Bill Dixon @ 99

Still misunderstood, still underappreciated

Bill Dixon, not mad, just disappointed

Before we begin: An excerpt from my book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor was recently published in DownBeat, and it’s now on the magazine’s website. It deals with the final years of his life, and offers some information I think I was the first person to report, so go check that out. (The book is available now from Amazon and direct from the publisher.)

Also: I reviewed three very interesting and excellent compilations for the Shfl this month…

• James Brown’s Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang, which documents the 1969-71 lineup of the JB’s with Bootsy and Catfish Collins;

• Miles Davis’s Greatest Hits, a fascinating 1969 curio apparently meant to introduce fans of his electric music to what had come before; and

• Gang Of Four’s A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century, the best possible introduction to the post-punk legends’ work

A fitting tribute: Vinnie Sperrazza wrote an excellent piece on trumpeter John McNeil, who died recently. They were in a band together, Hush Point, that made three really good albums in the 2010s. (Vinnie only plays on the first one.) I interviewed McNeil by email when the second album came out, almost exactly 10 years ago; you can read that here.

Also worth reading: Michael Elliott wrote about one of my favorite 1950s R&B acts, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters. I first heard their music in the 1987 movie River’s Edge, and a few years later picked up a CD compilation, Let ’Em Roll. Ballard had a fantastic voice, and was great at coming up with almost-too-dirty-for-radio songs like their massive hit “Work With Me, Annie” and one of my favorites, “Open Up the Back Door”.

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Last week was the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution in Jazz, a four-day event encompassing performances and panel discussions, all held at the Cellar Café on West 91st Street in Manhattan. The whole thing was organized by trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon, who also happened to turn 39 that week, having been born October 5, 1925.

Dixon’s own discography, at the time, was limited to one album with a quartet co-led with saxophonist Archie Shepp and one side of a split LP on which he led a septet. The other side was given over to music by the New York Contemporary Five, a group co-led by Shepp and fellow saxophonist John Tchicai. But he always seemed as interested in supporting other artists as promoting his own work; he had previously founded the United Nations Jazz Society while working there, presenting live performances and discussions of albums.

Between 1964 and 1966, Dixon attempted to form an artists’ collective, the Jazz Composers Guild, with Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp and others. They wanted to bargain with club owners and record labels collectively, in order to be better paid for their work. The effort fell apart, though, for a variety of reasons, some of which I explore in my book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor.

I now suspect that the Guild’s failure caused some bitterness in Dixon, because before long, he abandoned the commercial music scene almost entirely, and for decades was ready seemingly at a moment’s notice to throw darts at jazz critics and popular music and even the idea of “entertainment”.

In 1966, Dixon played on Taylor’s second Blue Note album, Conquistador!, and in 1967 he released his own full-length debut as a leader, Intents and Purposes, which featured a ten-member ensemble on one track (“Metamorphosis 1962-1966”), a quintet on another (“Voices”), and was rounded out by two trumpet-flute duets. The music was rigorously scored and arranged; the two long tracks are multi-part suites, and the players utilized avant-garde compositional and performance techniques, but this was not “free jazz” in any sense. The album, which was out of print for decades, can now be found on streaming services, and it has an extraordinary, stunning beauty.

In 1968 and 1969, Dixon produced several albums (by Marzette Watts, Marc Levin, Robert Pozar, and Ed Curran) for the Savoy label, but recorded no further music of his own. And in 1968, he took a position teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where he remained until 1995. In his own words, he was “in total isolation from the market places of this music.”

That was quite deliberate. When I interviewed Dixon in 2008 for The Wire, he told me, “[Education] was a sanctuary [in the sense that] well, at least you didn’t have to drive a cab. You didn’t have to do this or that. You knew every day what your life was going to be. You knew that when you finished your courses, what you could do. You could practice.”

Dixon was a devoted educator; he said, “Unlike a lot of people… I stopped everything else from outside and I never — I think during the entire time I was teaching, there may have been four things that were of such significance to me that I took time out from the term to do it. Other than that, I had winters and summers free. That’s when I did my work.”

He added, “So the thing that was interesting, though, was when I got into teaching, the climate in the late ’60s was very exciting. It was an exciting time and people were excited about what they did and what they didn’t want to do. Everyone was shooting from the hip, hitting themselves in their own feet and stuff like that. So you could guide them. And I had only one rule. I didn’t care who you were and what you wanted to do; as long as you wanted to do what the class did, you were welcome in my classes… You’d have a student come up to you, like a student came up to me when I was teaching up at the University of Wisconsin and said, ‘Listen, I don’t know anything about music. I don’t want to know anything about music. I just want to play free.’ Just outrageous behavior. But I understood what they were talking about. They were talking about, how do you — in their own uninformed way they wanted to know, how do you go directly to what you want to do without all of the filigree that sometimes, when you are taking care of that, takes you away from what you originally wanted to do. Once you understood that, and you were willing to put in the homework in terms of the techniques, devices, whatever it was, to make certain that whatever you were teaching, before that student left the room, he understood, so that the next time you didn’t have to revisit that, you were on your way.”

Eventually, some of the music he made while teaching emerged. In 2001, he released Odyssey, a six-CD box of solo music mostly recorded between 1970 and 1976. I wrote about Odyssey in 2021, on its 20th anniversary, saying in part:

In the 1970s, in isolation, Dixon began working extensively with electronics, specifically reverb and echo pedals. His work was, it must be said, entirely different than what Miles Davis was doing with the wah-wah pedal during this same era. Dixon’s playing style was extremely aggressive, more so than almost any trumpet player of that era. He worked in the trumpet’s lower registers often, creating loose, heavy-breathing streams of rumbling, groaning notes. But he also erupted in extraordinarily fast, upper-register outbursts that shrieked and gabbled like entire flocks of birds, the echo and reverb giving the sound a cloudy, disorienting feel, even/especially when, as on “The Long Walk,” the stereo field was split so he was able to move from the left to the right speaker, and create ringing feedback in between.

Some of the tracks, particularly on the first disc, are very short (“Mosaic,” “Shrike” and “Albert Ayler” are less than a minute long each), but others are more conventional in length, between three and nine minutes, and the third disc opens with “Jerusalem,” which differs from everything else in the box in three ways. It’s a live recording, not a studio effort; it was recorded in the titular city, not in Vermont like all but two of the other pieces; and it runs nearly 27 minutes. It’s an absolute storm of sound, performed with two microphones, one of which is “clean” and the other of which is hooked up to reverb and delay effects. The result is a kind of dialogue between Dixon and a warped, phantom version of himself, playing his lines back in distorted form.

The three-part “I See Your Fancy Footwork” is a different kind of dialogue: one between Dixon and his young son. In the first section, the boy interrupts the father’s music, entering the room in search of blue colored pencils. In the second, the boy begins singing in response to what his father is playing, and Dixon blows long droning notes to accompany his scatting and shouting. Toward the end of the piece, the son asks if he can get his own trumpet and play the things he knows. Dixon says no, but affectionately; “You’ve played too much today. You have to save your chops, you know.” The third section is the shortest, but also the noisiest and most violent, and while Dixon’s son is heard briefly singing along, eventually he’s drowned out by the massive squalling eruptions of horn and echo pedal.

In the 1980s, Dixon began recording for the Italian Soul Note label. The albums he released — In Italy, Volume 1 and Volume 2; November 1981; Thoughts; Son of Sisyphus; Vade Mecum and Vade Mecum II; and Papyrus Volume I and Volume II — are the work of an artist who has developed and refined a completely unique voice. His phrasing on the horn is like a predatory bird, circling slowly then diving suddenly, and he surrounds himself with instruments that allow him to float; he’s particularly drawn to the bass, featuring as many as three bassists on some recordings and adding tuba on others. The pieces have a patient but ominous quality, unfolding almost without any consideration of time and yet pulsing with life.

Dixon’s final recordings, 2008’s 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, 2009’s Tapestries for Small Orchestra, and 2010’s Envoi, were works for larger ensembles, as was 2008’s Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, a live collaboration with Rob Mazurek’s group. (Mazurek played on Tapestries and Envoi.) Envoi was a live performance from the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada on May 22, 2010, but Dixon was too ill to play his parts live, so recordings were used. On June 16, he died in his sleep at home in Vermont.

In the years since his death, former collaborators like Rob Mazurek and Stephen Haynes have done a lot to keep Dixon’s name and work alive. The majority of his records are on streaming services (though Odyssey is not), and some remain available on CD. Abstract, experimental music is often labeled dry or academic by people who don’t understand what the artists who make it are trying to accomplish. That doesn’t make those listeners dumb, nor does it mean that such music is automatically good. But Bill Dixon’s music, while it may not offer repeated, hooky melodies or a steady beat, is as far from dry abstraction as possible. It roars with life, and if you give yourself over to it — just listening to it, living in the moment and letting it inspire whatever emotions in you it’s gonna — you may well come away amazed.

That’s it for now. See you next week!