’, Charles Mingus and his regular Candid partners, Miles Davis and his second quintet, Coltrane’s disciples and Taylor and Ayler band members, and finally Archie Shepp and John Tchicai New York Art Quartet, giving life to a dialogue with LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka on his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” are listed as part of the whole scene.

Bill Dixon personal notion of freedom involved painting, music and dance. Choreographer Elaine Shipman recollections are particularly interesting since one can at first sight notice a deep connection with the work of Dixon's fellow Cecil Taylor – a passionate follower of dance too. As she refers: “he [Bill Dixon] didn’t seem that unconnected, or that minimal. That was not his philosophy: with his music I always felt that the dance did have some interpretational relationship with the music. […] I definitely expected all of his musical realities; they had the shape of the dance. He collaborated in a rhythmic way with the movement; that is, the music is toned to what the human body can do”. (in Ben Young Dixonia: a bio-discography of Bill Dixon, Greenwood Press, 1998).

Jazz Composers Guild. 1964. NYC
back, from left to right: Bill Dixon, Paul Bley, Michael Mantler, Archie Shepp
center, from left to right: Jon Winter, Sun Ra, Carla Bley, Cecil Taylor
front, from left to right: Burton Greene, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai

Dixon and Taylor response to their environmental situation was way beyond the mere ‘Black, Angry and Hard to Understand’ attitude depicted by Nat Hentoff on a 1966  New York Time feature. In 1964 the two musicians founded the Jazz Composers Guild, after the October Revolution in Jazz four day marathon at the Manhattan’s Cellar Café. Since the previous spring, Dixon was actively involving the Cellar as the headquarter for his own concerts and activities. 

Giuseppi Logan, a student of Bill Dixon rehearsing just few blocks away from the Café, was borrowing his alto lines to some of Dixon’s compositions and dance suites, but the musicians involved were Albert Ayler, trombonist Roswell Rudd, altoist Jimmy Lyons, pianists Carla and Paul Bley, bassist Gary Peacock, trumpeters Don Cherry and Mike Mantler, drummer Billy Higgins, and Sun Ra – at that time well established in the city - leading horns Pat Patrick and Marshall Allen.

After the October concerts, the pianist and the trumpet player gave life to the Jazz Composers Guild. A multiracial coalition featuring the most committed musicians of the New York area, whose purposes, in Dixon’s own words, were “to establish the music to its rightful place in the society; to awake the musical conscience of the masses of people to that music which is essential to their lives; to protect the musicians and composers from the existing forces of exploitation; to provide an opportunity for the audience to hear the music; to provide facilities for the proper creation, rehearsals, performance, and dissemination of the music” (Robert Levin, The Jazz Composers Guild: An Assertion of Dignity, Down Beat, May 6, 1965).

Alan Silva, Muhammad Ali, Frank Wright,
Bobby Few. Photo:Jacques Bisceglia

Previous attempts were Charles Mingus and Max Roach Jazz Artists Guild and their mini Newport Rebel festival in 1960, and Los Angeles Underground Musicians’ Association – UMGA, later ‘Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension’ - as outgrowth of pianist Horace Tapscott’s Pan African People’s Arkestra, formed in 1964 right after the Watts rebellions. While even John Coltrane tried to organize his own independent performance space and booking agency with Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and reedist Yousef Lateef in 1967 in Harlem, a second event was planned by the Jazz Composers Guild in 1964 at the New York Judson Hall in December.

In Alan Silva’s recollections to Dan Warburton: "I got to play with different bands, and I was impressed to see how many jazz musicians were out there playing this new music. I saw the contrast between the Afro-American tradition and a new tradition that I considered Bill to be part of, and I saw improvisation as the key. We wanted to purify music in America. That's always been my goal, and I saw this as a great opportunity. [...] For better or worse, when he set up the Guild, Bill Dixon integrated. [...] I had a major problem with the name though: I didn't like the word "jazz" - I always felt it was a bad word, like "ghetto" - and I didn't like the word "composers" either. [...] Anyway, they ended up accepting the name "Jazz Composers Guild", and I became very actively involved. 

It was a tight group, with tight byelaws created by Bill himself, simply because he believed that way we could act together. We had decided to deal as a group. All your gigs had to come through the Guild. Some people wanted it to be a non-profit organisation, but I wanted to run it as a regular company. We went down to City Hall to register as a business, with a bank account and the right to run it commercially and make records. Bill wanted to sell the entire Guild to a record label for a certain amount of money, but my idea was different: I was into making our own records. My perspective was the same as Sun Ra's with Saturn. We should make our own: why should we go to Riverside, or Prestige?"

The Sun Ra Arkestra

While holding weeky concerts in a loft on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, two floors above the Village Vanguard, the Guild lasted little more than one year, suffering the clash of the personalities involved within such a competitive atmosphere as New York’s, and the racial climate in the United States, finally dissolving when Archie Shepp signed for Impulse!, the label that was issuing John Coltrane records. As Cecil Taylor, quoted in Ekkehard Jost’s Sozialgeschichte des Jazz in den USA (Fischer, 1989): 

“the Guild did not survive because people who were dealing with it did not raise enough social consciousness; they neglected everything that has to do with what a person who lives in New York today, who not only wants to earn his living but also to honestly express himself, experiences in everyday life”. But, as John Coltrane himself said to Frank Kofsky (Black Nationalism and Revolution in Music, Pathfinder Press, 1970), “It was just something that couldn’t be born at that time, but I still think it’s a good idea”. 


Go to third part.

Related discography:

The Bill Dixon Orchestra, Intents and Purposes, Rca Victor 1967

Related bibliography:

Frank Kofsky, Black Nationalism and Revolution in Music, Pathfinder Press, 1970

Ekkehard Jost’s Sozialgeschichte des Jazz in den USA, Fischer, 1989

Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Duke University Press, 1993
Ben Young, Dixonia. A bio-discography of Bill Dixon, Greenwood Press, 1998

George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger Than Itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music, Chicago University Press, 2008

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