Bill Dixon Recording Residency
Firehouse 12/New Haven
Project Diary

July 9, 2008
Yesterday’s schedule of transportation had a few bumps along the way. Warren’s car broke down somewhere outside of Bridgeport. Fortunately, Taylor and Graham were enroute and able to pull over and meet Warren. The percussion equipment was loaded into Taylor’s already crowded coupe along with Anton, Warren’s assistant, carted to Firehouse 12 and offloaded. Later, Taylor drove back and collected Warren.

Bill had a productive morning with Nick, and succeeded in setting up his equipment and blocking the stations for all of the ensemble members. The recording contract was also discussed in some detail.

Meanwhile, I made two airport runs. First, picking up Rob, who came back to my house for a late lunch of buffalo mozzarella with basil and olive oil and a few glasses of pinot grigio. We had a long conversation about our shared desire to create performing opportunities for this ensemble (or some variation of it) and Bill during the coming season.

We realized that Sharon (Bill’s partner) has a birthday coming soon. On the way back to the airport, we stopped at Mozzicato Di Paquale Bakery on Franklin Avenue in Hartford's South End to pick up the previously-ordered cake (forgot to mention yesterday was Rob’s birthday), adding Sharon’s name to it, and then swung over to Spiritus Wines to get a bottle of calvados as a gift.

We collected Michel (resplendent in blue tropical shorts) and Isabell and drove down to New Haven with Ruben Blades (Mundo) and Dizzy Gillespie (Old and New) on the box. We all agreed that there is a clear connection (heard so well in these earl sixties quintet recordings!) between Dizzy’s work-his sound/use of dynamics/register, air attack, articulation and Bill’s conception. Ask Bill about Dizzy sometime. Begin with the stories about going to watch the big band rehearsing in the fifties.

After all the layered events of the day, we managed to spend time before dinner playing some music. Bill sat at the piano and dictated a lovely, three-phrase, lyrical line. This was then played as a canon with all the brass players entering in staggered fashion and gradually extrapolating from the material. Bill had rediscovered this line in an old notebook and worked at it on the piano at his home studio (where it sounded considerably darker). The material had originally been written for a duo concert at Judson church with Judith Dunn in the sixties.

The evening was capped off by a dinner at the wonderful Chinese restaurant across the street from Firehouse 12. The steamed fish and tofu, pea pod greens with garlic and twice-cooked pork were slammin’ but nothing compared to the company and storytelling that swirled around the table as folks got reacquainted and new friendships began to be forged. As usual, the hippest rehearsal is always dinner!

Images of Bill & Taylor by Nick Cretens/my studio setup by Isabelle Moisan.

Bill Dixon Recording Residency
Firehouse 12/New Haven
Project Diary

July 8, 2008
Spent yesterday on a long leisurely drive to Bill’s home in Vermont, then drove Bill and his partner Sharon down the hill to New Haven. The best thing about my driving trips with Bill are the stories. He told one that took place early in the fifties, revolving around a touring big band that included Dennis Charles and Cecil Taylor. Someone should write a book (and I don’t mean Dixonia) filled with these anecdotes. Perhaps an audio book, as more than half the fun resides in the delivery and the sound of Bill's voice.

Today we begin the technical setup for the recording and film process. Bill hits the studio in the morning with Nick Lloyd, engineer and director of Firehouse 12. Warren Smith will roll in mid-afternoon to set up his battery of instruments: tympani, vibraphone, marimba, drums and percussion. Videographer Robert O’Haire will be there capturing the early work and getting his feet wet. Our photographer, Nick Ruechel, will arrive early Wednesday morning. The rest of the ensemble will arrive throughout the afternoon and early evening from Chicago, Quebec, Boston, Connecticut and New York.

Bill plans to play the piano, a lovely Steinway, and has asked for a large black board.

We finish the day with a big family style meal, during which Bill will begin the reveal of his plans for the ensemble and set the tone for the next few days.

The last image was taken by Isabelle Moisan of Ken Filiano's setup.

Peter Zummo in the Woods
Montague Bookmill and Café
Montague Center, MA

After meeting Peter (and Jon Gibson) years ago through JD Parran, I have recently had the pleasure of playing with Peter at Roulette with Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra. I always thought Peter would be fun and I was right.

Peter just called me for an informal concert in Massachusetts, an hour from here. He will mike and manipulate the sound of the river that flows outside this historic converted 1842 grist mill site. And that's just for starters...

The ensemble is called HER and features Peter, Yvette Perez and Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers). Ernie unexpectedly can’t make the gig, so my Hartford friend Todd Merrell has agreed to tag along and add his sonic seasonings to the broth.

Should be fun.

Bill Dixon Orchestra Reviews and News
Signal to Noise and WIRE

First, a thoughtful and nuanced assessment of the new 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur by Marc Medwin from the Summer 2008 issue of Signal to Noise.

This release, recorded at last year’s Vision Festival, is the first publicly available document of Bill Dixon’s orchestral work in forty years. The landmark Intents and Purposes, released on RCA/Victor in 1967, remains inexplicably and unjustly out of print. Consequently, Darfur is the only example of his orchestral music in the CD era, aside from his recent collaboration with Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra on Thrill Jockey.

I attended the performance as well as a rehearsal, where I watched the music taking shape under Dixon’s incisive guidance. The 16-piece orchestra assembled for the occasion featured a stellar line-up that emphasized wind instruments (participants included Karen Borca, Taylor Ho Bynum, Andrew Raffo Dewar and Steve Swell); throughout they played with unflagging energy and understanding of Dixon’s idiom.

What separates the live and recorded experience is the sheer volume of detail obtainable from repeated listening. One of my most vivid memories of the concert involves the all-encompassing chord that is now aptly called “Intrados” (the inner curve of an archway). In both rehearsal and performance, it swelled to fill the whole room, threatening to overflow into the street below and hush it with its unnerving beauty. On the disc, the chord is revealed to be a series of undulating sustains; Michel Côté’s contrabass clarinet is one of the first instruments to swim into focus, but repeated listening demonstrates a series of interconnected but fluid masses of sound. Jackson Krall’s cymbals shimmer and roar as Warren Smith’s vibes trill, providing a transparent backdrop over which the wind instruments slowly dance.

“Intrados” turns out to be a microcosm of the whole hour-long structure of arching crescendos and decrescendos where the orchestra swells and fades as a single body; at times the music even suggests the interwoven cycles of Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître.

“Countour II” is half an arch, an astounding upward sweep ending on a plateau of unisons and trills, with Dixon’s “Hit it!” indicating the high energy level in the performance spacet; the astonishing further elongation in the 23-minute “Sinopia.” The arch is, however, not the only structural device at play; disjunct, highly chromatic unison passages recur throughout the work, notably during “In Search of a Sound” and “Darfur.” The latter is a menacing study in semitones, stark thirds and rapid-fire interjections, shot through with the tympani’s repeated rhythmic pattern. The unison passages never repeat exactly, adding another evolving layer to Dixon’s multivalent structure. That structure deserves careful analysis beyond the limits of a CD review.

If the chaos of the “Darfur” section invokes that region’s current state, do the series or “Pentimenti” imply an uncertain outcome to the conflict? In any case, 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 discernable. If Darfur eclipses Intents and Purposes in scope, it is because Dixon has made huge compositional advances that are still little known to the general public. I hope that this fine addition to his discography, coupled with a renewed interest in his work, will allow more of Dixon’s orchestra compositions to be performed by equally sympathetic interpreters.

The July 2008 issue of WIRE contains a feature article on Bill, The Great Learning, written by Phil Freeman and accompanied by wonderful photographs of Bill at home and in his studio produced by Mark Mahaney. Bill's conversation with Phil is also available online-highly recommended!

Image of the Bill Dixon by Nan Melville

Bill Dixon Recording Residency Project
Firehouse 12/New Haven, CT

We will spend the first week in July encamped at the wonderful Firehouse 12. Bill has gathered another singular grouping of improvisers that centers on brass; specifically trumpet and cornet players that have been influenced by Bill's work. We will rehearse, record, and film new work for a nine-piece ensemble. The resulting product will be issued on the Firehouse 12 Label early in 2009.

Funding for the project is from Firehouse 12 (big thanks to Nick Lloyd!) and the LEF Foundation with essential support from FONT: The Festival of New Trumpet Music.

Taylor Ho Bynum, Nick Lloyd, Sharon Vogel and I are managing and coordinating the project with Bill.

Bill Dixon/trumpet, electronics, leader
Taylor Ho Bynum/cornet. flugelhorn
Stephen Haynes/trumpet, cornets, flugelhorn
Graham Haynes/cornet, flugelhorn, electronics
Rob Mazurek/cornet, electronics
Michel Côté/contrabass clarinet
Glynis Loman/cello
Ken Filiano/double bass violin
Warren Smith/drums and percussion

Portrait of Bill Dixon by Nick Ruechel, who will join us at Firehouse 12 as photographer in residence.

17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur
The Bill Dixon Orchestra

Recorded in Concert/2007 Vision Festival

This stunning new release of Bill's work for orchestra is recorded on the AUM Fidelity label and will be available June 24. Wanting to avoid hyperbole, I will simply describe the music-it's performance, the composition-as a landmark in Bill's ouevre.

The ensemble was hand picked by Bill, relationship-based in the definitive tradition of Ellington, and includes players who have known/worked with Bill for over thirty years. That front-loaded familiarity is apparent in the remarkable cohesiveness of performance in a less than optimum rehearsal/performance environment.

To create Intents and Purposes during the sixties, Bill used a through-composed methodology. "This was the only way that I could be sure to get what I wanted from the musicians at the time." Bill's method now is a seamless blend of calligraphic notation, conducting and placement of elements and ways of moving revealed during the rehearsal process organically woven together with charismatic leadership ("in this music, if you are a leader, the notation is how you enter the room, how you take your horn out of it's case") in the moment -everything informs the music.

Bill is truly a painter of sound.

Buy the recording, take it home, turn it up loud and listen. The dynamics range from a whisper to a roar and the music will give your shivers and make you scream for joy!

Portrait of Bill Dixon by Nick Ruechel