Bill Dixon: A Trumpeter in His 80s Feeds the Fires of His Revolution

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June 22, 2007

Music Review | Bill Dixon

A Trumpeter in His 80s Feeds the Fires of His Revolution

By NATE CHINEN, NY Times

“The new thing, the third great revolution in jazz, has suddenly found its audience.” Whitney Balliett wrote those words in 1965, bestowing a serious subculture with a modicum of approval. By his estimation, jazz’s first two revolutions had been spearheaded respectively by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. The “new thing,” a looser but better term than “the avant-garde,” seemed a bit more surprising in its appeal.

What led Mr. Balliett to his conclusion was the success of the October Revolution in Jazz, a new-thing festival held the previous year by a handful of intrepid musicians, and the Jazz Composers Guild, a related artist collective. In both cases the chief organizer was the trumpeter Bill Dixon, though he didn’t receive full and proper credit at the time.

This history bears more than a casual significance to the artists and audiences convening this week at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts for the 12th annual Vision Festival. On Wednesday night the festival honored Mr. Dixon with a lifetime recognition award, acknowledging the extent to which his early efforts still serve as a precedent. There was also the premiere of his latest large-scale work, an untitled hourlong composition that confirmed the depth and vitality of Mr. Dixon’s art.

Mr. Dixon, an eminence now in his 80s, played his trumpet in the middle third of the piece. Characteristically, his approach was both inventive and analytical, involving a catalog of textures — variously creaking, chortling or chuffing— along with a ghostly echo effect. Behind him, his 16-piece Sound Vision Orchestra ventured a collective improvisation, drawing from a similar sonic palette.

The first half-hour was more orchestral, beginning with a mysterious accretion of timbres. Its prologue was a solitary cry on soprano saxophone, followed by a pitch-bending rumble on timpani. Crescendos gathered, peaked and dispersed, with a bassoon and contrabass clarinet buzzing at one register and a line of saxophones fluttering in another.

Repeatedly there was a sharp, sudden quiet, then a free-form solo cadenza. Each of the group’s cornetists — Taylor Ho Bynum, Stephen Haynes and Graham Haynes — took one of these, starting out unaccompanied and ending with full ensemble support. Among other things, Mr. Dixon was exploring a balance of expansion and contraction and letting the players generate any number of internal arrangements.

During the final 15 minutes, he drove the group toward full-bore combustion, a shocking release after so much measured tension. His gestures as a conductor were simple and emphatic: seeking more intensity from his drummer, Jackson Krall, he mimed the bashing of a cymbal. At another point, leaning into the saxophone section, he waved both arms and shouted “More!,” inducing the desired effect. Eventually he cut the storm short and cued the final section, an afterimage consisting of ceremonial long tones.

Mr. Dixon’s performance was one highlight among many for the Vision Festival; a strong subsequent set featured the pianist Marilyn Crispell, the bassist Henry Grimes and the drummer Rashied Ali. This weekend the schedule will include rare appearances by Ganelin Trio Priority (tomorrow) and the South African drummer Louis Moholo (Sunday).

And the Orensanz Foundation will probably be packed, as it was Tuesday and Wednesday. Mr. Balliett might or might not have been right to say that the new music suddenly found an audience in 1965; what matters is that it’s still finding one, and that the feeling of suddenness still applies.

[clifford_thornton]

I would love to have seen that.

I love Bill Dixon.

[Late]

That concert sounds like it was a bitch ... in the best of ways.

Put me down as a Dixon fan, even if his trumpet playing still confuses me.