"Composition is the assembling of musical materials that are generally accessible to every musician and their placement into a new order."
"Improvisation is the instantaneous realization of composition without the benefits or demerits of change or alteration." Trumpeter/Composer Bill Dixon on Composition and Improvisation.
"Don't just jump indon't play right away." Bill Dixon's rich baritone voice quieted the assembled musicians without ever rising above a mezzoforte. "Listen to the note you're tuning to before you start to playI mean really listen to it."
The rehearsal had barely begun, and the concert was only hours away. It was June 20, 2007, and Dixon was to have his newest orchestral work premiered on the second night of the twelfth Vision Festival at the Angel Orensanz Center. Even before the first note of the third rehearsal sounded, Dixon had proven himself the profound teacher he has always been, rendering tuning an object lesson concerning the listening required for his music.
Starkly removed from history and tradition, and yet eerily and achingly redolent of its revolutionary moments, Dixon's compositions form an equally disparate and unified body of work that ranks among the finest this country has offered the world.
Born in 1925 in Massachusetts, Dixon moved with his family to New York in the 1930s, as it became the heated cultural amalgam that would produce so many important musical figures and movements, but Dixon's work has always existed at an angle from whatever trends he has encountered and absorbed. An admirer of musical forces as diverse as Charlie Parker, Boyd Raeburn and Anton Webern, Dixon began developing a voice that truly synthesized and transcended his influences.
Dixon often insists that he developed late, not picking up the trumpet, or any instrument for that matter, until 1946, after he had left the military. A visual artist before he had ever composed or played, he nevertheless developed his musical craft rapidly, studying hard and listening constantly, beginning a ceaseless search for that which would push his music forward. His organization and execution of the October Revolution in Jazz (October, 1964) and his subsequent formation of the Jazz Composer's Guild should be seen as just one facet of his lifelong effort to win proper and long overdue respect for what Dixon repeatedly calls "This music!" He has no patience for the term Jazz, which he sees as one more manifestation of the racism that has made small groups the primary vehicle for Black music and kept it in the indifferent settings of clubs and bars, where selling drinks and enforced inattentiveness remain paramount.
As with the October Revolution, 1964 saw what must have appeared to be an extraordinary development in Dixon's compositional style. His side of a shared LP with saxophonist Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon/Archie Shepp (Savoy, 1964), was leaps and bounds ahead of their 1962 Savoy album, Archie Shepp - Bill Dixon Quartet, but Dixon's compositions on live contemporary Five documents, released after the fact, reveal stunning compositional clarity. By the time the orchestral masterpiece Intents and Purposes was recorded for RCA in October of 1966, Dixon's work sounded like no other. Since then, each work has inhabited an elastic but defined universe; even if it shares motivic ideas with previous compositions, as happens with several of Dixon's 1960s pieces. His visionary approach to timbre and orchestration, dictated equally by necessity and invention, ensures the autonomy of each venture and of each involved individual's contribution to the whole.
There was a pregnant silence before the Sound and Vision Orchestra began to tune; the note was sounded and, again, a pause, a passage of enough time for the note to penetrateinto the room, then through every sound outside the room. The transformation in the orchestral playing was immediate and breathtaking, a precursor of what was to occur that evening.
This was my first exposure to a live Dixon rehearsal, for what was to be my first Dixon performance. For a year-and-a-half I have had the privilege of very frequent conversations with Dixon about his music, the music of his generation and before, about literature and about the politics of his generation and beforein short, about everything. I have heard rehearsal documents from his vast archive, but now I had the chance to watch Dixon's vision unfold in real time.