Bill Dixon/Tapestries for Small Orchestra
Firehouse 12 Records
I wrote this
essay in 2009 for the liner notes for Bill Dixon's Tapestries for Small
Orchestra. I have decided to share this work here for those who have not
had the opportunity to listen to/read from the recording project.
The Influence of
Bill Dixon
I first met Bill
Dixon during the fall of 1973. I was eighteen, studying at Rhode Island
School of Design, and walked into his studio at Bennington College during a
short visit to the campus. I spent the better part of an afternoon listening to
him talk, work and teach. Bill was developing a series of solo trumpet
language/pieces, many of which are now documented on the Odyssey box set. He
had a Revox reel-to-reel tape deck and two microphones set up by the studio
window. From time to time, Bill would approach the recorder, wind back what he
had been working on, listen to a bit of it and then continue the ongoing
narrative. I had never seen anything like this before, not to mention the
singular sensation of Bill’s sound and the charismatic, enveloping quality of
his persona.
Three years
later, after multiple visits to Vermont, I moved north and began an intense and
formative period of deep study with Bill that lasted six years. In fact, though
our relationship is far more layered now than it was thirty years ago, the
mentorship continues. This spring, I asked him to give me lessons in
composition, inspired by witnessing his own voracious appetite for new
knowledge (he recently spent a weekend in New York attending a seminar in
scoring music for film).
Those of us who
pay attention to Bill’s work, and to what is said about it, have seen frequent
commentary during the past decade citing Bill’s primary influence upon a new
generation of trumpet players. He is arguably the next evolutionary step in the
growth and technical development of the instrument, following Dizzy Gillespie’s
ground-breaking work in the 1940s and ‘50s. Go back and listen to Bill’s
articulation and technique, evident as early as the mid-sixties on recordings,
and then listen to Dixon in full flower during the seventies and eighties. Dig
the sonic singularity expressed in Odyssey, an almost Olympic meditation (or
method book?) on the potential inherent in the solo trumpet; or the visceral
linear liquidity captured in November 1981. His limning of the unexplored
areas of the trumpet through consistent, controlled usage of multiphonics and
extended range alone earns Bill the mantle of trumpet innovator.
This continued
spirit of sonic exploration is evidenced by Dixon’s current thrust on the trumpet:
his mapping and harnessing of the lower, ‘off the horn,’ pedal register (who
else exhibits such controlled articulation there?); his use of electronics,
delay and reverberation, as well as his employment of extreme modality of
attack and articulation - sounds that carry the quality of spiritual possession
in their delivery, evocative of speaking in tongues. It is worth noting that
all of this new work is framed within/arises from the context/effect of
age/longevity on physicality coupled with stored experience, sustained study
and daily experimentation. Just as one hears a timbral shift in the late work
of singers (the past ten years of Abby Lincoln’s work) or wind players
(compare/contrast Ben Webster as ‘rabbit’ with twenties Ellington to his ballad
work with Art Tatum at the Patio Lounge in 1956: air as tone/note) that
simultaneously evidences un-invited/welcome limitation while opening a doorway
to new musical pathways, Dixon’s currently decreased employment of upper
register multiphonics reflects organic change and the artist’s use of what is
available to create new work.
Compositional
Chronotopes Meet Pragmatism in Practice
“Notation, in
this music, especially if you are a leader, can be the way you enter the room;
even how you take your horn out the case.”
“You use what
works; what doesn’t work you discard.”
-Bill Dixon
Dixon’s work as
an instrumentalist and composer is informed and infused by an extended view of
narrative - both the sense of the long line (extensions of playing ‘across the
bar lines’) and in the broader arena of orchestration and arrangement. Listen
closely to the work in this new recording and you will hear melodies that move
by so slowly that they begin to transmute from the horizontal into the
vertical. Again, it is worth referencing the seasoning effect of age, as if
comparing a ballad delivered by a twenty year old to a version spun by a
veteran artist. We are not simply talking about a minimalist approach, but one
that profoundly embraces and inhabits the notion that less is indeed more: a
single note as a symphony. Few practitioners (even amongst the ‘influenced
generation’) have understood and/or evidenced this core aspect of Dixon’s
music: his singular sense of time (as an individual voice and in the ensemble
context) and his way of organizing the music (composition).
The landmark
mid-sixties recording Intents and Purposes was primarily a
through-composed/scored piece of music. “At the time,” Dixon remarks, “this was
the only way to be sure to get what I wanted.” Just recently, Bill told
me that if he knew then what he knows now he would have written a lot less.
During the summer of 2007, in preparation for the work that became 17 Musicians
in Search of a Sound: Darfur, Dixon produced over one hundred pages of material
for the orchestra. As the dates of the rehearsal approached, he was faced with
striking a delicate balance between the amount of calligraphic notation he had
created and the modest amount of rehearsal time available. Bill did what he has
done with increasing frequency in similar situations: he reduced the quantity
of written material and concentrated, during rehearsal, on direct composition/ communication
of intent. Not for nothing, Dixon’s choice of musicians for the project flowed
directly from the Ellingtonian modality of orchestration: all players he knew
and trusted, with some relationships stretching back over thirty years. He
taught the ensemble specific language and indicated possible ways of moving
through material, ultimately crafting a piece that is as revolutionary a
statement for its day as Intents and Purposes was forty years earlier.
Coming full
circle to the development of the music at Firehouse 12 last summer, Dixon
brought these principles to a more intimate setting, carefully creating an
intentional environment that drew this smaller orchestra into his very
particular sensibility. This is not a soloist’s music: there is no emphasis on
the individual as being separate or distinct from the sonic whole. Indeed a
Tapestry, the listener will discover a weaving of the individual as orchestra
into a suite for multiple improvising orchestras. It is a layered creative
world made up of nine carefully chosen musicians, offering a new window into
the wonderful vision of one uniquely American artist: Bill Dixon.
Image of Stephen Haynes and Bill Dixon by Ken Weiss taken in Philadelphia/2009
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