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PHOTO: BILL DIXON (1925-2010)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/bill-dixon-mn0000764354/biography
Bill Dixon
(1925-2010)
Biography by Chris Kelsey
One of the seminal free jazz figures, Bill Dixon made his mark as a player, organizer, and educator in a career that spanned more than 50 years. Dixon was a jaggedly lyrical trumpeter -- his delivery was as vocalic as that of any free jazz trumpeter, except perhaps Lester Bowie. As an improviser, he was somewhat similar in temperament to Ornette Coleman, yet his compositional style differed greatly from the altoist. Dixon's work featured open space, wide intervals that did not imply a specific key or mode, and dark backdrops owing to the use of two or more double bassists. His art was eminently thoughtful even as it was viscerally exciting.
Dixon grew up in New York City. His first studies were in painting. He didn't become a musician until he was discharged from the Army following World War II. He met Cecil Taylor in 1951 and the two began playing together, along with other likeminded young musicians. In the early '60s, he formed a quartet with saxophonist Archie Shepp. The band recorded the self-titled Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet LP for Savoy in 1962 (Dixon was briefly the artistic director in charge of jazz for the label). In 1964, Dixon organized the October Revolution in Jazz, a festival of new music held at the Cellar Cafe in Manhattan. About 40 groups played, including the cream of the era's free jazz crop. Out of this grew the Jazz Composer's Guild, a musician's cooperative founded in 1964 that included Dixon, Shepp, Roswell Rudd, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and Carla Bley, among others. In 1967 he recorded an album of his music for RCA. Also that year, he founded the Free Conservatory of the University of the Streets, a music education program for inner-city youth in New York. Beginning in 1968, Dixon taught at Bennington College in Vermont. He was a visiting faculty member at the University of Wisconsin in 1971-1972, then returned to Bennington, where in 1973 he founded the Black Music Division. At Bennington, Dixon mentored a number of contemporary free jazz musicians, including alto saxophonist Marco Eneidi and drummer Jackson Krall.
Dixon remained at Bennington until his retirement from teaching in 1996. In the years to follow, he conducted workshops and master classes around the world. A collection of his work from 1970 to 1976 was made available by the Cadence label, and from 1980 until the close of the 20th century he recorded and performed, more or less infrequently, for Soul Note. After the turn of the millennium, Dixon turned his attention to the genocide occurring in Sudan's Darfur region with 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, recorded live at New York City’s Vision Festival in June 2007 and released by AUM Fidelity the following year; 2008 also saw the Thrill Jockey label release of Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, featuring Dixon with cornetist Rob Mazurek’s 13-piece Chicago-based experimental ensemble. Ill health subsequently restricted Dixon's performing schedule; however, he did make his last concert appearance (entitled Tapestries for Small Orchestra) on May 22, 2010 at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Victoriaville, Quebec. Less than a month later, on the night of June 15, 2010, Bill Dixon died in his sleep at home in North Bennington, Vermont at the age of 84.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/bill-dixon-excerpts-from-vade-mecum-bill-dixon-by-aaj-staff
Bill Dixon
A mentor to countless musicians, through both his teaching and his role as a producer for Savoy Records, Dixon turned his focus to education in the late 1960’s, serving for nearly 30 years on the faculty at the prestigious Bennington College, where he founded the historic Black Music Division in 1973.
(Originally posted on June 23, 2010):
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
MILFORD GRAVES: DRUMS
AT THE VILLAGE GATE
NYC, MAY 27, 1984
by Kofi Natambu
Luminosity's glare
fierce timbre vowels that
pierce invisible shields our pores
breathing in slivers of light
This compelling lure its open space
hidden creases in the swollen zone of
Sound
Streaking hearts trembling the fading distance that raises thought (THOTH?)from feelings
This bursting time implosion how does it
explode the vertical void that rules the AIR?
O gigantic creeping light seeping thru the earth its howling language a moving source of Color
our minds' most transparent desires
Spiralling tears of motion
a burning spectrum peering across colors' Dominion(s)
seeking blueness in an Ocean of Red
seeking blueness in an Ocean of Red
a slittering rippling sliding invocation: Tonalities hieroglyphic
Melodic holograms Now you FEEL the sound (now you HERE it!)
Blastic splutters rappling contexts
And what about the Night notes crashed thru colossal windows & glowing stones
found a place to rest amidst the huge soothing clatter?
Another pace/race breaks expectations' web
A brilliant shining this rampaging joy that cuts down all the Pain into ectastic children of Memory: the Souls efflorescence
How awful it all is
How AWE FULL!
Flames flickering inside the Glare, luminosity's not-so-sullen-secret as we dance in the wake of bestial surprises
Stutter past sidewalks dissolving in the blazing rain a staggering encounter this
Monstrous Joy that slips a stance
Crooked guffaws split lazy rhythmic questions
its nonreferential power that wants nothing especially its Self
This glance this chance this dance this prance this lance this stance that charges charges that charges charges admission to everyone at once
Inconsequential stirrings in the Heart
A rumbling MOJO expanding the leafy village between our Ears fears melting down like rainfall searing the darkness
This is the energy we call Revelation
This is the Life we call
Free…………………………………………………………………………….
Poem by Kofi Natambu
From: The Melody Never Stops
Past Tents Press, 1991
Biography
Born: October 5, 1925 | Died: June 16, 2010
Bill Dixon has been a driving force in the advancement of contemporary American Black Music for more than 45 years. His pioneering work as a musician and organizer in the early 1960’s helped lay the foundation for today’s creative improvised music scene in New York and beyond. In 1964, he founded the all-star artists collective, the Jazz Composers’ Guild, and produced and organized The October Revolution in Jazz, an unprecedented New York festival that helped put the so-called “new thing” on the cultural map.
A mentor to countless musicians, through both his teaching and his role as a producer for Savoy Records, Dixon turned his focus to education in the late 1960’s, serving for nearly 30 years on the faculty at the prestigious Bennington College, where he founded the historic Black Music Division in 1973.
With the notable exception of Cecil Taylor’s Conquistador (Blue Note), Dixon has recorded almost exclusively as a leader since 1962, most frequently for the Soul Note label in the 1980’s and 90’s. Still a prolific composer at age 82, his work as a composer and improvisor can also be heard on the critically acclaimed February 2008 CD, Bill Dixon with the Exploding Star Orchestra (Thrill Jockey), and in July 2008 he recorded a new collection of original music with an all-star nonet for the Firehouse 12 label.
Press Quotes
17 Musicians in Search of a Sound is pure Dixon, massive in scale and rigorous in execution...this is not a mere concert souvenir, but a significant statement. Dixon’s music is about the process of its becoming; while its expansions into dense, eventful fanfares and contractions into hushed, detailed dialogues may be scripted, the sound of the music is not...as group improvisations go, this one is remarkable for its poise and balance....it’s about great players subsuming their identities into an ensemble.
...Dixon has fashioned a work around which new formal paradigms will need to be constructed. Dixon’s music explodes category: it is neither free nor through-composed, though elements of both approaches are often discernible. I hope this fine addition to his discography, coupled with a renewed interest in his work, will allow more of Dixon’s orchestral compositions to be performed by equally sympathetic interpreters.
...Dixon opens up space and the musicians play it.
...the process of searching for a sound, both as an individual musician, or as a composer, is an ongoing process that leads to the creation of a certain type of music palpably, viscerally distinguishable from music that does not. Bill Dixon is nothing short of a master when it comes to this concept of sound, and at his age and stature is unique in his ability to offer us an incredibly refined vision of this different approach to sound and music.
The 13-part suite creates an ebb-and-flow effect, with the reeds and horns surging by turns amid throbbing drum rolls and calmly snaking solo lines. The work's centerpiece, the 23-minute “Sinopia,” is where Dixon best makes his presence felt as something other than conductor. It leaves room for some intimate dialogues between instrumentalists, but there's no missing the leader's entrance. With puckered blurts, upper-register trills, and rubbery bleats -- most of them enhanced with ghostly delay -- he stalks across the landscape, his utterances punctuating the arrangement like shadow puppets dancing across an illuminated screen. And even when the piece is more geared toward an ensemble sound -- which, to be fair, is most of the time -- Dixon shines brightly with his mastery of texture.
Articles [VIEW ALL]
PLEASE CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINKS:
Artist Profiles
Bill Dixon: In Rehearsal, In Performance
Bill Dixon: The Morality of Improvisation
CD/LP Review
Tapestries for Small Orchestra
17 Musicians in Search Of A Sound: Darfur
17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur
17 Musicians In Search Of A Sound: Darfur
Bill Dixon With Exploding Star Orchestra
Bill Dixon With Exploding Star Orchestra
Berlin Abbozzi
Berlin Abbozzi
Berlin Abbozzi
Papyrus Volume I
Extended Analysis:
Bill Dixon: Tapestries for Small Orchestra
In the Artist's Own Words:
Bill Dixon: Excerpts from Vade Mecum
Interviews:
Bill Dixon: In Medias Res
Megaphone:
Bill Dixon: The Benefits of the Struggle
Total Articles: 16
News [ MORE - POST ]
Remembering Bill Dixon: 1925-2010
Bill and Fred
Bill Dixon Paintings, Lithographs and Drawings Now Featured at...
Trumpeter Bill Dixon Interviewed at AAJ
Bill Dixon:17 Musicians in Search of Sound: Darfur
Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra
Bill Dixon's New Orchestral CD Released Today on AUM Fidelity
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=58430
Trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon died June 16th at his home in North Bennington, Vermont after a two-year illness. He was 84 years old.
Dixon was a revered and idiosyncratic figure in the avant-garde of Jazz music, and a creative force who strived at all times to place the music in ever more respectful circumstances. Dixon developed an often controversial profile as an outspoken and articulate defender of musicians' rights as artists, and specifically the challenges to Black music as a contender in the culture and society of the United States. His music is known for a dark, poignant, pan-tonal abstraction that remains lyrical without relying on songs or the conventions of Jazz music-making. Through five decades as a recording artist, Dixon's music has developed a loyal worldwide following.
As a musical stylist and educator, Dixon was the progenitor of an often reserved composition and playing approach that stood in contradistinction to the trends prevailing in the avant-garde in Jazz since the Sixties. He steered an influential through short-lived collective-bargaining movement in New York in 1964-65, the Jazz composers' Guild. Under Dixon's leadership, the Guild crafted a stance to preserve the artistic self-determination of Guild membership. Though he lived in Vermont for most of the last four decades, playing only occasionally in New York and in the US altogether, Dixon remained a leader and doyen for musicians of successive generations in a diaspora of alumni of his teaching and ensembles.
The legacy of Dixon's progressive organizing activities in the music often overshadow the impact of his own music-making. Dixon emerged as a composer and bandleader in what can fairly be called a second wave of the New York avant-garde. Dixon's legacy of ensemble records (1966, 2007, 2009) frames an unparalleled body of solo music for trumpet (1970-76, mainly) and a subsequent series of small ensemble recordings (1980-1995) that stand apart in texture, instrumentation, personnel, and orientation from most of the numerous records of the period by Dixon's contemporaries.
Born William Robert Dixon on October 5, 1925, he was the son of William L. Dixon and Louise Wade. His family transplanted to Harlem at the height of the depression from Nantucket, Massachusetts where Dixon was born. An early aptitude in realistic drawing led him to advanced studies in commercial art during and after high school, well before music became a serious interest. (He was also acclaimed in a group and solo shows of paintings prior to serious recognition of his music, and he was painting, drawing and creating lithographs to the end of his life). Dixon enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII and served in Germany at the close of European theater.
Bill Dixon's deliberate study of music began at the Hartnett Conservatory of music in the mid-1940s. His journeyman years as a Jazz trumpet player in the 50s involved activity as a sideman in an array of entertainment and rehearsal projects. Daytime employment as an international civil servant at the UN Secretariat, Dixon also turned to musical advantage. He founded the United Nations Jazz Society in 1959. He worked in the same period to establish the coffee houses of Greenwich Village as a formal and legitimate venue for presenting progressive music, an early manifestation of the spirit that fed the formation of the Jazz Composers' Guild.
Bill Dixon will perhaps always be remembered for his organization of a concert series to present the new music, the October Revolution in Jazz of October 1-4, 1964, at the Cellar Cafe on west 91st Street. Though literally digested by only a handful of eyewitnesses, the concert series focused significant critical attention on the undergrowth of otherwise unrecognized creative musicians, many of whom, including Dixon, shortly would show forth as the newest voices of the new music of the Sixties.
Starting in 1966, Dixon entered a fruitful collaborative partnership with the dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn, whose background lay in the Cunningham and Judson schools. The collaboration with Dunn led Dixon to join the faculty at Bennington College where she taught in the Dance department, and Dixon pushed for the creation of the Black Music Division, a phalanx of the school's music teaching that had its own faculty, student body, and orientation. Active officially from 1975 until 1985, the program was a prototype of a kind of college-level music study that has flowered only haphazardly since, basing itself in the aesthetics and praxis of avant-garde music-making.
Dixon is remembered by many of his students as a powerful and charismatic teacher who adroitly factored student musicians at various levels of skill and development into classes and his own ensemble pieces. Within the first few years at Bennington, it became the norm for Dixon to design individual and group exercises artistically meaningful enough to become part of the compositions he developed through a term's work.
Dixon retired from teaching in 1995 and continued to perform and record, chiefly in Europe. His last years saw a dramatic increase in the frequency of his U.S. appearances, and, since 2008, in U.S.-released recordings of his works for ensembles.
Dixon is survived by his longtime partner Sharon Vogel of North Bennington, a daughter Claudia Dixon of Phoenix, Arizona and a son William R. Dixon II of New York City. He also leaves two grandchildren.
A memorial celebration of Bill Dixon's life and work will be held in New York City at a later date.
Ben Young is the author of Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon (Greenwood Press, 1998).
RIP Experimental Jazz Trumpeter Bill Dixon
From his publicist comes the news that Bill Dixon, the experimental jazz trumpeter and composer, died in his sleep last night at his home in North Bennington, Vt. He was 84 years old.
Dixon was a professional musician for over 60 years and one of the most reliable exploratory voices in jazz—a word he hated. His music, in (very) large and small ensembles as well as solo work and collaborations, pushed continually outward, both artistically and politically; Dixon was the organizer of 1964’s infamous festival “The October Revolution in Jazz,” and the founder of the influential early collective the Jazz Composers Guild. He continued to defy convention over nearly three decades as an educator, making his legacy immense.
William Robert Dixon was born on Nantucket Island, Mass., in 1925, and grew up in Harlem. His family was nonmusical, but Dixon fell in love with the trumpet after seeing a Louis Armstrong concert as a child. He bought his first trumpet in high school, then attended the Hartnette Conservatory of Music in Manhattan after serving in the Army during the closing months of World War II. He began his career after graduating from Hartnette in 1951, but also began composing on his own; at the same time, however, he worked a day job at the United Nations, where in 1958 he founded a listening and discussion group for the diplomats, the UN Jazz Society.
Throughout the 1960s Dixon established himself in collaborations with forward thinkers Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and avant-garde dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn. He also gained a reputation as a composer and bandleader in his own right, including a band co-led with Shepp and a large-ensemble recording, 1967’s Intents and Purposes, commonly regarded as his masterpiece.
In 1968 Dixon took a teaching position at Bennington College in Vermont. He remained affiliated with Bennington for 28 years, gaining tenure and founding and chairing the school’s Black Music Division for 19 years. Meanwhile, however, his recording and performing (as well as painting, examples of which often adorned his album covers) continued unabated, including a remarkably consistent string of albums recorded for the Italian Soul Note label in the 1980s and ’90s. His most recent recordings included two large-ensemble pieces, 2007’s 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur and 2008’s Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra, a collaboration with Chicago post-rocker Rob Mazurek. Shortly after the release of the latter, however, Dixon withdrew from performance due to illness, which persisted until his death last night.
He is survived by his longtime partner Sharon Vogel and two children.
http://www.improvisedcommunications.com/blog/2010/06/17/dixon-obit/
Bill Dixon: The Official Obituary (June 17, 2010)
Bill Dixon’s estate has released this official obituary written by Ben Young, author of Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon (Greenwood Press, 1998).
Trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon died June 16th at his home in North Bennington, Vermont after a two-year illness. He was 84 years old.
Dixon was a revered and idiosyncratic figure in the avant-garde of Jazz music, and a creative force who strived at all times to place the music in ever more respectful circumstances. Dixon developed an often controversial profile as an outspoken and articulate defender of musicians’ rights as artists, and specifically the challenges to Black music as a contender in the culture and society of the United States. His music is known for a dark, poignant, pan-tonal abstraction that remains lyrical without relying on songs or the conventions of Jazz music-making. Through five decades as a recording artist, Dixon’s music has developed a loyal worldwide following.
As a musical stylist and educator, Dixon was the progenitor of an often reserved composition and playing approach that stood in contradistinction to the trends prevailing in the avant-garde in Jazz since the Sixties. He steered an influential through short-lived collective-bargaining movement in New York in 1964–65, the Jazz Composers’ Guild. Under Dixon’s leadership, the Guild crafted a stance to preserve the artistic self-determination of Guild membership. Though he lived in Vermont for most of the last four decades, playing only occasionally in New York and in the U.S. altogether, Dixon remained a leader and doyen for musicians of successive generations in a diaspora of alumni of his teaching and ensembles.
The legacy of Dixon’s progressive organizing activities in the music often overshadow the impact of his own music-making. Dixon emerged as a composer and bandleader in what can fairly be called a second wave of the New York avant-garde. Dixon’s legacy of ensemble records (1966, 2007, 2009) frames an unparalleled body of solo music for trumpet (1970 –76, mainly) and a subsequent series of small ensemble recordings (1980–1995) that stand apart in texture, instrumentation, personnel, and orientation from most of the numerous records of the period by Dixon’s contemporaries.
Born William Robert Dixon on October 5, 1925, he was the son of William L. Dixon and Louise Wade. His family transplanted to Harlem at the height of the depression from Nantucket, Massachusetts where Dixon was born. An early aptitude in realistic drawing led him to advanced studies in commercial art during and after high school, well before music became a serious interest. (He was also acclaimed in a group and solo shows of paintings prior to serious recognition of his music, and he was painting, drawing and creating lithographs to the end of his life). Dixon enlisted in the U.S. Army during WWII and served in Germany at the close of European theater.
Bill Dixon’s deliberate study of music began at the Hartnett Conservatory of music in the mid-1940s. His journeyman years as a Jazz trumpet player in the 50s involved activity as a sideman in an array of entertainment and rehearsal projects. Daytime employment as an international civil servant at the UN Secretariat, Dixon also turned to musical advantage. He founded the United Nations Jazz Society in 1959. He worked in the same period to establish the coffee houses of Greenwich Village as a formal and legitimate venue for presenting progressive music, an early manifestation of the spirit that fed the formation of the Jazz Composers’ Guild.
Bill Dixon will perhaps always be remembered for his organization of a concert series to present the new music, the October Revolution in Jazz of October 1–4, 1964, at the Cellar Cafe on West 91st Street. Though literally digested by only a handful of eyewitnesses, the concert series focused significant critical attention on the undergrowth of otherwise unrecognized creative musicians, many of whom, including Dixon, shortly would show forth as the newest voices of the new music of the Sixties.
Starting in 1966, Dixon entered a fruitful collaborative partnership with the dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn, whose background lay in the Cunningham and Judson schools. The collaboration with Dunn led Dixon to join the faculty at Bennington College where she taught in the Dance department, and Dixon pushed for the creation of the Black Music Division, a phalanx of the school’s music teaching that had its own faculty, student body, and orientation. Active officially from 1975 until 1985, the program was a prototype of a kind of college-level music study that has flowered only haphazardly since, basing itself in the aesthetics and praxis of avant-garde music-making.
Dixon is remembered by many of his students as a powerful and charismatic teacher who adroitly factored student musicians at various levels of skill and development into classes and his own ensemble pieces. Within the first few years at Bennington, it became the norm for Dixon to design individual and group exercises artistically meaningful enough to become part of the compositions he developed through a term’s work.
Dixon retired from teaching in 1995 and continued to perform and record, chiefly in Europe. His last years saw a dramatic increase in the frequency of his U.S. appearances, and, since 2008, in U.S.-released recordings of his works for ensembles.
Dixon is survived by his longtime partner Sharon Vogel of North Bennington, a daughter Claudia Dixon of Phoenix, Arizona and a son William R. Dixon II of New York City. He also leaves two grandchildren.
A memorial celebration of Bill Dixon’s life and work will be held in New York City at a later date.
Bill Dixon - Live At Newport Jazz Festival 1966:
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Bill Dixon interview audio
Hear Phil Freeman's full interview with Bill Dixon, on tape:
| Bill Dixon interview part one | 0:06:03 |
| Bill Dixon interview part two | 0:04:37 |
| Bill Dixon interview part three | 0:06:58 |
| Bill Dixon interview part four | 0:07:27 |
| Bill Dixon interview part five | 0:12:07 |
| Bill Dixon interview part six | 0:09:52 |
| Bill Dixon interview part seven | 0:04:04 |
| Bill Dixon interview part eight | 0:04:55 |
| Bill Dixon interview part nine | 0:06:45 |
| Bill Dixon interview part ten | 0:09:10 |
| Bill Dixon interview part eleven | 0:04:50 |
Listen to the entire audio of Phil Freeman's interview with Bill Dixon including material which never made it into the printed piece. The interview is divided into individual Question and Answer segments, totalling 75 minutes of interview time.
In the teaser trailer for last year's Tapestries for Small Orchestra, Bill Dixon said, "If you told me you couldn't do something in music, that was the thing I tried to do to prove you wrong."
And he always did.
With Dixon, music wasn't so much something to be conquered, but instead a beautiful problem to solve. Perhaps this approach came from his background in painting. Even as he began his musical journey later in his 20s, he sought a trumpet sound in broad, abstract strokes. While little recorded output exists from these early stages, co-led releases with Archie Shepp and an appearance on Cecil Taylor's Conquistador! (1966) are crucial pieces to jazz history.
Spending most of his time teaching at Bennington College in the '70s (where he taught until 1995), Dixon re-emerged to the recording world during the oft-ignored development of avant-jazz in the 1980s. Dixon always worked well in isolation, but what came challenged modern music at large. The improvised compositions heard on the two-volumed In Italy and later Vade Mecum were seemingly formless, never spurred on by the wild rhythm sections that lit a fire under jazz during the dawn of the New Thing. Instead, these pieces unfolded slowly, creeping along like some surreal Italian horror film, full of breathy yet colorful sound.
In 2005, this sound changed the way I thought about space.
At the time, I was still relatively green to avant-garde jazz, attracted to its fire and spontaneous invention. Eager to experience this music live — Athens, Ga., isn't exactly a hot bed of improv — my friend Mitch and I flew up to New York City for Vision Festival X.
In the midst of much raucous exploration, there was the Bill Dixon Quintet, performing what he then announced as a "work in progress." The shape was long and vacuous — Dixon's spits, gargles and abstract kinds of blues echoed into space. It was a language that spoke oceanic depth, a trumpet that could mimic a Wagnerian bow across a double bass. The composition's picture never quite revealed itself until the eureka moment hours, or even years, later.
A relentless innovator, educator and trumpet linguist, Dixon has died at the age of 84. He passed away in his sleep Tuesday night at his longtime home in North Bennington, Vt., after a two-year illness.
Thankfully, Dixon was very active in the latter part of this decade, particularly taking a shining to younger sound explorers like cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum. In the liner notes to Tapestries for Small Orchestra, Bynum writes that instead of following the forward momentum of his contemporaries, Dixon "[stopped] the clock and [turned] his gaze inward, towards the infinite potential of the existing moment rather than the moment to come."
Somewhere in the celestial sound space, Dixon's moments will echo forever.
More Bill Dixon remembrances: Clifford Allen, Taylor Ho Bynum, official obituary by Ben Young.
Photo: Stephen Albahari
Trumpeter Bill Dixon didn’t record much between 1966 and 1980. Having taken a position at Bennington College in Vermont, where he created the Black Music Division, he was focused on teaching during some of jazz’s most adventurous — if commercially parlous — years. He taught at Bennington from 1968 to 1995, and from 1970 to 1976 in particular was, in his own words, “in total isolation from the market places of this music.” Much later on, he released several CDs’ worth of solo explorations in the Odyssey box set, but by then he’d already re-established his reputation as an avant-garde jazz composer and conceptualist without peer, through a series of superb releases on the Soul Note label.
In 1981, though, another Italian label, Fore, released two LPs’ worth of Dixon’s music, recorded during that Seventies interregnum. Considerations 1 and 2 gather tracks recorded between 1972 and 1976. Some are solo pieces, a few feature small groups, and one is performed with an orchestra. All display the Dixon voice, with its fixation on open space, unusual intervals and juxtapositions, and disinterest in conventional rhythm.
Considerations 1 begins with the 12-minute “Places and Things,” a drumless trio featuring Dixon on trumpet, Steve Horenstein on tenor saxophone, and Alan Silva on bass. It’s a portion of a larger work, and was recorded in Paris, where the trumpeter had gone for a festival. The bassist is by far the most prominent and dominant voice; it often seems as if Dixon in particular is accompanying him, emitting long, slow tones that seem to whisper to a halt, as Silva bounces along joyfully and emphatically. The next two pieces, “Long Alone Song” and “Shrike,” are solo recordings from a studio at Bennington; both can also be found on Odyssey.
The album’s second side features another long trio piece, “Pages,” on which Horenstein reappears, Henry Letchner is on drums, and Dixon plays both trumpet and piano. The saxophonist’s playing is tender and romantic in the manner of Dexter Gordon or even Houston Person, and Dixon backs him with soft balladry before stepping away from the keyboard. When he picks up the trumpet, he begins to sputter and squeal, as was his wont, and Letchner enters, tumbling across the kit and gradually building up an almost tribal beat. Then Horenstein is heard again, unaccompanied; Dixon gets another turn, squawking and whimpering into what seem like two different microphones, with Letchner subtle behind him. Finally, Dixon returns to the piano for a romantic duo with the saxophonist. At no point do all three men play together.
Considerations 2 begins with a 14-second solo spurt called “Webern”; that’s followed by “Orchestra Piece,” recorded at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in 1972. The piece is somewhat static — there’s no dominant melody or sense of progress, though a hand-held shaker provides accents if not rhythm. The orchestra hovers behind Dixon like a cloud as he takes a slow, languorous solo; occasionally they rise up, buzzing like hornets.
A long duo with Letchner, somewhat more aggressive than their work together on “Pages,” ends the first side and kicks off the second. (It fades out, then fades back in.) The album concludes with “Sequences,” a nearly 13-minute piece featuring Jim Tifft on trumpet, Jeff Hoyer on trombone, Horenstein on tenor sax, Jay Ash on baritone sax, and Chris Billias on percussion. Like the orchestral piece on the first side, it was recorded in performance in Wisconsin, and it has a similarly cloudy quality to start with, with the horns mostly massing behind Dixon like a Greek chorus of moaning ghosts, as he solos. But then Hoyer begins to repeat a few notes obsessively, and the saxes do something similar-but-different behind him, punctuated occasionally by a quick fluttery fanfare. Things get really exciting in the second half, when the saxes erupt in a staccato, romping-and-farting riff-storm like something the World Saxophone Quartet might play, as Billias switches from shaker to gamelan-like percussion. This might be the least “Dixonian” piece in the trumpeter’s discography. It almost rocks.
The two Considerations LPs have never been reissued on vinyl or CD; they’re not on any streaming service; and they’re not that easy to come by. Some enterprising soul should absolutely find the rights (and the tapes) and get them back out there, though, because the music is extraordinary and beautiful and 100% worth hearing for all Bill Dixon fans and anyone with an ear for adventurous, creative music.
https://taylorhobynum.com/bill-dixon-the-essence-of-a-sound-and-the-infinity-of-a-moment/
Bill Dixon: The Essence of a Sound and the Infinity of a Moment
My liner notes for Bill Dixon’s Tapestries for Small Orchestra (Firehouse 12, 2009)
The music of Bill Dixon maintains such a powerful flavor, it is one of those things where you inevitably remember the first time you taste it. For me, it was his mid-career landmark recording November 1981. Within the one minute and twenty six seconds of Webern, the opening track, I realized I had to completely rethink the possibilities of the trumpet as an improvising instrument. By the end of the album, I realized I had to examine my assumptions about the nature of creative music in general. For Dixon’s music does not adhere to the common practice of any established musical genre, be it “jazz”, “contemporary classical”, “avant-garde”, or what-have-you. While drawing upon all of these rich traditions and more, he has established his own set of rules and principles, creating a wholly individualistic canon over the course of his extraordinary career.
Bill Dixon came to music relatively late in life, in his early twenties, after training as a visual artist. From the beginning, Dixon had an advanced sense of what he wanted to accomplish in the medium, doggedly pursuing his own interests rather than following the paths others might prescribe for a more traditional student. In the ensuing 60 years, these instincts have naturally evolved and been consciously refined into an inimitable sound world. At an age where some artists might coast on a lifetime of accomplishments, Dixon’s work continues unabated and with unceasing vibrancy; the last few years have seen the exceptional orchestral recordings of Exploding Star Orchestra and 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur. This activity culminates in Tapestries for Small Orchestra, with two hours of music and a documentary film culled from a multi-day residency with a handpicked mid-sized ensemble at the Firehouse 12 Studios in New Haven CT.
One of the exciting aspects of Tapestries is the insight it allows into Dixon’s process and the way it illuminates core structures of Dixon’s musical DNA. Ever since that first, sharp bite of November 1981 years ago, I have endeavored to gain some understanding of his music. After years of focused listening, a treasured handful of performance opportunities, and occasional conversations with the maestro, participation in this project clarified some of my rough impressions to the extent that I feel comfortable articulating them. Of course this just scratches the surface; I would recommend the interested listener search out the more detailed and scholarly research of Andrew Raffo Dewar, Ben Young, and Stanley Zappa, among many others, in addition to reading Dixon’s own writings.
There is a revealing moment in the documentary where Dixon discusses his frustration with composition teachers insisting one must never double the third. He was dissatisfied with traditional pedagogy presenting rules without taking the time to explain why. Dixon took the time to learn the “rules” of traditional music-making (in fact, he spent five years in conservatory study). However, he also learned to reject dogma that impeded the trajectory of his personal creative journey. He went on to discover doubling the third produces “one of the most beautiful sounds in music,” but it is so strong it changes the nature of the chord. For his own music, Dixon was not interested in the functionality of the harmony; he cared about what kind of sound that assemblage of notes created, not what it was supposed to lead to.
The most celebrated musical breakthroughs of the 20th century, from Schoenberg to Parker, tended to involve harmonic innovations. (Not coincidentally, also the easiest concepts for institutions to promulgate through the kind of simplistic definitions Dixon rebelled against.) Even amongst Dixon’s peers in the early 1960s like Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler, the effort to explore, subvert, or explode harmonic conventions remained a primary motivation. However, for Dixon, pushing against the constraints of harmony never seemed to be a motivating factor; instead, his consistent mission seemed to be asserting the primacy of sound itself.
In much of Dixon’s music, vertical harmony is not about moving towards (or away from) any tonal resolution, but about a distinct sonic experience existing in its own space and time. So much music is about “getting somewhere;” from the basic principles of the sonata form to impassioned free jazz improvisations leading to inevitable climaxes. But Dixon was unusual among his ‘60s contemporaries for avoiding this need for forward momentum; rather, he stops the clock, and turns his gaze inwards, towards the infinite potential of the existing moment, rather than the moment to come. His music acts like a microscope of time, peering in at the atoms of a suspended cell and the universe of activity contained therein. This sense of timelessness has always been one of his hallmarks, and allows him to explore the extremes of duration like few other artists. Dixon’s compositions might be thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but the seconds last an infinity, and the half-hour passes in a single breath.
Listen to the album’s title track, Tapestries, as an example. While the low-end instruments (cello, contrabass clarinet, acoustic bass) bubble with ceaseless motion, the brass remains wholly unperturbed, resounding slowly evolving harmonic clusters. (It is somewhat reminiscent of Charles Ives’ Unanswered Question, another revolutionary American master who managed to capture the feeling of eternity.) Again, where free jazz cliché would draw the horns into the temptations of the rhythmic excitement, Dixon holds them back, creating an exquisite tension that lasts throughout the composition.
In the past, some of Dixon’s large-ensemble works have involved extensive, traditionally styled, written notation (his talents as an arranger and orchestrator, as demonstrated on the 1966 classic Intents and Purposes, are too rarely acknowledged). However, Dixon considers all forms of information exchange as a kind of notation, understanding that new musical ideas may need similarly new means of expression. So in recent years, Dixon has gone in a different direction; he will bring in a minimal amount of materials, but painstakingly craft how those materials are played and interpreted. The process becomes the notation. In rehearsal, it is not unusual to spend an hour on how a single line is phrased, or how a solitary chord resonates. By applying this level of care to the smallest details, Dixon forces the performers to become deeply aware of and engaged in every sound they create, and how the choices they make as individuals effect the ensemble as a whole. There also are a few pieces on Tapestries that had no written materials or instruction, but they are far from “free improvisations;” by existing in the sonic environment he cultivated and adhering to the clear principles he provided, the results are unmistakably the music of Bill Dixon.
Just as it is impossible to distinguish between the moments of composition and improvisation, it is a false dichotomy to distinguish between Dixon’s identity as composer and instrumentalist. In Dixon’s music, these are simply terms for the various practices of a consistent artistic vision. But this vision is clearly delineated in his innovations as a trumpeter. For all the extended techniques he has pioneered and the virtuosity he has displayed over the years, Dixon’s most striking tools have always been the diversity of his timbral palette, the character of his tone, and the drama of his rhythmic phrasing and use of space. From his earliest recorded improvisations with Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor to the material in this package, it has always been less about the notes he plays than the sounds he chooses and where he places them. Where some trumpet players sorely miss the pyrotechnics of youth as they get older, Dixon’s playing maintains its intensity. While the physical palette he draws from has changed with age, the mastery with which he wields the brush continues to flourish. Take the openings of Tapestries’ two trio pieces, Slivers: Sand Dance for Sophia and Allusions I. What other trumpeter could shatter the silence with that kind of authority?
Dixon’s influence on the subsequent generations of brass improvisers is profound. The trumpet and cornet players on this album (Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes, Rob Mazurek, and myself) are but a few examples of his many musical progeny, and even amongst the four of us, the diversity of ways this influence manifests itself is striking. None of us sound alike, nor do we sound like Dixon, but all of us clearly draw upon Dixon’s legacy in how we approach our horns. (It is also interesting to note that three of us are almost exclusively cornet players, and the fourth a very frequent practitioner. While perhaps less accurate and aggressive than the trumpet, the cornet has greater timbral flexibility; it is an instrument for those who improvise with sound as much as with notes. Not a coincidence that we are all so attracted to Dixon’s music.)
This influence is by no means restricted to brass players. Dixon’s subterranean explorations in the depths of the trumpet register clearly offer a template for Michel Coté’s contrabass clarinet work. Glynnis Lomon’s cello recontextualizes the rough-edged beauty of Dixon’s sound, where resonant pedal tones alternate with thrilling harmonics. Bassist Ken Filiano met Dixon for the first time at this recording, while the masterful percussionist Warren Smith has known him for over forty years, but both demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of his concepts. They allow the music enough space to breath freely without sacrificing rhythmic intensity.
For those who are already familiar with Dixon’s music, this recording offers a bracingly fresh document from an artist who, like Ellington or Picasso, refuses to sit still even after a fifty-year career. It is one moment in a journey of uncompromised expression investigating the very principles of sound. For those approaching Dixon’s music for the first time, I envy you. Hopefully, Tapestries for Small Orchestra will be the first addictive taste, offering a sonic feast to those open to experiencing sound and time in a new way.
Taylor Ho Bynum (b. 1975) has spent his career navigating the intersections between structure and improvisation – through musical composition, performance and interdisciplinary collaboration, and through production, organizing, teaching, writing and advocacy. Bynum’s expressionistic playing on cornet and his expansive vision as composer have garnered him critical attention on over twenty recordings as a bandleader and dozens more as a sideman. He currently leads his Sextet and 7-tette, most recently documented on the critically acclaimed 4-album set “Navigation” (Firehouse 12 Records, 2013), and the debut recording of his PlusTet, a 15-piece ensemble made up of his closest long-time collaborators, will be released in the fall of 2016.
His varied endeavors include his Acoustic Bicycle Tours (where he travels to concerts solely by bike across thousands of miles) and his stewardship of Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Foundation (which he serves as executive director, producing and performing on most of Braxton’s recent major projects). In addition to his own bands, his ongoing collaboration with Braxton, past work with other legendary figures such as Bill Dixon and Cecil Taylor, and current collective projects with forward thinking peers like Mary Halvorson and Tomas Fujiwara, Bynum increasingly travels the globe to conduct community-based large ensembles in explorations of new creative orchestra music. He is also a published author and contributor to The New Yorker’s Culture Blog, has taught at universities, festivals, and workshops worldwide, and has served as a panelist and consultant for leading funders, arts organizations, and individual artists. His work has received support from Creative Capital, the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Chamber Music America, New Music USA, USArtists International, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
To contact Taylor, email thobynum [at] gmail [dot] com. To subscribe to Taylor’s occasional newsletter, click here. For complete CV, discography, and hi-res photos click the link below to download EPK.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
BILL DIXON, 1925-2010: Musician, Composer, Painter, Educator, Critic, and Activist
https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/qrgw/
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/bill-dixon-the-benefits-of-the-…
I appreciate your interest in having me say some things that you can present in your paper to interested readers, readers that may be interested in my work, how I go about it, how I have existed, what my work means, how that work is arrived at and my general feelings as they relate to music and art and all of those things [everything in toto, if one really wants to look at it definitively] that relate to them.
I thought things over and it had occurred to me that there weren't really that many people who claim an interest in this music and its non-commercial events, if they can be called that, that would even consider what I said as even being relevant. And if I am in error with regard to that then where are these people?
The genesis of feelings experienced, put together and cemented into ideas after 50 or so many years of experiences all seemingly designed and aimed at the justification of the above...
However and at the risk of being or appearing maudlin, I am coming to New York this month. Yes I am coming to NY to do the Vision Festival. I will be coming from Montreal where I will have participated in a conference sponsored by McGill University that will have focused on the relationships that exist [if they do] between the visual arts and the musical arts, the art of this music, especially. I will have shown drawings, paintings, etchings, lithographs of my work that span 30 or more so years and my "paper , more oral than written, will have concerned itself with how I have approached both of these art forms in terms of aesthetic and philosophy and methodology. I will have performed a small portion of the piece of music that I will be doing in total at the Vision Festival. While I will be doing that section in solo form there in Montreal I will be doing it situated for a quartet in NY.
In the last year I have been philosophically and methodologically engaging in an even more deeper penetration into areas of solo trumpet performance that at present, from the standpoint of being a full time endeavour, have, for most of the players, seemed only useful as an adjunct to the other areas of their performance on the instrument. And, of course the reasons for this is obvious, audiences want to hear you play the things that they want you to play that indicate to them that you can play effectively and coercively in manners that get their attention in the ways that they want their attention gotten.
In August of last year I was able, in performance at the Baha'i Center (with the quartet of double bassist Dominic Duval; vibraphonist/drummer Warren Smith and piano/synthesizer player Tony Widoff), to focus on those things that, at this particular point in time, are of principal interest to me with respect to the instrument and with music, composition and improvisation naturally being considered.
In October, I went to Baden Baden, the Donaueschingen Event, at the invitation of Cecil Taylor, as one third of three established musicians in this music that had Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and myself poised to do music that would serve to reflect our collective and individual places, achievements and contributions in this area of music.
The performance format utilized for the realization of such music that might ensue out of this instrumentation, which after Donaueschingen included Portugal and London in November, was such that it permitted my continuance of the work on my areas of interest without sacrifice or dereliction of my obligation as a member of the trio.
The format for the performances had, for analytical purposes of discussion the following layout: three solos that preceded a short break that then led into a tutti performance by the trio. Oxley always took the first solo orchestrated to permit him maximum leverage and continuity to reveal the focus of his musical interests and concerns.
I took the second solo which let me, knowing what had preceded my entrance and what was to follow it, work with maximum freedom, regarding material, approach to that material and the handling of that material without concern with trying to establish any idea of an [for me] "artificial relationship to the other two players long established and comfortable with the norms of their years of performance as a duo, to the extent that when I felt that I had established my point(s) of view [musical] and reference, paved the way for the next solo which was that of Taylor.
The short period of silence that followed permitted the dynamic of the totality of the trio to come to terms with all that had existed [musically] previously. A fitting way, in my opinion when one is able to understand and appreciate both the freedoms and responsibilities that are resolutely attached to this kind of performance that the uninformed prefer to label, erroneously as "free."
Because it is virtually impossible for people like myself to manage to keep a group together I have to work especially hard to maintain both the ideas that I want to express more fully and directly, by intense practice on the instrument [I continue to put in about five or six hours a day irrespective of whatever else I am doing], knowing at the same time that that is not enough for the recognition, solidification and presentation of those ideas through performance via the public arena.
For a while I was driving from my house in North Bennington, down to Hudson, NY to do some "tightening up work, concerning the duo format, with the young musician-composer Tony Widoff. It was about a four hour drive, round trip, but was well worth it since it could concern itself with the music on a pure basis: how was what it was thought "worthy to be considered for performance to be dealt with and done to the aesthetic satisfaction of the two of us.
I am trying to, as I've said at other times, in my work on the instrument to pierce the outer "shell of creative music so that the "inner shell will be more "kind , in terms of an extension of the vocabulary, to that kind of "probing around. Some may just hear it as noise and I don't have the time, inclination and am also not afforded any kind of forum to debate them [at this point], but I find it, when all of the things that need to be working [with the help of the ever present Sages, as the late and much missed pianist-composer John Benson Brooks, was wont to say on many an occasion], the most exciting time for me musically.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Trumpeter, composer, bandleader, visual artist Bill Dixon was the organizer and producer of the now legendary October Revolution in Jazz, a concert series devoted to the then "new music in 1964 - the same year he was the prime architect of the ever-significant Jazz Composers' Guild, a group whose place in the history of this music is a philosophical model and progenitor for groups that have followed such as Chicago's Advancement for the Association of Creative Musicians (AACM) and St. Louis' Black Artists Group (BAG). He joined the faculty at Bennington College in 1968, where he was a professor for nearly 30 years before retiring. Dixon has recorded some hard-to-find jazz classics including Intents and Purposes (1966) and has recorded for Soul Note since 1980, releasing nearly a dozen gems for the label such as the two-volume Vade Mecum and Papyrus series.
BILL DIXON--'November 1981'
November 1981 is double album by American jazz trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon consisting of one disc recorded live in Zurich and another in a studio in Milan, Italy in November 1981 and released on the Italian Soul Note label.
Bill Dixon--Trumpet
Laurence Cook --Drums
Mario Pavone · Bass
Alan Silva--Bass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrAOvvpUNdU
Track listing
All compositions by Bill Dixon
Side A:
"November 1981" -10:40
"Penthesilea" -10:10
Side B:
"The Second Son" - 5:10
"The Sirens" - 7:05
"Another Quiet Feeling" - 6:48
Side C:
Announcement" - 1:13 omitted from CD rerelease
"Webern" - 1:24
"Windswept Winterset" -15:42
Side D:
"Velvet" - 6:44
"Llaattiinnoo Suite" -15:24
Announcement - 1:40 omitted from CD rerelease
Intents and Purposes is an album by American jazz trumpeter Bill Dixon, which was released in 1967 on RCA Victor. Despite critical acclaim at the time, it was soon out of print except for appearances in 1972 on Japanese RCA and later in 1976 on French RCA. The album was reissued on CD by International Phonograph in 2011.[1] The album's title is an example of a Siamese twins idiomatic expression.
Background
In 1966 Dixon premiered his composition "Pomegranate" at the Newport jazz festival with dancer Judith Dunn, and this performance led to a contract with RCA. Dixon signed with producer Brad McCuen to do a quartet piece, but instead he started working on "Metamorphosis 1962-1966", for an ensemble of ten musicians. The personnel was an unusual mix of freemen and mainstream jazzers. Pozar and Levin were Dixon's students at the time, and Lancaster and Kennyatta frequent participants in Dixon-Dunn projects.[2]
Reception
The JazzTimes review by Mike Shanley says that "The whole release compares to very little from that period and offers a stellar example of the composer’s vision".[6]
In a 2011 Village Voice article following the CD reissue, Francis Davis wrote: "If ever a jazz LP literally qualified as 'legendary,' Intents is it... I envy anyone first hearing it now, because it's as bold and surprising as anything newly released this year."[7]
Writing for The Vinyl District, Joseph Neff noted that the album, "if often gripping and raw is never chaotic," and commented: "Intents and Purposes' large group template combined with compositional fortitude and improvisational vigor makes it essential to any free jazz library."[8]
Point of Departure's Ed Hazell stated: "What's apparent from the opening moments of 'Metamorphosis'... is how well Dixon grasps the dichotomies and contradictions in the music of the time and how completely he controls them... Dixon the composer expertly transitions from one theme or passage to another; his ability to shape compositions into self-contained wholes would remain a hallmark of his art."[9]
Track listing
- All compositions by Bill Dixon
- "Metamorphosis 1962-1966" - 13:20
- "Nightfall Pieces I" - 3:47
- "Voices" - 12:08
- "Nightfall Pieces II" - 2:25
BILL DIXON ORCHESTRA:
- Bill Dixon - trumpet, flugelhorn
- Jimmy Cheatham - bass trombone
- Byard Lancaster - alto sax, bass clarinet
- Robin Kenyatta - alto sax
- George Marge - english horn, flute
- Catherine Norris - cello
- Jimmy Garrison - bass
- Reggie Workman - bass
- Robert Frank Pozar - drums
- Marc Levin - percussion
| Released | 1967 |
|---|---|
| Recorded | October 10, 1966, January 17 & February 21, 1967 |
| Studio | RCA Victor's Studio B, New York City |
| Genre | Jazz |
| Length | 31:40 |
| Label | RCA Victor |
Bill Dixon--""For Nelson and Winnie"
(Composition and arrangement by Bill Dixon)
From the album 'Thoughts' (1985)
'Thoughts' is an album by American jazz trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon recorded in 1985 and released on the Italian Soul Note label
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8D5fcBIMEk
Track listing:
All compositions by Bill Dixon
"Thoughts" - 11:20
"Windows" - 4:40
"For Nelson and Winnie" -18:53
"A Song for Claudia's Children" - 11:10
"Brothers" - 8:30
"Points" - 8:45
BILL DIXON SEPTET:
Bill Dixon - trumpet, flugelhorn, piano
John Buckingham - tuba
Marco Eneidi - alto saxophone
Peter Kowald, William Parker, Mario Pavone - bass
Lawrence Cook - drums
Bill Dixon: Excerpts from Vade Mecum
January 29, 2010
AllAboutJazz
Dixon first presented his writings alongside scores, photographs, and drawings in the monograph L'Opera: A Collection of Letters, Writings, Musical Scores, Drawings, and Photographs (1967-1986), vol. I (Bennington: Metamorphosis, 1986, currently out of print). A companion volume has not yet surfaced, though Dixon maintains a collection of post-1986 writings that he has given the name Vade Mecum, or a "journal." It is something that he hopes to one day have published, along with a revised edition of L'Opera. Dixon has allowed exclusive access to some selections from these writings for publication here; they are unedited and maintain the prosaic and stylistic approach that characterizes his writings (i.e., all brackets, parentheses, and non-traditional punctuation are Dixon's), with a nod to the stream-of-consciousness.
When I visited
Dixon in 2008 at his home in Bennington, Vermont, the idea of a
"selection" was both necessary and anathema—I spent several days
discussing music, art, aesthetics, philosophy and criticism with him, a
huge amount of information that somehow had to be shaped into a
publishable and concise article. With the thoughts, ideas, reactions,
and opinions presented here, it's difficult to tell a reader (much less a
compiler) where a "good starting place" is—the beginning isn't always
the beginning. Since the title of the broader work is Vade Mecum,
I chose to begin with Dixon's responses to a list of questions and
ideas presented by the writer Graham Lock, who had been asked to write
the liner notes to Vade Mecum 2 (Soul Note, 1996), the second volume of quartet music joining Dixon with drummer Tony Oxley and bassists Barry Guy and William Parker.
What follows are some of Dixon's writings on ensemble and solo playing
("process" writings), a letter discussing the relationship of artists
(and Dixon specifically) to certain parts of the jazz/new-music press,
and the responses to two then-graduate students writing their theses on
Dixon's work. These excerpts stand as a companion to the AAJ interview Bill Dixon: In Medias Res and the selections of visual art available at the AAJ Photo Gallery (search for the "Bill Dixon" tag). Ultimately, however, my hope in
presenting this material is that it may provide a window into the
thoughts that, in part, have given rise to and resulted from a
half-century of Bill Dixon's music.
Chapter Index
- To Graham Lock
- The Art of the Solo
- Materials and Ideas for Discussion for Workshop in Contemporary Improvisation and Composition as That Relates to the Performance
- For Alexandre Peirrepont: The Weavers
- Answers to Additional Questions from Andrew Raffo Dewar
- Harnette Notes
This
one side of a faxed exchange between Bill Dixon and writer Graham Lock,
where questions are answered and ideas explored in preparation for
Lock's liner essay to the second volume of Vade Mecum
recordings for the Soul Note label (released 1996). It may be helpful
for the reader to have these in hand while re-reading Lock's notes to
the album and in (partly) experiencing the recording, but they stand on
their own equally well. —CA
Dear Mr. Lock:
I am
in receipt of your fax of 20 April 1996; I was in NY for a few days and
only returned on Saturday. Since time is of the essence I will attempt
to provide answers / that are clear / to your queries.
- The
main reason(s) for Vade Mecum, 1 and 2, circulates around the idea
that, as soon as it was possible to record ideas that I felt would
sustain the time factor of a recording, I have attempted since 1980 when
I began recording more / for me / "prolifically," I attempted to do so.
Whether to the listener it is aurally visible or not, I have gone
through great pains to space the recording of my work that is commercial
recording: I have, for many years, personally, by recording, documented
almost everything that I've done / so that that work that did become
accessible to the interested listening public could, as much as
possible, reflect the different stages or formations, regarding musical
ideas that I was involved with. For me there always IS a reason: I'm
working on a specific area; line, density, intervals, spacings, etc.;
how does that INTERACT, if it does, with what other members of the
group, if a group is involved, with what THEY, individually and/or
collectively, are working on; the nature of SOUND and the placement OF
that sound relating to attack and duration as THAT relates to the basic
nature of the trumpet and how that is articulated concerning the myriad
of ways that one can NEGOTIATE notes out of the instrument / and the
list continues, etc... / and that reason serves to dominate my thinking
relating to the RECORDING of my work and in the case of Vade Mecum served for the impetus of that work.
- The MAIN problem that was addressed relating to Vade Mecumcentered
around the idea of doing a complete work with the barest minimum of
verbal or academically notated / via manuscript / instructions to the
musicians that would be complete, cohesive, and non-reflecting of the
methodologies utilized in its realization, faithful to my concept of
composition / those "compositions" being authored by me / and yet "free"
enough to permit the feelings and personalities of the musicians to
exist and co-exist sans the general "hell-for-leather" musical attitude
that is generally / and erroneously / associated with areas of this
genre of music.
- The sound of Vade Mecum is
exactly what I had in mind and could not have been realized without the
players that were used. I wouldn't characterize the sound as "foggy'; it
seems / to me / to be a liquidly dark and light sound that is, because
of the instrumentation and the manner in which the musicians are able to
extract things from their instruments, is able to cross both the
borders and the boundaries of extreme high and low; seemingly with ease.
In that instance, there is more of a pointillistic approach to the
sound / relating to painting / rather than the alla prima / or more
specifically glaze approach that might be likened to Turner or Monet.
Again, for ME, THIS analysis is, of course, in hindsight, only able to
be even THOUGHT of after the fact; since at the time of execution it is
the THING that I'm after and NOT how it is done. And, in that instance,
there are no accidents. The intuition, sensitivity, musicality and
performanceability / if I can coin such a word / of things and ideas
only vaguely suggested / by me / TO the musicians, completely
dovetailed, consequently rendering the idea of "accident" as being
non-existent.
- I could hear that this music / or this
series of thoughts / was indeed possible if I had this group of players.
I had not played with either TONY OXLEY or BARRY GUY but had done an
extensive amount of work with WILLIAM PARKER. I knew of both Barry's
work and Tony's work. And it was Cecil Taylor,
while we were doing the concerts in Italy and France a few years ago,
who virtually insisted that I meet Tony since it was his feeling that
Tony and I shared musical sensibilities.
- I view Vade Mecum
as more formally DISTILLING things that I've been interested in and due
to that instrumentation / and the particular players / permitting a
certain KIND of evolution.
- The "accident of purpose"
can best be viewed if you will consider the way and manner in which the
"OCTETTE I" was done. I wanted the sound and textural feature of eight
players; and I had four. I knew I could overdub but I didn't want the
MECHANICAL sound and feeling of that kind of device. IN recording the
piece the first time it was just done; the second time, I used
headphones so that I could hear / and thus PLACE / what I had previously
played within the FRAMEWORK of that. I wanted that kind of symmetry.
The other players opted NOT to use headphones for the second time around
of recording and, as a consequence, there are places where the
"accidental" bumping into each other is EXACTLY what I like since I,
through what I was playing and how I was placing it could BALANCE, in
terms of line, height, and weight the TOTALITY of the sound. Am I being
clear??? Listen to it closely.
- The suggestions that I
gave were, as mentioned earlier, deliberately sparse and left open to
interpretation by the players. You don't HAVE to play in any specific
tonality, if the feeling for being metric or pulsative seems to indicate
that that is what you do, do it. Space, texture, lines and counterlines
are desirable, as is the idea of unison, octave unison, if it occurs
naturally depending on the direction of the music; I will indicate
possibilities of where one can go by what I play; dynamics can be
observed by the ability to hear all of what everyone is playing at all
times. Regarding the authorship of the compositions, what I play is the
composition, and what the players do are their reflections or reactions
to these compositions; hence the orchestration and the arrangement,
however you want to designate it. In that instance, from how I view
music / in this portion of the 20th century, after 2000 years of man's
making music / any indication of ANYTHING to any musician that causes
that musician to respond in any way other than what he would were it not
so indicated, IS notation. And since I define composition as "the
assembling of musical materials, generally accessible to every musician,
into a NEW order" and improvisation as the INSTANTANEOUS realization of
composition without the benefit / or demerit / of being able to change
or alter anything for ME, all music is both composed and improvised.
- With the exception of one piece / for the time span of the CD / all works were done in the order that they appear.
- I've answered this as much as I can at this point.
- You
are exactly right in "supposing" that the titles come after the music
and that, in some cases suggest a quality that / I / hear in the music.
PRIOR to that, however, I do make a determination concerning what THIS
particular music / relating to what I am attempting to do / is about. If
you will go through the titles of my works, including the very titles
of the albums themselves you should be made aware that I'm quite
conscious about the idea of the documentation of both ideas and the
placement / in time / OF those ideas. For example: INTENTS &
PURPOSES; THOUGHTS; CONSIDERATIONS; BILL DIXON IN ITALY; HAROLD IN
ITALY????/; etc.
VADE MECUM has several meanings; I used the meaning "NOTEBOOK" or "JOURNAL." INCUNABULA has several meanings; I used the meaning "early books" or "beginnings" / And it IS Latin. / smile//. The supposed "link" referring to the music and painting/drawing is NOT, as far as I can determine, pre-ordained DELIBERATELY by me. If there is a CONSCIOUS link that would have to do with the fact that I do both and would therefore had a NATURAL affinity for attempting / even if subliminally / a rhythmic stratification / relating to sound / AND the articulation of words that might attempt either a definition or simulation OF that sound through the titling of the music, etc. As far as DELIBERATELY plotting such a course architecturally to intellectually affect or attempt a DOVETAILING of the work / music and painting / I don't do that.
- There hasn't been a "hint" or a "whisper" of Intents and Purposes
being reissued on CD. A few years ago there were some mumblings but
that is as far as that went. I've asked SOUL NOTE to see about
purchasing it from RCA VICTOR.
- I prefer both the alto
flute, which is what the late George Marge played on "NIGHTFALL PIECES,"
and the bass flute which I've done some work with. I'll send you a
cassette of some of that work when I can get around to it.
L'OPERA, which is about 400 pages and would only be of interest to those that might have an INTENSE interest in my work and my thinking about a variety of things. I hope to publish it next year and am currently working on a revised edition of the first volume of L'OPERA, There is also the possibility that there will be a Japanese edition of L'OPERA in the near future. Ben Young's DIXONIA, which he is calling a biographical discography and documentation of the performances of my works, is being published by Greenwood Press and is slated for publication in 1997.
- The orchestra
work that is being released sometime this summer is the work with TONY
OXLEY'S CELEBRATION ORCHESTRA that was done at the Berlin Festival in
1994. I'm a soloist on that work.
- The VADE MECUM
quartet will be known for the two recordings, done in 1993, one issued
in 1994 and the other one / that you're doing the liner essay for /
sometime in the summer of 1996; and the concert in November 1994 in
Villeurbanne, France at the Espace Tonkin. Incidentally, there is a
video of the performance in Villeurbanne. As far as recording is
concerned, I have an orchestra work that I'd like to record; Andrew Hill
and I have / over the years / periodically discussed the idea of a duo
recording; I'm thinking of a solo piano recording; and there are various
ideas like that coruscating around. I'm currently discussing a tour /
for fall, October 1996 / for Italy, France and possibly Germany,that
would be followed by some work in Israel. There is also work being done
for some concerts in Japan. Of course there are some new paintings that
I'm outlining for work now in addition to my wanting to publish a
calendar of my lithographs done in Lyon, France in 1994.
- It
is not so much that "New Music" has been under attack as it is patently
being ignored as a music that generated certain valuable additions to
the language / vocabulary of music. It is my feeling that no matter how
one tries to deny the past that past has existed. There is a kind of
"palatable" niceness and "softness" of much of the music / this music /
that lacks a kind of / for want of a better and possibly more
politically correct word / "masculine" bite to it. We used to call it
cocktail music and while there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, it
is at times galling that we are made to believe that that is all there
is. Yes, it would be useful were you to pursue that kind of thought. It
might just wake someone up.
- If you can get a copy of BILL DIXON IN ITALY, Vol. 2,
which has just been released on CD by SOUL NOTE. The original notes in
the interview I had with Angelo Leonardi, were replete with errors which
I have, in this edition, corrected. Read what I try to explain there
and it should give you some idea as to what I mean.
- In
going through my works to arrange and catalogue them in the last four
or five years for the radio programs that Ben Young has done for
Columbia University's radio station WKCR, I began to view the work in a
different light. There is a tremendous amount of work and, considering
its breadth and scope, by ANYONE's standards, some of it has got to be
good. While that is not the basic reason WHY I have done this work, it
hasn't escaped my attention that work of any magnitude, or done for any
reason, is not completely fulfilled AS WORK until it has been given the
opportunity to be either heard or scrutinized by an outside public. Of
course, we have a hostile public; a non-caring public who willingly and
blindly have their minds turned in the direction of the so-called
purveyors of taste and aesthetics. And they seemingly accept carte
blanche what is put before them without even a glimmer of questioning. I
used to tell students, when they, when it was convenient, complained
about the inaccessibility of the new music, that when they went into a
record store to buy what they bought / always the heavily touted and
advertised more popular stuff / that they ASSIDIOUSLY avoided the other
music; they HAD to pass by some things to get to others. That if they
did NOTHING about a problem they had, in fact, done SOMETHING about it.
So if Van Gogh's SUNFLOWERS are NOW worth about $12 million, how is that
possible??? HE couldn't sell them, so they couldn't have been worth
anything. And if they weren't worth anything then, then they can't be
worth anything now!!!! We know that things derive their value from their
marketability or their lack of same. So I was arguing, at that time
about the viability of my own work and someone had suggested something
to me that was anathema to me. But that was in the summer of 1976, I was
on my way, that fall to do the AUTUMN FESTIVAL in Paris. In twenty
years I just may have changed my mind... I don't know, but I am
assembling my works to make up my estate and the final decision may be
left up to the person who will be managing that estate.
- You
should, by all means, call both Barry Guy and Tony Oxley. I'm certain
that they will, in a less turgid fashion than I can, supply you with
relevant and important information as seen from their eyes and
experienced by them.
Graham, though I may have tended to ramble a bit I hope that you can sift through all of this and come up with what is important and necessary for you to know. I'm looking forward to seeing how you will handle this as I find in your writing a knowledge, integrity and passion for the music that, unfortunately is in short supply in your profession.
What
I am attempting to do within the framework of the construction of a
solo has to do primarily with creating a solo composition that, as a
composition, is complete within itself.
The form or structure of the solo seams itself into the solo simultaneously as the solo is being performed.
There are no pre-existing performance patterns that I know, have taken
the time to learn or use, consciously, that I can, at will, "call into
play."
I don't approach my work on the instrument in that manner and never did.
I, right from the beginning, when I started to learn the instrument and
was working on the fundamental things in music that support musical
thoughts and ideas, for the security of their realization, dependent on
knowledge (personal playability) that "guides" when the "nod" to utilize
a scale passage is made apparent, for example, and in the music that
required it, when to, in the music that required it, to arpeggiate the
chord, or when to further identify the quality of the material as that
related to further identification of the piece of music being examined
[played], either by alteration, rhythmic or intervallic, or use of the
melodic structure and rhythmic layout in a more variegated manner that,
in its formal structure (the way the primary composer had organized the
piece to reflect it as being an "original"), I still resisted the
learning of preordained or pre-thought out or pre-worked out, either
passages or sequences or phrases since my feeling was that if what one
was supposed to be doing [as a player] had to do with the idea of
spontaneity, then any other way that avoided that, the learning of or
the insertion of things thought out in advance at pivotal points might
be "hip" and capable of getting the crowd to respond but, to my ear, it
wasn't fully musical, from the standpoint of being creative [on the
spot], and it certainly wasn't spontaneous.
Of course I know
that anything that we do has to do with having knowledge of that thing
that quite possibly we didn't know we had.
In other words, it
is not possible to play something that on some level one didn't know
something about, or on some level, intellectual, philosophical,
metaphysical or methodological, have some kind of "inroad" knowledge
about what one was playing. But that doesn't mean that one doesn't try
to keep the mind "clear" and not "cluttered" with things so that at the
right moment one will be able, both to respond and to execute those
things that one didn't know that one knew, and freely as though it, as
an idea, had just occurred. This is the high point, in my opinion, of
the performance of any genre of music.
My approach to the solo
at this point in my performance on the instrument focuses on the sounds
that may be placed at my disposal and my attempt at their placement in
the areas that they must be placed that will identify them, or what I
play, as having the order and logic, in terms of hearing and experience,
of a more academically "formal" constructed or thought of piece of
music as experienced through being listened to in performance.
Sound and the fuller penetration of sound becomes the universe or the
slate that can either be written upon {placing a sound on it} or
extrapolated from, "taking" if that is possible, if there is a "body" or
a mass to this sound, things out of the sound; much as one would carve
something out of something.
In that instance I try to pierce
the innermost qualities of the sound; I feel, because it is in this
instance "cube-like," that I can "walk" through the sound and each sound
has a multitude of layers that, again, much like something that can be
carved, alterations can be made upon.
In my work, or my
explorations with the instrument, I am currently and have for some time
ceased to look or feel that the trumpet has to be eternally linked with
what it has done {and excellently} in the past and continues to be
doing, in the hands of rather incredible players, in the present.
I, myself, for a variety of reasons, am not that interested, for myself, in that aspect of the trumpet.
I am also not that interested in the formulations of the literature
that have generally been the foils for the instrument and the
development of its subsequent identification. I am interested in trying
to "find" those things that I am interested in that sometimes I don't
know that I would be interested in until I am faced with the fact that
they are emerging from the instrument as I am playing and that I have
indeed found them. I have a vision of how I want to begin to place some
things; some lines; some textures; some points of rhythmic interruption
of those sounds, but most of the time I am content to let the "sounds"
themselves dictate where they must go, what they must be, the qualities
they must have, their interlockings and their durations and their
densities. I try to be ready to grapple with the elements that are
produced.
In that instance, the sound in the room, how the
instrument is responding, whether there is attentiveness on the part of
who is there witnessing; and even my own feelings about what I am doing
and does a composition really have an ending? If you will consult the
work in ODYSSEY: SOLO WORKS there are pieces that can be traced
that lead you, much as I was led, to where, for me, the work on these
solos is currently focused.
The works: Albert Ayler, done in 1970, concerned itself almost totally with what I call the "mass" of the sound, almost brutally; MOSAIC, done during the same period, "permits" the emergence of a "linear" quality to arise out of that mass.
The piece "TRACINGS II" [1974-1975], are those masses of sound, less
"thick" in texture, that serve as punctuations; "SHRIKE" [1973], is
like, what I would call a "velocity" knife thrust of slowly elevating
horizontal sound, frightening in its intensity; I wanted to see, then,
if it was possible to "blow the bell off the horn." I don't need to do
that anymore...
Ideally, for this presentation I would have, by
recording, played the three solo pieces that I did in 2004 in
Donaueschingen, Guimaraes, and London. And there are portions of the
quartet work that I did at the FONT Festival in NY in August.
You would then and because I am pointing out those things that serve to
define the "curve of departure" from one area of performance thought, as
that relates to how the instrument is being used to another, be more
aurally in touch with the linkages of those things.
As an
explanation, this is clumsy I know, but it will have to do for now. Any
of you who may be familiar with the work of the Viennese trumpeter Franz
Hautzinger, who is quite an interesting young player, will have to read
my liner essay to his work Gomberg (Grob, 2000), where I
detail more graphically [there are drawings, etc.,] some things about
the process that while not at all necessary for coming to terms with
this music, for those that would want that kind of clarity, it is there.
Regarding the explanation of the process, I know that I have been wordy; I also hope that I have been clear.
This performance is dedicated to the memory of an old friend, the poet and writer Allan Polite.
It is also dedicated to the work of an American artist that I hold in high esteem, Gordon Parks.
BILL DIXON February 2005
Materials and Ideas for Discussion for Workshop in Contemporary Improvisation and Composition as That Relates to the Performance
This
text has been used (by me) whenever I've done an orchestra or ensemble
workshop where I felt that the experience(s) of the participants merited
that kind of view in addition to the physicality of the work itself.
—BD
- What is the ensemble?
- What is the instrumentation?
- What is (or are) the methods of presenting the material to be used in the performance/rehearsal situations to be used?
- How are the pieces of material to be practiced by the members of the ensemble?
- What
will be the methods of notation; aural; instrumental (tpt, cello,
piano, vocal); spoken; use of calligraphy; the assigning of pitch
systems laying out of textures on the piano?
- From the standpoint of rhythmic propulsion.
- Setting
a harmonic situation on the piano and then playing out all the parts on
the horn (the various members of the ensemble left then to notate their
own parts at will after their parts have been "described" to them).
- "Loosely"
attacking the situation by the immediate approaching of the musical
idea through instant playing; setting the mood and character of the
piece and cuing the other members of the ensemble as to when they should
enter also giving them the range area in which they are to explore, and
indicating by hand signals the density each individual member will use
on his instrument and also whether or not they will play (by hand
signal) melodically or vertically (as the case may be) also indicating
whether they will "trade" off with other instruments (as far as their
space situation in the composition is concerned) and indicating the
level of the dynamics.
- Define the role and character of the solo.
- How are solos to be taken?
- What is the content of the solo?
- How is it determined whether it will be harmonic; melodic; rhythmic; or a combination of all three?
- Define the use of space; silence; rhythmic silence; and the sound of the room.
- Describe
how the soloist makes use of the material; of what has preceded his
lone entrance; what takes place (if anything does) while he is playing
alone and what will take place at the termination of his "alone"
playing.
- Describe how the entire ensemble sets and
maintains textural balances as this relates to the individual horns and
the horns in tutti.
- How are balances (orchestral) entered into and maintained?
- Define
(for this type of ensemble) the use and designation of the term
"energy'; define the use of line; define how rhythmic complexity is
entered into and maintained (the introduction of lines stated at
different times (tempi).
- Describe how all of these
so-called "restrictions" will limit the element of freedom of choice for
the player and how the players relate to it.
- Discuss also the idea of the sometimes complete abandonment of constituency (the being able to single out the "identity" of individual instruments); discuss the idea of the "feeling presence" of certain instruments, the new idea of color, the fact that even though some of the instruments cannot themselves be heard by the listeners, the players can "feel" the presence of the instruments and therefore this "feeling" plays a heavy role in the selection of the material they have at their disposal.
- Discuss the interchangeability of the pieces of material even after they have been assembled in the slot of final playing order /or performance order/ and how sometimes this "order" changes depending upon the circumstances of performance; the room; (the sound that the room "makes") the audience; the mood of the players; the composer; the idea of defeating the over "slickness" that is almost ever present when a piece of music is played or rehearsed for a long period of time, etc.
- Describe some of the technical achievements that have been entered into and dealt with.
Bill Dixon: In Medias Res
- Prologue
- Early History
- Teaching, Mentoring and the Highest Art
- The Sound's Eye
- Dixon and Criticism
- Epilogue
Dixon came to the trumpet rather late, at age 20, at a time when bebop and small-group cutting contests had taken hold of New York. It was, in fact, right after returning from a year of Army service (1944-5)—he was stationed in Morganfield, Kentucky; Cheyenne, Wyoming and in Germany—that he began to study the instrument seriously. In 1946, Dixon enrolled at Hartnette Conservatory in Manhattan, where he studied until 1951. Of course, the trumpet was not something completely out of left field. As a young artist, he gravitated to musicians well before he could play—the vibraphonist Earl Griffiths (who later worked with Cecil Taylor) was his childhood friend, and he was surrounded by music on the radio and in the streets. "The teacher I had who was the most sensitive to me at the time [that I was beginning to play] was Steven Gitto. He was a very good teacher and I did something once—I brought him the Gillespie folios and he sight-read it, though what he played wasn't what Diz did. That informed me that notation isn't everything—it can be read but not spoken the same way. Teaching the articulation was very important, and because I was older, I knew more intellectually than what I was able to do. When I got ready to play, I didn't want to play like Louis Armstrong; I wanted to play like Miles, Diz, Kenny Dorham, Fats Navarro, Idrees Sulieman and all the trumpet players I heard live. It wasn't until years after I'd learned to play the instrument that I went back and discovered that without Louis there wouldn't be anything else."
Dixon worked as an arranger and played with small groups in Queens and the Bronx; meeting alto saxophonist Floyd Benny resulted in a 1954 regular engagement in Anchorage, Alaska, of all places, which provided him with regular pay and even health insurance. He returned to New York at the end of the term, and within another year had found his way into employment at the United Nations and instituted the UN Jazz Society, all while organizing small concerts and showcases in Village coffeehouses and becoming intimate with a lesser-known segment of the city's jazz players—those who might aesthetically be associated with bebop, chamber jazz and the nascent "New Thing." As a concert organizer in the Village, Dixon met many musicians who were unable to consistently perform professionally, and this became the base on which the Jazz Composers' Guild was built.
Though somewhat supported in words by John Coltrane and (mercurially as ever) Ornette Coleman, infighting exacerbated by Archie Shepp's acceptance of an Impulse contract and other artists accepting contracts from ESP and Fontana eventually dissolved the organization (1). "What I was trying to tell people in the Guild, when that music was new and just beginning, was that we had the ability to gain control of the music by withholding it and only doing it in places we owned. But early on, people began to pick other people out, and there were some who had never played the Village Vanguard. Right away musicians flew the coop. The day musicians understand that because they do the music, they have the power—if no musicians do music, there is no music industry. You can do music without the industry supporting you, but it can't support itself without people doing music. So we have the power."
"I remember us meeting for the first time in Harlem at the Sportsmen's Club, which was on 7th Ave. between 145th and 144th next to the Roosevelt Theater. In the basement, there was a private club for young people, and they had a bar and a small dance floor. They had a trio and you'd go there cattin.' Thursday night was jazz night and we'd all go over there. The first time I heard Taylor play was at that club. He says when his father moved to New York from Queens, he was walking up 8th Avenue and heard the sound of a trumpet and followed it into the studio, around 116th. Right on the corner was a place called Newby Studios, and he gets there when I was rehearsing with a group. That would have been between 1950 and 1951. I have known him a hell of a long time, and I am probably the only person who doesn't ask him for anything, doesn't bullshit him, and if he does something I don't like, I let him know immediately."
There's something that Dixon brings to the table on Conquistador that makes this date atypical in the Taylor canon. After Dixon takes his sparse, wispy solo, underpinned by percussive knocks from Cyrille and Grimes and Silva's softly shrieking arco, things change completely. The tune's second theme is rendered with an extraordinary, expansive weight and Taylor's flourishes become ever more delicate—communal rather than showy, as though this were a band in search of a whole, rather than Taylor and his cohorts. Such democratic music is not often what one thinks of with respect to Taylor's work.
The Dixon-Taylor environment is part of the mentoring process that he has engendered for many years. Teaching new musicians in New York was something he was almost immediately involved in, with players who had a wide range of abilities and approaches. "During that time, Eddie Gale was on the phone with me; he'd play things over the phone and we'd discuss them. Eddie was a student of mine, Rashied Ali was a student of mine on trumpet—he was a very good trumpet player. Dewey Johnson was another; one person I couldn't teach was Donald Ayler—he wanted to play in lower registers, but the music he was doing and the context he was in didn't demand it. His instrumental approach was coming from a different place, despite what he may have wanted to try and do.
"Almost all trumpet players of a certain persuasion came to visit me at certain points in their career, whether it is common knowledge or not. They all know I know. I was the one who took Ornette Coleman up to Zottola to get him a mouthpiece because he wouldn't return mine that he liked. When Ornette decided to play the trumpet, he came to see Bill. There was a reason why guys did this—I was very didactic and systematic." Ric Colbeck, Jacques Coursil, Joe McPhee, Marc Levin—the list of vanguard trumpeters of that era (and since) who made their stamp as a result of Dixon's work is rather long. Today, one might look at people like Mazurek, Bynum, Cuong Vu, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Axel Doerner and others who act within the sphere of Dixon's approach to the instrument (whether they credit him or not is another matter).
Dixon's teaching then didn't just include the trumpet section—Silva ("back then, he couldn't play the same thing twice"), drummer Cleve Pozar, saxophonists Ed Curran, Marzette Watts and Byard Lancaster, and dancer/choreographer Judith Dunn (4) ("she didn't improvise before she met me") all made significant work either with or as a result of their experience with Dixon. What is interesting about this is the varied levels of musicianship some of these players had—from a classically-trained percussionist (Pozar) to saxophonists who may not have been playing for long, to a dancer who became integral to Dixon's 1960s ensembles, so much so that the group was billed as the Bill Dixon-Judith Dunn group. The gravity of their output under his tutelage is remarkable. This carries over to the Bennington students he worked with—getting players who ranged from the good to the untrained to collectively play the same work with equal contributive force might seem unheard of. Significantly, there is no pandering or "playing down." How is this even possible?
Curran notes in the liners to his lone LP on Savoy (Elysa (1967), produced by Dixon, with Pozar, Levin and bassist Kyoshi Takunaga) that he is among the new breed of musicians who have started their work with the new music and are only influenced by what is contemporary. Most of Dixon's students probably would say the same thing—that where they are, is now. Dixon explains it by saying, "You start from where you are. To write a novel, you don't have to study Charles Dickens—you'll do that in time. You'll exhaust your limitations first—don't forget, tradition is all around you. You're sinking in it, breathing it, and you can't escape it or resist it. To force it as a prerequisite—the most you can get out of it is that it presents you with such a phenomenal bunch of facts about how things are done that you're intimidated from ever doing anything. Art goes on forever, and my experience is that you start from where it excites you and if you're intelligent, you look from where the hell did this thing come? So you took a beginning person in the room and you stayed in the room till the thing was done. The one thing I tried to impress upon people was that if you are in the room, you are as important as anybody else. It's not about this overt virtuosity—it's about everyone being a part of the whole." Yet what's also crucial is maintaining and accentuating integrity. A constant refrain of Dixon's is rooted in the idea that "somebody is always trying to lead you away from the thing that you do." Part of mentoring and educating is finding out not only what that thing is, but how to expand upon it and perhaps bring it into a collective venture.
Hired in 1968, Dixon only intended to teach at Bennington College in Vermont for a year in order to save money. "I was going to move to Europe and I decided I'd work a year or two and save my money, because I didn't want to go there like other musicians—I'm no good at working out of a paper bag, you know? I also didn't want to go to Europe and be forced to do work I wouldn't do here just to survive. I never did get the money I needed to move—I'm still working on it!" Aside from creating and running the Black Music Division from 1973 to 1985 and being a central figure in the college's Music Department from 1968 until his 1996 retirement, he's one of the rare musician-composers to have reached tenure status in a university setting—"When I came up for tenure, it was like the shot heard 'round the world. I was a faculty member.”
Though not common knowledge, musicians like reedmen Marco Eneidi, Sam Rivers, Arthur Doyle, Steve Horenstein, and trumpeters Stephen Haynes and Arthur Brooks were among the players who flocked to Bennington once Dixon was there, either as visiting artists or adjuncts, even working in mills—whatever they could do to be part of the music. Says Dixon, "If I hadn't been able to use outside musicians, I wouldn't have been able to do what I did." Student musicians, some of whom later became known in this music, also had tremendous import—drummers David Moss and Henry Letcher, bassist Xtopher Farris, and pianist John Blum all participated in the Division's ensembles.
Yet, to many in this music, becoming an educator is like dropping out of the scene. As Dixon tells it, "The mantra was those that do, do and those that can't, teach. I was told a few nights before I went up there, disparagingly, 'Go on up there and teach those kids what we're doing.' The interesting thing to me was that very few professional musicians were equipped, either by temperament or skill, to teach. They thought it was going there until the phone rang, and canceling a class for George Wein. During the entire time I taught at Bennington, I had maybe four things that were important enough that I took them during the term and got someone else to teach a class. I had my winters and summers off, but my work never stopped—you have to put yourself into it, and teach those people." Indeed, wherever one is becomes Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, or Slug's.
A fascinating window in this process is comparing Dixon's introductory classes taught at Bennington to the veritable master class he often gives to orchestras that he's bringing together to perform a piece. The intellectual output and the demands placed on each are remarkably similar, disarmingly so. Teaching Jack or Jill Smith about the history of this music or how to get more projection on the flute is on an equal level with getting the right contributions from [trombonist] Conny Bauer or [vocalist] Phil Minton (5). "You have to be able to speak in a language that musicians can find ways to identify with. Concert composers do everything off the page; the notation is there and the conductor—you do what he tells you. In this music, it is a summation of all the people who are doing it. So that has to come through, and there are all kinds of ways of rehearsing an orchestra. No piece of music is so fragile that it can't have certain things not go right and still come off. I prefer rehearsing and putting together, the process, to actually performing. I know what it's finally going to be."
In the rehearsal video of the orchestra from 2007's Vision Festival, such methods as having Jackson Krall turn around several times before sitting at the drum set in order to approach the cymbals with the proper amount of looseness, made visible how the physicality of subtleness can be manifested. Similarly, in getting the ensemble to play a line a certain way, Dixon asked them to think of three different painters' approaches (whether they knew the painter or not) in getting towards what the section was based on, so as to bring to the fore "the visualness or the approach of the painters in their work—in terms of line, color, temperature of the color and collectiveness of the two—and how these things were attempting to either depict or reinforce, relating to the totality of the picture and the sound." Encouraging musicians to hear and see beyond music to get into a space collectively is just one of myriad methods that Dixon the conductor, teacher and mentor finds valuable.
In both his classes in Black Music and dealing with the exigencies—the process—of putting together an ensemble piece of music, Dixon's philosophy is very direct. Though referring mostly to instructing students, the following thoughts are hugely indicative of his mentoring approach no matter who the recipient: "I always said if I was in a [teacher's] position, students would not leave a class without being clear. I actually put myself in the place of the students I teach and imagine myself taking the class and knowing nothing. I try to be clear without teaching down to them—you have to take everyone seriously. As far as I was concerned, a beginner didn't require any less of your attention than anyone else. You also required of them the same input.
Rob Mazurek has been studying with Dixon intermittently since they met in Guelph in 2006. It shows on recordings such as that with Tigersmilk (with drummer Dylan Van Der Schyff and bassist Jason Roebke) on their latest album, Android Love Cry (Family Vineyard, 2008), or Mazurek's Sound Is (Delmark, 2009). Mazurek's phraseology is cloudy and ephemeral but somehow extraordinarily direct, projected with extreme presence. In the dining room one afternoon, I watched Dixon instruct Mazurek on the projection of wispy, half-valve sounds, and it brought the point home that somehow, getting the thing that's needed requires a combination of intent and relaxation. It doesn't have to be perfect, but meant—and that can be done not only mentally but physically, in terms of holding one's body in a certain way as the most delicate sounds are being produced. Yet Dixon rarely gives one-on-one classes: "You tell students who want a personal lesson that one to one is very advanced. You have five or six people in the room and you see that many different ways of solving the same problem. Also, you have to convince them that though they're not getting their private time with you, they will learn how to critique each other and emulate without competition."
Dixon's work with Mazurek is just beginning; so far it has resulted in one of the most significant discs of 2008, finding Mazurek's Exploding Star Orchestra in collaboration with the elder trumpeter (Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra). Instigated by Dixon's appearance with the Orchestra at the Chicago Jazz Fest, a new collaboration occurred in August at Lisbon's Jazz em Agosto. On disc, two versions of Dixon's piece "Entrances" (written for the Orchestra) and Mazurek's composition "Innerlight (For Bill Dixon)" were recorded following a seamless performance at the 2007 Chicago Jazz Fest. Dixon's playing on Mazurek's piece is a rarity—he almost never participates in others' music. But his low brass rumble and architectural sense of space have a perfect affinity for the open and backlit writing that has long characterized Mazurek's work. Dixon's own piece is deliciously out of tempo, a repetitive tandem percussion riff buoying fuzzy dissonance, with drummers John Herndon and Mike Reed updating something remarkably akin to "Metamorphoses 1962-1966," from Intents and Purposes.
Untitled Painting - Ink, Acrylic & Printing Process on Paper, 30 x 32 North Bennington, VT. [2000]
The way in which he views sound is both architectural and (especially in light of his work with Judith Dunn) extraordinarily choreographic. The idea that a soloist need not be out front—rather in the ensemble or behind other soloists, moving or sounding entirely relative to other players and to the space—is not the way this music is usually approached. Certainly, Dixon's voice can be below or behind what the ensemble is doing. Indeed, on a recording like Son of Sisyphus (Soul Note, 1988, with Pavone, Cook and tubaist John Buckingham), Dixon's trumpet seems to be in another room than the rhythm section—an acoustical approach that lays a very different set of parameters on the listener.
"I don't think vertically, but horizontally. For me, 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." Since the 1960s, Dixon's ensemble pieces and often his orchestral situations have required that every member of the group stand in a circle. The basis for that is so "everyone can be a conductor," but it's hard not to see that visually and spatially, so that everyone is involved on an equal, cloud-like level, giving true form to the sound as well as those producing it.
There's an interesting thing that Dixon does in his visual art—he photographs, cuts up and recombines sections of his paintings into new pieces, a sort of "collage" of components that are from his own vocabulary of work. This relates to two axioms constant through his oeuvre. One is that he always starts with more than he can use in a given instance, and that some things not used may find their way into another piece instead. Another is that he often reuses elements that are particularly effective in multiple contexts. Jonathan Chen's violin line in a work Dixon conducted in 2005 for Anthony Braxton's Wesleyan orchestra is based on a line that tenor saxophonist Steve Horenstein played in Dixon's 1970s ensemble, an anchoring repetition that stabilizes immense blocks of sound. It is similar, perhaps, to the vocal part that unifies the massive 1968 piece played by the Orchestra of the University of the Streets. Yet at the same time, these pieces aren't necessarily revisions or recidivism; indeed, for Dixon, "if your dedication is to a different piece of music and the only relation it has to anything else you've done is that you wrote it, things don't necessarily attach themselves by chronology or proximity. Picasso didn't have a Blue Period; he just painted some blue paintings, right?" Drawing a line from piece to piece is what one might be predisposed to do, but when the oeuvre is as much of a cloud as the sound a listener or player is faced with, a tendency is as close as one can come.
"Vade Mecum, Series II" - Litho & Xylogravure, 76.5 x 56 cm. Villeurbanne, France. [Winter/1994]
Bill Dixon and Angelo Leonardi, Ferrari Gallery, Verona, 1981
Black critics and writers on the new music have either not mentioned or have resoundingly disparaged Dixon's work, either because they didn't grasp his decidedly far-from-populist aims or because racial politics were more important to them than the work produced. During the 1960s, writers like LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and A.B. Spellman gave him continually short shrift despite his centrality in the New York milieu. "LeRoi Jones was reviewing a record we'd done, each one half, and LeRoi writes that Archie Shepp had the serious music on his side. If you read the criticism I went through—A.B. Spellman said, 'Bill Dixon as a space age trumpet player is in trouble—he has no chops and has fuzzy tone, and in him you can hear all the players who are hip.' So I wasn't one of them." Stanley Crouch has said almost nothing of Dixon's work, though the two have known one another for a long time. Of the copies of Odyssey that have been given to critics and educators, few have even mentioned the work in any light.
"For Charlie Parker" - Lithograph, 50 x 34.5 cm. Villeurbanne, France. [Winter/1994]
Ring me if you need to speak additionally.
BILL DIXON /22 April 1996/
The Art of the Solo
Beyond Abstraction: Bill Dixon on Music and Art
Interviewed by
Graham Lock
The Cloisters, from the Red Dot series; undated (before 1990); pen, ink, acrylic on paper;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
I was lucky enough to interview Bill Dixon twice, and on each occasion he was extremely generous with his time. In 1998, in New York City, we spoke for nearly five hours, chiefly about the 1960s, the origins of “free jazz,” and his work in the Jazz Composers Guild. This was for a research project that, I regret to say, I have yet to complete, although I was able to use excerpts from the interview for the liner notes I contributed to Odyssey, the six-disc set of solo music that Dixon himself issued in 2001. We next met in 2003, at his home in North Bennington, and spent an entire day talking about two of his greatest passions, music and art, discussing in particular the similarities and differences in the ways he approached these disciplines. It is a version of this conversation that appears below.
I’m sure PoD readers will already be aware of Dixon’s enormous importance in contemporary music, but his artwork is perhaps less well known. In fact, he initially trained as an artist and continued to paint and draw throughout his life, as well as branching out into other kinds of visual art, such as lithographs and photography. For a period in the ’60s and ’70s he boycotted American galleries because of the racism he felt was endemic to the art establishment, but in later years he exhibited in France, Germany, Italy and the USA. Although his work appears in a couple of books on modern art, it circulated more widely on the covers and inserts of his recordings: Odyssey, for example, includes a portfolio-booklet, “Works on Paper,” that comprises 13 paintings beautifully reproduced in full color. Perhaps like his music, Bill 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. He once named Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and De Kooning as the modern painters who had most impressed him, while also citing a multitude of other influences, which ranged from George Grosz, Otto Dix and the Impressionists to architecture and design.
The 2003 interview was for a different research project of mine, about jazz’s influence across other art forms, and this one did reach fruition in two books, The Hearing Eye and Thriving on a Riff, which I co-edited with my colleague David Murray and which Oxford University Press published in 2009. The interview with Bill Dixon was scheduled to appear as a chapter in The Hearing Eye; unfortunately, a last-minute dispute between Dixon and the OUP legal department about the wording of a contract could not be resolved and, to our great disappointment, we were unable to include him in the book. This was our loss because Bill Dixon was an astute and insightful commentator, not only on his own music and art but also on many aspects of American culture.
What follows is a transcript of that interview (which took place on 8th June, 2003), as edited by me for The Hearing Eye and then slightly modified for this new context. One advantage of publishing online is the chance it affords to present several examples of Dixon’s artwork, and I am very grateful to his partner Sharon Vogel for permission to include these images here. Bill was an exceptional improviser, composer, painter, draughtsman, photographer, writer, and teacher: I hope the words and pictures below will help to shed a little more light on the work of a remarkable creative artist.
Graham Lock, July 2010
****
Graham Lock: When we last spoke, back in 1998, you said that you believed in the idea of a black aesthetic. Last night you read Richard Powell’s essay on the blues aesthetic, and you’ve just said that you don’t think this is a viable notion. Why is a black aesthetic viable, yet a blues aesthetic isn’t?
Bill Dixon: It should be obvious why a black aesthetic is viable. Black people are identified, visually, as black; and then everything that a person is confronted with is based on that person being black. Someone has set that into motion. I don’t think black people did it themselves, so someone else has done this. In that kind of situation, it stands to reason that there would be a way that black people then express themselves, in response to how they are perceived and what has happened to them.
When you’re talking about a blues aesthetic, if I understand it correctly, a lot of people would like to believe there is an underlying feeling, a kind of emotion, that runs through black expression. Because the blues is first of all a feeling: its musical significance is secondary. The blues is an Elizabethan song-form, I -IV-V; you’ll find some of those songs way back and, whatever made them attractive, there was no blues inflection when they were sung then. So black people supplied that, as a particular form of expression, and they must have supplied it because they weren’t totally happy. But not everything that happens to black people is evocative of a blues feeling, so my resistance to setting up the blues as the criterion is that it’s too narrow.
Let me be clear. There’s a black aesthetic because someone has said there’s a black aesthetic. If blacks were not made to feel that they were being treated in a certain way, there would be no black aesthetic, because how could one react to what didn’t exist? The black experience is a real experience, that’s all. And if people are tired of hearing about it, then they should eliminate whatever makes that experience continue, so that racism and the unpleasantness that people go through because of their color would cease immediately.
Artists—white, black, whatever—are treated with hostility in this society. All I’m saying is, if a white artist presents his work, he may be turned down but he gets a fairer shot in terms of his work. The black artist, when he hits the room, people size him up because of what he looks like, whether they’re aware of that or not. This seems to me to open the door for a black aesthetic, though it’s another question whether you want to be confined by it. If you are a black architect and you build rows of small houses, two-storey houses, it doesn’t mean to say you’ve confined your studies and knowledge to building only those row houses; you know how to build a skyscraper too. You can’t be imprisoned by the canon: “They don’t build skyscrapers, that’s not the black aesthetic.”
You hear people talking, it’s like living in a land of black people; the way people speak, the way they slur their words, the way they walk, high fives . . . and these things weren’t invented down in Appalachia. So, yes, there’s a black aesthetic, but you don’t have to be a prisoner to it: whereas, if you say a blues aesthetic, you’re already narrowing it down. The next thing you’re going to say is that there’s a jazz aesthetic and that a trumpet player can’t play this or that because it’s going outside of “jazz”, like Marsalis and his people are trying to say. You’re narrowing it down and you’re saying, if we don’t see that aesthetic, then what you’re doing isn’t authentic, in terms of where you’re coming from.
GL: I don’t think Richard Powell is proposing the blues aesthetic as a measure of authenticity or as a kind of feeling. I think he’s saying that one reason why so many black painters have been neglected or misunderstood is that they’re being judged by white aesthetic standards, and there’s no recognition that a different set of formal concerns might be at work in their paintings.
BD: Okay, then he’s right, but he’s still saying it clumsily. Because what are white standards? White standards vacillate back and forth; they’re not consistent with any damn thing. You’re going to be judged by the majority society; they have the power both to do the judging and to decide what’s eligible for judgment. That has less to do with aesthetics, as far as I’m concerned: that’s unadulterated power. I mean, there would be no way in the world that the black artist could escape the dilemma of the people he comes from: black people. If black people are not being accorded status as human beings, why should we single out the black artist for special treatment?
GL: Let me try to come at this from a different angle. When we talked about a black aesthetic in 1998, you said you thought there were certain things that black musicians did that white musicians didn’t, and vice versa. Is the same not true of painters?
BD: Well, if you look back, there have always been black painters who painted exactly like white painters; you couldn’t tell the difference. Okay, you get the same argument in music: there were certain people who couldn’t tell the difference between, say, Miles Davis and Chet Baker! But in music, the innovations, the changes, the looking at another way of doing something, that’s come from the black point of view. Now, since our exposure to black painters has been frighteningly limited, we don’t really know what black painters have done. A painter needs his work to be seen, he needs a gallery, he has to be highly successful before someone makes reproductions of his work.
In addition, how is a black person going to paint, given the living conditions? How can a black man, say, a Pullman car porter, have a studio? Whereas a guy can go to the pawnshop, buy a horn for $25, come home from work and just play for himself. Don’t forget this music started with musicians playing for themselves, doing the only thing they could do. Music always had an easier path, I think, in terms of people not being so dependent upon the outside environment. The painters are not in the galleries; they’re certainly not represented in the books, the art histories, so I don’t think we can be sure what the story is with the painters.
We know more about black musicians, for obvious reasons. The music made money. When the record companies realized that blacks bought this music, they thought, well, maybe whites will too. The history of the music has always been that the blacks did something, whites appropriated it . . . look at the big bands. I mean, Billie Holiday, when I was a kid, was singing down there on 33rd Street at the Lincoln Hotel and she couldn’t go in through the front door. This kind of stuff. Someone always reminding you that no matter what you did and how valued it might be, you were not going to be accorded the status. I remember Ornette Coleman—this was in the ’60s—saying to me, “Do you ever get the feeling that they like what you do but they wish it was someone else doing it?” I said, “YES! That’s it exactly.”
But getting back to painting, we may find one day that many of the characteristics we thought were white really aren’t. We just don’t know. The literature on black painting is not extensive.
GL: I think it’s acknowledged now that many of the early modernist painters were very much influenced by African art.
BD: No question about it. But I think the idea of a black aesthetic in painting is still an unknown factor at this point.
GL: The notion of a black aesthetic seems to imply a kind of racial consciousness, a racial self-awareness. Does that impinge at all on your own work?
BD: I don’t approach painting as a ‘black’ person, if that’s what you mean; just as me, and with regard to what interests me. Mind you, everyday I’m reminded that I’m black. Unless I stay in the house.
GL: Can we talk about your own work? I’m interested in the relationship between your music and your painting. For example, on the Odyssey CDs you have six or seven pieces of music with titles that correspond to the titles of six or seven of the paintings in the accompanying booklet. What’s the relationship between the music and the paintings?
BD: There was actually no relationship intended. Originally what I wanted to do was find paintings from the same time period as the music to include in the booklet and I wasn’t able to find many that corresponded in terms of their dates. So then it became a matter of trying to make the booklet more representative of my artwork.
GL: The music covers the period 1970 to 1990?
BD: Yes. Some of the paintings come from that period too: The Cloisters, When We Were Children. Others are more recent: Sfumato, Poemm per I Delicati, Resolution, Murmurs, The End of Silence, these are from 1999, 2000.
Sfumato; 1999; pen, ink, acrylic on paper; © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
Resolution; 2000; pen, ink, acrylic on paper; also reproduced on the cover of the FMP CD Berlin Abbozzi;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
GL: Why did you give some of those paintings the same titles as the pieces of music?
BD: I was working on auditing the tapes for the CDs, checking balances et cetera, and coincidentally I was sorting through my paintings. And I put them together. The only aesthetic liaison had to do with the fact that as I was hearing the music, certain paintings seemed to suggest themselves. But this was after the fact.
So it was a two-fold process. First, trying to get a selection of paintings that was representative of the total period. Okay, I did that. But if I were to have included them all, the booklet would have been much longer and much more expensive to produce. So then I selected some by that listening process and gave the music and the paintings the same titles. It was down to practical considerations and some accident, in terms of listening over to the music and shuffling the paintings.
It took the longest time to get the paintings in the right order, where if you look at one page, it greets the eye in a certain way, and the next page relieves it in a certain way. A sort of dovetailing. It took me months to do this: I can show you all my notebooks, all the mock-ups I made. I worked on Odyssey for five years altogether, trying to make it the best I could make it.
GL: Does this mean that the titles themselves are not very important to you?
BD: Not for some things. I always had a problem with titles. The only reason I started doing titles at all had to do with when I formed my publishing company and we needed titles in order to register the compositions. I would have had just Composition 1, 2, 3.
I think titles lead you too much into trying to relate the work to the title, and I think that’s an unfair boundary to impose on people. We claim we want people to have all these experiences, all these responses to art: the title immediately cuts that off. If I say, this is Peter and the Wolf, people are stuck with that being Peter and the Wolf, no matter how hard they try to avoid it.
The thing I’ve tried to do with my titles, and most of them have been very literary (what I would call literary), I’ve tried to make my titles formally deal with the concept of that work. That goes for the titles on the recordings and the titles of the paintings. You don’t find titles that are overtly political, for instance. When you name things for people, when you say this is a dedication to someone, that’s different. When I’ve done that, it’s because, when I was doing that work, I was really thinking of that person. Like on the Papyrus CDs, those pieces for Larry Neal, Allen Polite, Henry Dumas, N. H. Pritchard, Jeanne Phillips . . . for the longest time I’ve wanted to do something and dedicate it to the works of black writers.
I’ve been criticized for using Italian titles. The Italian titles have seemed more musical to me, in their sound, their euphony; and let’s be practical, I’ve been studying Italian, so I might as well use it. [Laughs.] Also I have idiosyncrasies relating to spelling, say doubling up on letters, ‘poem’ as ‘poemm.’ That’s for the visual. It looks different. I like that. Things have to look a certain way for me.
But if I was to do my work over again, why do I need titles? Having to have a title because the work has to be identified, I resent it, I really do.
GL: You say you dedicate a piece to a person because you have that person in mind when you’re working on it. The group of lithographs you showed me yesterday, the ones for Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor—they’re abstract, there’s no figurative element there at all.
For Miles Davis; undated (after 1994); lithograph;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
BD: When I did those lithographs, I had each of those people in mind. But I had them in my mind; they’re not in anybody else’s mind.
GL: Would you be able to explain how each lithograph relates to what you were thinking about its dedicatee?
BD: No, no. It’s not narrative at all; it’s not representational. 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 possible. That’s all.
Now, I think that’s a valid way of keeping certain ‘secrets’ from your viewer, regarding a work. As I said before, the title already puts the viewer in a box; you don’t have to tell him or her any more than that. And if the viewer ‘knows’ any more than that, is looking at that picture going to be any more informative or interesting?
I exhibited half a dozen or so paintings in a group show in New York a few years ago. There were three of us who shared the show, which was on a jazz theme. The other paintings were more traditional—pianist playing piano, et cetera. But my pictures, the Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, people at the opening were saying: “Monk? Coltrane? What the . . . ?” [Laughs.] Because we haven’t sufficiently ‘educated’ people for that kind of visual experience. It’s like poems that don’t rhyme, you know, “What! They don’t rhyme!” [Laughs.] I think it’s relatively easy to do, say, a portrait of Thelonious Monk. However, it’s more intriguing, in my opinion, to put down what you think about Monk, who he is, what his music has meant to you. And if you have to have a title, let people mull over it.
GL: Is it the same when you title your music? When you have a piece that’s named for a person, there’s not necessarily a clear link?
BD: Not a link, not a link. Like the piece for Jeanne Phillips, those little short pieces. You work on the piece, listen back to it, say, okay—Jeanne Phillips! Contrary to that, the pieces I did for my mother, they were very consciously thought out: ‘Sumi-E’, on Son of Sisyphus, which is one of my favorites, I think it’s a very beautiful piece of music. I think my mother would’ve liked that.
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. That orchestra work Index, which we played at the Vision Festival in 2000, had me moving things around during the performance. For instance, I was going to play a long introduction to the piece on trumpet, but when we did the sound-check they couldn’t get the set-up that I use right; they were taking so much time, people were already coming in for the concert. I didn’t even have time to go back to the hotel to change my clothes. So I had to content myself with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to play the introduction. Well, the players wanted to hear me play but I told them, it’s not about a virtuoso thing. And during the performance, I was deciding, based on what was going down, what I could place where.
So, similarities in preparation? With regard to painting and large group performances, yes: with regard to my own playing, no. My own playing, for me, at this particular point, and it’s been this way for the last ten years, is all about the magic of the moment.
GL: What happened prior to those ten years?
BD: Let’s see . . . Son of Sisyphus [recorded in 1988], that’s when I started on the musical path I’m on now. Thoughts [recorded in 1986] is a formally notated situation, with other things interspersed. November 1981 . . . it’s remarkable because all the pieces I play sound notated, and I wanted them to, but they were not formally notated. There’s some beautiful music on November 1981: ‘Velvet,’ ‘The Second Son,’ ‘The Sirens’ . . .
GL: I agree they’re beautiful, but why would you want to have improvised pieces sound notated?
BD: Because I liked those pieces that I’d composed and I wanted them played exactly that way.
GL: Then why not notate them?
BD: I didn’t want to. [Laughs.] I didn’t have to, I have a good memory: I don’t notate anything for myself unless it’s very, very long. Those are short pieces, they’re almost like songs rather than compositions; why would I take the time to notate them? To show I’m literate? I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted them to sound formal, that’s all. I’m not always informal. Sometimes you want a certain thing, so you do whatever is required to achieve that. If I’d wanted another person to play those pieces, I’d have written them out—but then they wouldn’t have come out the same anyway.
I did write out some of the bass parts on November 1981 and even on Son of Sisyphus. But after Son of Sisyphus I thought, I don’t want to write out parts any more, why not just wait until it’s time and then play? I’ve been doing that ever since. I don’t tell the players anything. Vade Mecum is a beautiful record because those people, Barry [Guy], William [Parker], Tony [Oxley], they wanted to play, I wanted to play, and it’s really something. That’s the way I view music, it’s got to be exciting: I don’t want to know how everything will go. I want that edge. That’s how I feel about playing.
When I’m painting too, that’s the kind of feeling I have inside about wanting to do a work. The only thing is, in painting I can change it if I want to. In music, once it’s out there, it’s out there.
GL: Well, once a painting is on the cover of a CD, it’s out there. You’ve used your artwork on a lot of your CDs, from the Considerations LPs in the ’70s through to Odyssey in the present.
Untitled drawing; 1975; included with the Fore LP Considerations, Volume 1;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
The Idea of the Solo, from the Red Dot series; undated; pen, ink, acrylic on paper; included in the Odyssey booklet ‘Works on Paper’; © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
BD: More people have seen my paintings than a whole lot of other painters’ work because I use them on my covers. That was one of the reasons I opted to take less money. I have complete artistic control over my work and that’s important because your work is all you can control; you can’t control anything else. So I’ve used the CD covers and, unlike a lot of painters who are totally dependent on galleries, my work has been published and people see it. And benefits have accrued from that: I was invited to Lyon in 1994 because they saw some covers of mine and they said, look, this guy would be able to do lithographs. I’d never done a lithograph in my life, although I had done some etchings. I initially said, no, no, I don’t want to deal with any stone, but they said, we know you can do it, and they were right.
Twice Upon a Time; 1994; lithograph; also reproduced on the cover of the Soul Note CD, Vade Mecum;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
But for the average painter, it’s cruel! If they don’t have a show in a gallery, their work is invisible: no prints, no catalogue. I’ve been lucky. Not that I’m very well known or acknowledged or whatever you want to call it—in fact, I’m overly ignored! [Laughs.] But I have managed to record and thus I’ve managed to have my music heard and documented and also to have my artwork viewed by people. Whether they buy the records or not, they are out there. When I get down in my cups sometimes, I realize . . . well, my work is out there, someplace.
GL: You were talking about the changes in your approach to playing. Can you say a little about the various stylistic shifts and phases that your artwork has been through?
BD: Well, I did a lot of posters at one time. When we had the ‘Four Days in December’ concerts in 1964, we had no money, we being the Jazz Composers Guild, so I got a bunch of newspapers . . . okay, the Cellar Café, where we had regular concerts, was on 91st Street, between Lexington and Broadway, and Judson Hall, where we put on ‘Four Days in December,’ was on 57th Street. So there were all these subway stops in between. I designed a poster—it just said “Four Days in December,” the dates, and “Judson Hall,” nothing else—and it was on newspaper, because we had a pile of old newspapers. I had the members of the Jazz Composers Guild plaster the walls of every subway stop between 57th Street and 91st Street with those posters. On the opening night, you couldn’t get in! I remember, when Cecil [Taylor] did his first Town Hall concert, I designed his poster too.
I did a lot of book covers, book designs. When I was younger, I was very interested in book illustration. I loved it. Illustration’s very difficult: an illustration has to tell a story, which is hard to do. In my generation it was different, it was all about craft, being able to do all of these things; we didn’t make distinctions the way people do today. People don’t think about craft any more, or they think of it as gauche. I used to do a lot of portraits too, because you could sell them. I used to do studies of jazz musicians, realistic portraits.
GL: Do they still exist?
BD: People still have them. I was thinking I should ask people who have things of mine to send me copies. Let me see, what was the next phase? I worked exclusively in oil for a while, but oil’s not my favorite, it’s slow drying. Watercolor was frightfully difficult to do. When I discovered acrylic, which you can mix with anything—and I mix a lot, I make my own colors—I began to deal with subject matter differently. Subject matter became, for me, how things looked. Rather than people, rather than . . . well, I never did like landscapes. But still life held an attraction for me. Just a glass, sunlight, windows. I used to photograph doors; I’ve photographed doors and windows all over Europe. I make drawings and paintings from them too; I continue to like those kinds of things.
Untitled and undated photograph of a window by Bill Dixon, as used on the cover of his 1987 Soul Note CD, Thoughts; photograph © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
Then it reached a point, many years ago . . . if you look at the cover of Sisyphus, that’s the way I was working: one solitary figure, a nude figure, in a variety of situations. Next I did the ‘target’ paintings, you could call them, like on the back of Sisyphus.
Detail from an untitled and undated painting by Bill Dixon, as used on the front cover of his 1990 Soul Note CD, Son of Sisyphus; painting © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
Untitled ‘target’ painting; undated; also reproduced on the back cover of the 1990 Soul Note CD, Son of Sisyphus;
© Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
[Doorbell rings. Brief interruption.]
GL: You were describing the various stylistic phases your artwork has gone through.
BD: They haven’t been conscious. They’ve just worked themselves to the present stage. It’s been a sort of evolution, without being overly complex or simplistic about it. Whether your work ‘goes’ any place or not, in terms of reception, you can do it; whether anyone sees it or not, you can do it. And depending on the necessity for you to do this, that’s how it will evolve. You make things, you put them aside; you make other things, you put them aside. Periodically you look, you have a bunch of stuff; some of it you like, or it suggests something that you’d like to pursue further. It’s a process, which you can control, and you subsequently find yourself going down different paths.
I find there are certain things that continue because I like the way they look: certain figures, half figures. There’s an ‘eye’ kind of situation that I like: I don’t know what it means, I don’t even want to know what it means. I like doing it. It wasn’t for any conscious reason that I stopped drawing figuratively. I got tired of it. I was too shy to do nude pictures; the female figure is absolutely incredible, but I had to bypass that.
GL: Don’t you include female nudes in your work now? Like on the cover of Son of Sisyphus?
BD: I don’t really do figures any more, I do parts of figures—with other kinds of things. I also do pyramids a lot. I have about half a dozen books on pyramids. I was very interested at one time in seeing if I could keep a razor blade sharp underneath a pyramid. [Laughs.] I like boxes; I have drawings of boxes with their shadows when the sun hits. Circles have intrigued me too. I’m not good at math but I love those symbols—all these things that have no meaning but which look good and around which you can build interesting compositions.
Untitled painting, with circle; 1977; also reproduced on the cover of the 1980 Soul Note LP, Bill Dixon in Italy—Volume One; © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
Untitled painting, with circle; 1977; also reproduced on the cover of the 1980 Soul Note LP, Bill Dixon in Italy—Volume Two; © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010
GL: Are you sure there’s no meaning to those shapes? Because people will look for one. [Laughs.]
BD: Oh, people ask me what it’s about. I was in
psychoanalysis in New York for three years, I know all about that stuff
and this has nothing to do with it. But if it makes you happy,
anything you see in there … I don’t care. [Laughs.] I would
imagine there’s something deeper to it; I’m generally very upset about a
myriad of things. The way I keep control of myself is, I have to stay
busy. So I guess there’s a connection, things don’t spring up
fully-grown. But, frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t want
to be in the position where I know so much in advance about what I’m
doing that I can’t do it. I don’t want to know the answers, if that
stops me asking the questions.
I’m not anti-intellectual about meaning. I think, though, as
I’ve gotten older, I’ve ceased to find that an interesting venture,
unless the people who are discussing the art have done some
art. The creative process, as far as I’m concerned, is both mysterious
and fragile; you’re either interested in the process so that you can do
it, or, if you become too interested, then you can only assess what has happened.
Ideally, I’d like to be able to do a concert and have all my
work there. I’d like to do more than just play. I’d like to play, have a
conversation with people, read from my writings, show my paintings.
I’m old enough now to want just to have a good time! [Laughs.] I don’t want to play and then go back to the dressing room. I want to have fun,
you know what I mean? Because I’m not going to live, I’m not going to
be here, much longer. I think we’ve got to start presenting ourselves
differently, as total human beings. Like writers do book tours, I think
musicians should do that: you can present your work, talk to people,
explain your position. Just standing up and playing the horn,
especially if … you know, it’s “Good God, why does he play that weird
stuff?” People resent it; they’re hostile, because you’re not revealed
as a full human being. With that more intimate approach, you can show
your development, say why portraits are no longer interesting to you,
why melodies are no longer interesting to you.
It’s like … one day I realized I don’t need to paint or draw in
a way that will let people know that I know how to do it. Many years
ago, I said I don’t need to play ‘My Funny Valentine’ any
more, because it’s been done so definitively I can only be measured
against something that it’s impossible for me to do anything about.
That’s an oversimplification, but in essence that’s how I’ve come to
every conclusion. So, in my life, I reserve the right to be as ‘narrow’
as I determine. It took a long time, but I came to realize I
didn’t have to prove to people that I was intelligent. As far as how my
artwork developed or moved ahead, basically it was very simple: I did
something until I didn’t need to do it any more. Then I was
always able to look at what I’d done previously and decide whether
there was still something in there that I could extrapolate, that held
an interest for me. I think people will misread it. They’ll see all
these themes, the funny things that keep appearing. You know how people
are. [Laughs.] “Is that him? Is that his eye? Why is he always looking out?” But, no, that’s not me!
GL: If you’re not in your painting, are you in your music?
Do you feel that your music is a more personal form of expression than
your painting?
BD: No, no. No one’s artwork looks like mine.
GL: I mean, more personal in the sense that the painting is external, it’s out there and you work on it, whereas the music is something that comes more directly out of you. Or is that not true?
BD: I don’t know if it comes out of you or not. I think that’s a quantum leap into allowing you not to deal with what is,
regardless of its reason for being, which a lot of people do. When you
hear Miles Davis play ‘My Funny Valentine,’ are you more in tune with
it if you’ve heard other versions of his that you like better? If you
realize he was in frightful pain from his sickle cell anemia? Or if you
look at that famous Rembrandt painting with the helmet, which for
years people revered and then they discovered he didn’t paint it, does
that diminish the picture you claimed to love? So what you’re asking,
I’m not sure that’s even relevant. When I look at a painting, I only
want to know, how well was the painting done? Based on what’s being
presented in front of me, was the artist in 100 per cent control of the
material? The other kinds of questions that people ask—“Who painted
it? What does it mean? What was he trying to say?”—I’ve never done
that.
There’s a passage in that Richard Powell essay you gave me to
read where someone is talking about Romare Bearden’s recollections of
childhood: it sounds very pompous to me. This is supposedly validating
his art … recollections of childhood? I become embarrassed with that
kind of conversation because I think it’s the kind of conversation that
painters or musicians feel they’re supposed to engage in, to draw people closer to their work.
So I have a problem with your question. I don’t know … it’s
like, if you ever try to walk downstairs and think about it, you’ll
trip up because you’ve interfered with a reflex motion. You know that
story about … is it Sonny Rollins? Where someone in the nightclub tapes
a solo, notates it, then comes back the next night and says, “Here,
this is what you played.” And the musician looks at it and says, “Oh
no, man, I couldn’t play that.” [Laughs.] So the assumption
that you know exactly what you’re doing, I’ve never felt comfortable
with that. On the other hand, the way that story has been used, trying
to show the primitive, instinctual thing at its worst, I’ve never felt
comfortable with that either.
GL: Can I ask you about dance? I know in the ’60s and ’70s
you often collaborated with Judith Dunn. I wondered if dance has had a
significant influence on either your music or your painting?
BD: I’ll tell you this, Judith Dunn’s thinking and the way
she did choreography and the way she understood painting, the way she
understood Japanese culture—she had an enormous influence on my
thinking. She had an effect on my knowledge of dance, for example,
because she was remarkable in her concept of creating dance. She taught
a magnificent technical class. I saw her, one time, teach a technique
class when she was wearing heels! I’ve never seen anything like it! She
was one of a kind. Jack Moore too, who I worked with for a while, had
an influence on my thinking about dance. And Nancy Meehan, though I
never worked with her, we had conversations.
As a musician in the ’60s, I worked with a lot of interpretive
dancers; that’s how you learned to play. Almost all the musicians I
knew had a relationship to dance. It was one of the outlets, because
dancers always needed musicians and musicians always needed work, so
you had opportunities to play. And nothing could make you more aware of
rhythm and time in improvisation than playing for dance classes.
Before I learned to play piano adequately and functionally to service
the technique class, I would accompany classes on the trumpet; I was
that fluent. I did Judith Dunn’s classes like that originally: it
freaked people out, but I could do it, I could set the parameters
rhythmically with just a single line. Later on, in the teaching of
music at Bennington College, I taught all of my serious students of the
trumpet how to do this. In fact, all of the people who did advanced
work with me were required to play for dance class on their principal
instrument in addition to the piano.
So dance, yes, I guess I was influenced by it. But then I’ve been ‘influenced’ by everything. [Laughs.]
GL: We were talking earlier about the idea of a black
aesthetic. It seems to me that in the 1960s the Black Arts movement
held up music as the definitive model of black art, of a black
aesthetic. Do you think that’s a fair assessment of what was happening
at the time?
BD: It was happening for an obvious reason: at least the
music had visibility. Until the ’60s, you couldn’t go into a gallery
and see any representative black art. Blacks doing concert music had
gotten very little coverage. Whereas jazz … when the Black Arts people
talked about music, they were talking about jazz, and it did seem to be
at the center of black culture.
GL: One result of this was that—and I know you knew him—suddenly John Coltrane was taken up by all the black poets and …
BD: After the fact!
GL: After the fact?
BD: After the fact. Please, I mean, it was the easiest
thing in the world to write poems to John Coltrane. I have a whole
bunch of those things that people wrote. I feel very funny about that
because it’s one-sided, you know what I mean? It’s really one-sided,
where you can link your words with John Coltrane after John had
definitively done what he did. And most of them talk about A Love Supreme. I don’t think, myself, that A Love Supreme
is one of his best works. The playing is good, but it’s one of his
more accessible recordings and it caught on. And the poems they wrote!
It’s like they’re trying to make believe their poetry and what John was
doing are equal. NO! John went through hell to do what he was doing.
It reminds me of when we were doing music back in the late ’40s
and ’50s, a poet would jump up on the stand and read while the players
were playing. No one complained about it, you’d just continue to play.
Very few of those poets, though, really had anything to do with the
music. In fact, the only jazz poet I knew, whose poetry did
nothing on the page but had to be read aloud, was Ted Joans, who died
recently. When he read, he spoke rhythmically and in syntax like it had
something to do with the music. The rest of them adopt that singsong
manner, they sort of intone, and everyone sounds alike. The music is just an excuse for them to do what they’re doing.
John Coltrane didn’t play music because he heard somebody’s
poetry. I’ve never been in favor of that movement. I saw it as highly
opportunistic. I still do. The musician, not only is he being kicked
around anyway, but when he finally gets something going, here are these
people jumping on the bandwagon. Where were they earlier in John’s
life? Why has no one attempted to do a poem on ‘My Favorite Things’?
The way that works rhythmically, it could be interesting. Or on one of
those last duets with Rashied Ali on Interstellar Space,
‘Saturn’ or whatever, where it’s just pure playing? In my opinion, if
someone wanted to write about John Coltrane, that poet himself or
herself, their work would have to be as strong and as inscrutable as
certain areas of John Coltrane’s work were. Then, when they came
together, you might get something.
GL: But a poet needn’t replicate the music. Surely you
could write a poem about Coltrane’s music based on your responses to
his work?
BD: Sure, you could. But once you say “A Love Supreme,” we
know that would be your music. When you take anything that familiar …
it’s like playing ‘My Funny Valentine,’ if anybody gets up to play that
he’d be playing out of the trumpet. He could be playing it on the bass,
but it would be out of the trumpet—because that’s the association.
GL: Do you not think any of those poets were trying to depict Coltrane in heroic terms, say, rather than being opportunistic?
BD: It’s possible, but I don’t feel that way. I don’t
think it’s about dealing with him as a heroic figure. Most of the poems
I’ve read have been incredibly lightweight and almost embarrassing in
the ploy of the writers trying to identify themselves with the
musician.
The best writing about music that I ever read—and I read a lot of that stuff: Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn, John Clemmons’ The Horn,
all those books—was Jimmy Baldwin’s story ‘Sonny’s Blues.’ I used to
do staged readings of it at Bennington, where I assembled the actors
and directed them myself. I don’t know of anything else that purports
to deal with this music that’s as impressive, as painful, and as
revealing as ‘Sonny’s Blues.’ Because if you don’t feel anything about
the music, it’s difficult to write about a musician, to make that
person come alive on the page. I’ll tell you who else wrote very well,
and everybody tried to make you believe he didn’t: Mezz Mezzrow. I read
his Really the Blues and I didn’t understand why people were saying bad things about it. He speaks very authentically about that kind of life.
In the early 1960s, I don’t know why,
but I became very involved with Ezra Pound’s poetry to the degree that
I read everything I could get my hands on. Then I stopped with the Cantos.
I did some pieces of music using them as a framework. I can’t say I
understood a damn thing about them! This was when I was up at the
Cellar on 91st Street. I wrote a piece of music for solo trumpet and
bass and had a woman recite the Cantos in a certain kind of
way. No one knew what the hell was going on. It sounded good: there was
certainly no depth there, but I wasn’t trying to get something out of it, it was a framework.
GL: What’s happening with your own writing? You were working on the second volume of L’Opera and on your autobiography.
BD: I stopped working on the autobiography. I don’t think
the world’s ready for that, people would consider it much too negative.
I’ll probably never finish it. I am still working on the second volume
of L’Opera. If I can start to move Odyssey … I’ve
only sold about 300 copies, so I have to move that before I can do
anything else. I can’t incur any more debt. But I would like to do L’Opera.
I’m trying to keep it down, but it looks like it’s going to be at
least 400 pages. There are a lot of letters I’d like to have in there.
I’ve written a lot of letters. I think letters explain positions in a
way that people can find accessible. A letter is such a free-form
thing, it’s not like you’re writing an essay.
But I’ve got to get hold of some money. I’m interested in small
things; it’s too late for big things. I’ll never be popular. If the
world and I lasted a million years, there’ll always be someone ahead of
me in the popularity stakes. [Laughs.] I know it, you know it,
they know it. But I’m glad to be working: I do work, I do think. I’m
pissed off half the time, which makes it easier. If you’re pissed off
half the time, then you don’t have to get pissed off. [Laughs.] It’s like they say about turning the lights on and off—it’s cheaper to keep ’em on. Save that energy!
North Bennington, Vermont 6.8.03
All images © Bill Dixon Estate, 2010. Used by kind permission of Sharon Vogel.
Interview © Graham Lock, 2010.
