This is a session diary from the recording of Bill Dixon‘s Tapestries For Small Orchestra, released in 2009 on Firehouse 12. Written by trumpeter Stephen Haynes, a collaborator of Dixon’s since the 1980s, it originally appeared in the first print edition of Burning Ambulance.

WEAVING THE TAPESTRY: A BILL DIXON SESSION DIARY

Introduction: Why the Orchestra?

From the outset of his musical development, Bill Dixon studied avidly, and then composed for orchestra. His own words circa 1960 are instructive in this regard:

“Around that time I was trying to break away from being just academic with the material. I was trying to play, but I really would have liked to have had things that I had written played by large ensembles. One of the things that I did not like about jazz was that everything was a trio or quartet (to be practical, because the work needed to get done and might not wait for a large band opportunity) or, if you were lucky, a quintet or sextet. I didn’t know why creative musicians settled for that. I didn’t know why it had to be that or a big band, or why ‘orchestra’ was a bad word.”

From the historic mid-Sixties work of the Jazz Composer’s Guild, the recording of Intents and Purposes for RCA, and the storied orchestra at the University of the Streets, through Dixon’s tenures at the University of Wisconsin and Bennington College, having and working with an orchestra has been at the heart of his musical oeuvre.

The past three years have seen a marked increase in performances and recordings of orchestral work by Dixon. Following 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, a live recording at the 2007 Vision Festival in New York which was released on AUM Fidelity, he began an ongoing association with Rob Mazurek and the Exploding Star Orchestra, making a live album with them for the Thrill Jockey label. He then recorded Tapestries for Small Orchestra in 2008; it was released in late 2009. This spring, Dixon plans to bring the ensemble that recorded Tapestries to the annual Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada, to perform and record.

Tapestries for Small Orchestra

During rehearsals for the music released as 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur, a number of musicians commented on how unfortunate it was that we had so little time together. A significant portion of the ensemble consisted of musicians who had been associated with Bill Dixon, and with each other in a variety of configurations over the past 20 to 30 years, either as students or colleagues. Leaving aside the extended-family social dynamics afforded by most large ensemble work in avant-garde music and the need for ample time to prepare new work for performance (and the limitations springing from not having enough time), what became quite clear to some of us was the need for a working orchestra that serves the music, and Dixon’s oeuvre in particular.

I began asking musicians if they would be interested in rehearsing with Bill, qualifying the request by stating the obvious: that there would not be, initially or for some time, any money connected with the work. Everyone I spoke with said they would love to have the opportunity to work regularly with Bill, and Bill was intrigued by the idea. The last person that I spoke to was Taylor Ho Bynum, and his response was to suggest that we pursue funding for the project.

After talking to Bill about what he might like to do, we consulted the LEF Foundation about the project. The plan was to convene a chamber orchestra at Firehouse 12, a recording studio and performance space in New Haven, Connecticut. We wanted to spend several days rehearsing and recording new music and to invite a photographer and documentary filmmaker to participate in the residency process. The finished product would be released on Firehouse 12 Records. We wanted to introduce Bill to a New England workspace closer to his Vermont home than New York or Chicago (home of the Exploding Star Orchestra), a place where projects might take place from time to time.

Firehouse 12 Recording Residency

Bill mapped the instrumentation of the residency ensemble to provide a showcase for several trumpet/cornet players whose work and approach to the instrument he finds interesting. Out of an international wish list of six to eight players, he opted to reconvene the section from 17 Musicians, adding a new confrére from São Paulo by way of Chicago, Rob Mazurek. Rob had recently begun studies with Bill, and had commissioned him to compose, perform and record for and with the Exploding Star Orchestra during the 2007 Chicago Jazz Festival.

New Haven was a friendly and familiar work site, as Bill had already spent time at Firehouse 12 the preceding fall, when we mixed 17 Musicians.  Bill was comfortable with in-house engineer Nick Lloyd as a result of that intensive mixing process, during which Lloyd repaired a damaged set of master recordings from that 2007 Vision Festival performance. What follows is adapted from the daily project journal that I kept and posted on my blog.

Monday, July 7, 2008

We spent today on a long, leisurely drive up to Bill’s home in Vermont, and then drove Bill and his partner Sharon down the mountain to New Haven. The best thing about my driving trips with Bill is the stories. He told one that took place in the early Fifties, revolving around a touring big band that included Denis 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.

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

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

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

Tuesday, July 9, 2008

Yesterday’s planned schedule of transportation had a few bumps along the way. Warren’s car, a vintage Mercedes, broke down somewhere outside of Bridgeport. Fortunately, Taylor Ho Bynum and Graham Haynes were en route and were able to pull over and connect with Warren. The percussion equipment was loaded into Taylor’s already crowded coupe along with Warren’s assistant Anton, carted to Firehouse 12 and offloaded. Later, Taylor drove back to Bridgeport and collected Warren. The Mercedes remained in Bridgeport for repairs.

Bill had a productive morning in the Firehouse 12 studio working with Nick, and succeeded in setting up his equipment and blocking out positions for the ensemble members. The recording contract was also discussed in some detail.

Meanwhile, I made two airport runs. First, picking up Rob Mazurek, 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, had 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 July 8 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 Côté (resplendent in blue tropical shorts) and his wife Isabell and drove down to New Haven with Ruben Blades’ Mundo and Dizzy Gillespie’s Old and New on the box. We all agreed that there is a clear connection (heard so well in these early sixties quintet recordings!) between Dizzy’s work—his sound, use of dynamics, register, air attack, and 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 overlapping events of the day, we managed to spend time before dinner playing some music together as an ensemble. Bill sat at the piano and dictated a lovely, lyrical, three-phrase 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 mid-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!

Wednesday, July 10, 2008

Yesterday we worked from ten in the morning until 11:00 PM, with breaks for meals. Much was accomplished, but the way ahead was not easy at first. Bill spent the first half of the day working relentlessly to get the ensemble members to surrender so that they could receive and fully inhabit the music. When we finally did manage to cross this creative threshold with the completion of the first fully realized and recorded ensemble piece, it was a relief. The material for the first piece was a suite-like combination of the line for Judith Dunn, delivered as a chorale, and a page of new lines that Bill had written for the residency week. He finally ended up dividing the new lines, giving each brass player a phrase and instructing us to use this material as the basis for the development of individual voices in the composition.

After lunch, a spontaneous trio of Bill, Ken Filiano and Warren Smith emerged. No directions, just pure music created in the moment between three sympathetic individuals. The first piece was a long arc, slow-moving and beautiful. Suddenly, Bill leapt into aggressive movement: bursts of pure sound driven by force through the horn, visceral and vocal. Ken laid a rhythmic bed and Warren moved across the vibraphone, marimba and cymbals. The music made us all want to dance. Michel was in tears when Bill finished. Pure joy!

Next, Bill developed new music for the full ensemble through dictation, employing a deceptively simple grouping of three pitches (“call this an exercise”) that, when employed independently by the brass, created either subtly phased unison lines or clusters of pitches—what I would call cloud sound. On top of this, Bill built layers of sound with the rest of the ensemble and then weaved through the entirety with his singular trumpet voice.

During a break, in conversation with Graham, he talked about one of the primary and persistent difficulties that flowed from this instrumentation: finding one’s place in a cluster of brass players who all, though possessing distinct voices, have consistently dark sounds. Both Graham and Rob have employed electronics today, but even that method does not solve the problem completely.

We ended the evening in a sound environment that was unlike any I have ever heard or participated in before. Again, no instructions were issued, not even a signal to start. Bill began slowly, softly intoning pitches. I added a drone, a single pitch in the pedal register, and stayed in that position without variation. What unfolded was almost dreamlike in quality, and had the feeling of suspension, with motion so slow as to be almost imperceptible, shimmering like light on water. For a long moment after we finished, no one spoke or moved.

Thursday, July 10, 2008

We began the morning early, filming the ensemble without Bill, seated in a semicircle downstairs in the wine bar below the recording studio. Questions were directed to the entire group and to individual musicians. Some wonderful stories of experiences with Bill arose, along with a range of mostly parallel takes/assessments of the methodology that Bill employs in creating music and his overall significance in “this music.”

When we went upstairs to warm up, we discovered that Bill had already begun to work at the piano, and he continued this while we prepared, finally voicing an entire page of horizontal material that we had used the previous day. What had been employed before as distinct but linked language sets for each brass player now became a slowly moving harmonic bed played by the brass for an improvising group of contrabass clarinet, cello, bass, marimba and vibes.

It is worth noting one particular aspect of the music that we produced over the two days of recording that is distinct from the work produced with the full orchestra (17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur) during the summer of 2007. Nothing that we did here was conducted by Bill. He would rehearse sequences and events, adding verbal notes or demonstrating changes in individual/group stance (e.g., attack, spacing), and then he’d say “Okay, let’s try this. It should go on for about twenty minutes.” The music would begin. Bill would listen intently and occasionally make subtle indications when they were needed. For the most part, though, he would let the music unfold naturally, making corrections verbally afterwards and then recording another version. We seldom used playback as a tool.

Nick Ruechel took some marvelous formal portraits of Bill, alone and with different groupings of musicians against a white background, and got images of the full ensemble in front of Firehouse 12. Isabelle (Michel’s wife) stood back from the goings-on and took additional shots of the photo shoot in progress.

The ensemble arrived at a particular place at the end of the second day of recording that would have been a nice starting point for a longer creative arc. We really could have used another week to work together. Food for thought, and indicative of the ironies and the struggle inherent in creative work in this culture during these times.

Postscript

For a variety of reasons, the mixing work for the project did not take place until after the first of the year. As usual, Nick Lloyd did an initial blocking of the sound panorama and mix. We brought Bill down to New Haven for the final mix work in January 2009. Bill had worked with Nick rescuing, mixing and mastering the master recordings of 17 Musicians in Search of a Sound: Darfur. Watching him work in tandem with the engineer, both in 2008 for Darfur and a year later on Tapestries, brought to mind the work of Miles Davis and Teo Macero. Bill utilizes the recording studio as another tool in his composer’s toolkit. Hearing him reveal layers of line and voice was as instructive as working on the recording had been the previous summer.

Reading the raft of reviews that continue to arrive in response to the release of Tapestries, it is clear that one of our goals in the project—that of opening a small window for the audience into the work process that Dixon employs—has had a mixed result. There appears to be a lingering confusion in some of the critical response regarding notated material provided to the musicians for the creation of Tapestries.

I recently asked Bill what the difference was in his approach to notating his music now in comparison with the work he produced for Intents and Purposes. Students of Bill’s work will know that a large part of what may seem like improvised performance is in fact notated.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have written a lot less,” he told me. This is not to be construed as a move towards minimal material, but rather a shifting or broadening of communication methodology on Dixon’s part—a fully mature understanding of the place of written notation in the job of conveying musical language and compositional intent to a set of musicians. Dixon engages multiple intelligences when conveying composition to ensemble. And the communication of the idea is just as layered, just as complex, as the music produced.

Glynis Lomon:

My mom is a composer and I grew up listening, constantly, to 20th century music. I enjoyed the sound, but I found the music too intellectual. I also loved rock ’n’ roll, but found that music very boring to play.

When I arrived at Bennington College in 1973, I thought I’d be playing chamber music in the woods with other women. I also wanted to dance in an improv class for dancers and musicians. I was refused as a dancer, but joined the class as a musician.

That’s when I met Bill Dixon. I had no idea who he was—his significance. If I had known, I would have been too shy to play.

At the end of the term Bill invited me to join the Black Music Ensemble. I went to listen to a rehearsal, and from the first I knew that this was what I had always wanted to play. One particular remark Bill made to me during the recording of Tapestries stayed with me: a reference to creating a sound like shattered glass.

Warren Smith:

I remember the first time I worked with Bill at the Vision Festival, on Index. He had me play tympani and orchestra bells. He made me do some stuff that I had never done before! I don’t even remember what I did, but it was completely in response to the way Bill played, almost in desperation to find a sound solution. People like that make you leave the beaten path to look for something new.

Bill always says that he does not want to sound like any other trumpet player. This is something that is very important to him. I believe that his students on the horn have taken this advice: they all sound more like themselves than they sound like Bill. This is really his deep influence on them.

Ken Filiano:

I remember reading Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar while we worked with Bill that summer. I wrote a note in the margins of the book, ‘breaking our attachments to the shticks which are our shadows in the music.’ Look, I have a shtick, you have a shtick, even Bill has a shtick. Everything that he did during the recording was to make it so we could clearly see the music, the group sound, rather than our individual thing. That is so important, and it’s a subtle essence in 20th century music: we have the improvisation, the individual/learned voice; but then finding the collective voice, that’s the thing!

You know, I think Bill left New York to get away from his shtick.

—Stephen Haynes