Bill Dixon was born October 5, 1925 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. He spoke with a strong New England accent and a Yankee’s disdain for pretense. He said what he meant and did not suffer fools.

Two years before his death, I interviewed him for The Wire. It turned out to be his last major interview, and the first thing he said to me after an exchange of greetings was, “Anything that I don’t want to discuss, I just won’t discuss.”

Dixon got a late start; he studied painting before going into the military, and only focused on the trumpet after coming back after World War II. In the 1950s, he got a job at the United Nations, and there formed the UN Jazz Society, which gathered to discuss new records and occasionally brought in performers, including a young Cecil Taylor.

Dixon was always an organizer. In the early 1960s, he put on a series of concerts dubbed the October Revolution In Jazz, which in turn led to the establishment of the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild, a cooperative that foundered on the ultimate inability of musicians to cooperate. And in 1968, he joined the faculty of Bennington College, where he formed the Black Music Division and where he would remain until 1995.

By the time he left “the scene” to become a professor, though, he had already established himself as a major artist. He recorded one album with a quartet co-led with Archie Shepp, one side of another album shared with a Shepp-led ensemble, and his full-length debut as a leader, 1967’s Intents and Purposes. He had also made a memorable appearance on Taylor’s second Blue Note album, Conquistador! — something he told me, only half in jest, had overshadowed his own work in many jazz fans’ minds.

“There are two groups of people that generally approach me about my work”, he said. “One group is talking about the work I did when I was working with Archie and the one recording where I play one five- or six-minute solo on a Cecil Taylor record. And the other group wants to know, based on what I’m doing now, could I revisit, just for them, some of the things I used to do so that they could be sure that I was certified enough to do what I do now.”

(When I interviewed Archie Shepp in 2014, he described Dixon as “like an older brother to me” and said, “I always liked Bill and respected him; as a younger man, he always gave me good advice… We had a very good relationship.”)

Dixon’s discography is small, by jazz standards; only 20 titles under his own name, and another half dozen appearances as sideman or special guest. That’s a catalog an interested listener could round up pretty easily, save for a few out-of-print titles (the two volumes of 1970s recordings released as Considerations 1 and 2, and Weight/Counterweight, a 2009 double LP with percussionists Aaron Siegel and Ben Hall).

In 1967, Dixon released Intents and Purposes, his first real masterpiece. It featured a ten-member ensemble on the opening “Metamorphosis 1962-1966”, a quintet on “Voices”, and was rounded out by two trumpet-flute duets, “Nightfall Pieces” I and II. The music was scored and arranged; this was not “free jazz” in any sense. The two long tracks are multi-part suites, and although the players utilized avant-garde compositional and performance techniques, they did so within parameters laid out by Dixon. The album was out of print for decades, but there was a beautiful CD reissue some years ago (I own a copy) and it can now be found on streaming services. It has an extraordinary, stunning beauty, much closer to modern chamber music than jazz, and is a must-hear for anyone who thinks they know what was going on in avant-garde music in the 1960s.

In 1968 and 1969, Dixon produced albums by Marzette Watts, Marc Levin, Robert Pozar, and Ed Curran for the Savoy label, but recorded no further music of his own. And then he went off to Bennington, where he described himself as being “in total isolation from the market places of this music.”

That was quite deliberate. When we spoke for The Wire, he told me that teaching was “a sanctuary [in the sense that] well, at least you didn’t have to drive a cab. You didn’t have to do this or that. You knew every day what your life was going to be. You knew that when you finished your courses, what you could do. You could practice.”

Some of the results of that practice were released in 2001. Odyssey was a self-released box containing six CDs — five of music, and one of an interview — and two 32-page booklets. The first of those included interviews with Dixon, and essays on his work by Ben Young, Graham Lock, and others. The second reproduced some of his paintings (Dixon had been painting his own album covers for decades). The package also included a few reproductions of photos, and another small pamphlet. A thousand copies of the set were made, all signed; mine is #612.

In the 1970s, in isolation, Dixon began working extensively with electronics, specifically reverb and echo pedals. His playing style could be extremely aggressive. He worked frequently in the trumpet’s lower registers, creating loose, heavy-breathing streams of rumbling, groaning notes. But he also erupted in extraordinarily fast, upper-register outbursts that shrieked and gabbled like entire flocks of birds, the pedals giving the sound a cloudy, disorienting feel, even/especially when, as on “The Long Walk”, the stereo field was split so he was able to move from the left to the right speaker and create ringing feedback in between.

Some of the tracks, particularly on the first disc, are very short. “Mosaic”, “Shrike” and “Albert Ayler” are less than a minute long each. But “Jerusalem”, which opens the third disc, stands apart from everything else. It’s a live recording, not a studio effort; it was recorded in the titular city, not in Vermont; and it runs nearly 27 minutes. It’s an absolute storm of sound, performed with two microphones, one of which is “clean” and the other of which is hooked up to reverb and delay effects. The result is a kind of dialogue between Dixon and a warped, phantom version of himself, playing his lines back in distorted form.

Beginning in the 1980s, Dixon returned to public performance and the recording studio. His releases, on the Soul Note label, were often paired: In Italy, Vade Mecum, and Papyrus were each two-volume sets, while Thoughts and Son Of Sisyphus were single (and singular) stand-alone studio albums, and November 1981 was a double LP (one studio, one live) later cut down and re-sequenced for CD. The live portion was recorded on a double bill with Cecil Taylor’s Unit; their performance was released as The Eighth.

Dixon and Taylor had a fascinating relationship that went back to the 1950s. The trumpeter described the pianist as “the principal underground musician in New York at that time who — whether people wanted to believe it or not — was working in a way that previously hadn’t been thought of as what jazz musicians did.” They were more than peers; they were friends. In a 1982 interview, Dixon said, “I knew Taylor when he was a dishwasher, when he served in the capacity of a ‘delivery boy’; I worked in an area, as a shipping clerk, where he once had a job delivering lunches in the Madison Avenue advertising district and on my lunch hour I would go with him on his ‘rounds’ so that we could continue our discussions of things that we both felt were rather important in terms of the plight of the Black artist in America.”

On the few occasions that they recorded or performed together, Dixon was able to accomplish something no one else ever could: He got Taylor to embrace his aesthetic, rather than the other way around. The way his trumpet solo on the pianist’s Conquistador! album cuts through the music, taking it to an entirely new place, is stunning and never repeated anywhere else in Taylor’s discography. And their next documented encounter, the 2002 concert released as Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley, feels like the pianist and drummer are playing Dixon’s music. A collection of studio duets, recorded in Italy in 1992 but not released until long after each man had died, was a similarly fraught yet affectionate encounter.

Trumpeter Stephen Haynes, who played with both men, told me, “like with a lot of friendships and [especially] male friendships, they had good years and they had bad years, so they’d be pissed off at each other. They’d always come back to each other. They loved each other. I mean, really, really deeply.”

There was a competitive aspect to the relationship that could grow combative. In 2001, Taylor called Dixon “undoubtedly one of the great voices in American music today”, but twenty years earlier he’d said he could “accurately assess the extent of his genius” and thereby use Dixon in his music. Meanwhile, Haynes recalled, “Bill often characterized his relationship with Cecil [by] saying, Well, I’m the only one that can tell him the truth about what he’s doing, whether it works or doesn’t work.”

This may have provoked Taylor at times, particularly the notion that he had ever shaped his own music to align better with Dixon’s concept, which is obvious to anyone who listens to the Victoriaville album or the Italian studio duets. When we met in 2016, Taylor told me, “You know something? Dixon was one of the most selfish people I’ve ever met, and really extraordinarily cruel… Bill came from the same part of [Massachusetts] that [W.E.B.] Du Bois came from. I mean, really study Du Bois, he was brilliant, but he didn’t care anything about spiritualism. Bill Dixon was a cruel man.”

I don’t think either of those things were true. No one who was “selfish” or “cruel” would have spent so much time working for the betterment of others, from the founding of the UN Jazz Society to the Jazz Composers Guild to his decades as an educator. I think often of several things Dixon told me during our interview.

The first was his work with the Free Conservatory of the University of the Streets, a typically Sixties project launched by Puerto Rican activists in New York. Dixon brought musicians from nearby Tompkins Square Park indoors for classes in orchestration and ensemble performance.

“I was working on a large orchestra piece,” Dixon told me, “and it occurred to me that I might make use of some of the musicians in the park for areas of my own work and at the same time provide, for those musicians that might want it, some kind of musical experience that took into consideration the larger formations of musical performance. Said another way, why not try to form an orchestra out of what was right in front of me? That would provide me with an outlet for what I was writing and, for those musicians that might be interested, would provide them with the experience of doing or creating music in a formation that otherwise would be beyond their social and financial ability to participate in.” Classes were five days a week, rehearsals once a week, and all participants were paid for their time.

Dixon was also a big proponent of making his ensembles’ rehearsals open to the public. “As I became older and began to understand more, as I became more sure of what I was doing, for my work, whenever I could, I always had people at the rehearsals”, he said. “I didn’t care who came to my rehearsals. I thought it informed the players better, and the players played better with other people in the room besides themselves. When we started up the Jazz Composers Guild, that was one of the first things I insisted upon, much to the discomfiture of the other people, initially. I insisted that people be allowed to come to the rehearsals, because I found it made the players take themselves much more seriously, and I found that it informed audiences more about the process, so they were then eager to see the thing when it was completed.”

But the thing that’s stuck with me the most was an almost offhand comment he made about working with students at Bennington. First of all, he expressed great humility about the importance of the work at all, saying, “one had to be aware that if [students] really wanted to do music they wouldn’t be at a liberal arts college, they’d be at a conservatory, where everyone is a fanatic.” But he found use for everyone. Everyone. “If a person could hold one note in an ensemble, as far as I was concerned he was just as important as your best soloist”, he told me. I’ve brought that idea up with other composer/educators, like Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton, and while Braxton in particular said he wouldn’t go that far himself, he admired Dixon’s philosophy.

Bill Dixon’s music has not been heard by nearly enough people. If you’re new to his work, you will likely be surprised by it. His frequent use of multiple bassists and low brass instruments like tuba gives many of his pieces an almost underwater depth, and while he doesn’t write big hooks that stick in your brain, there’s real grace and careful structure to the music. It is absolutely not the sound of a bunch of dudes blowing their lungs out at you. Like I said above, it’s not a huge catalog, and most of it is easy enough to hear or purchase (his Soul Note albums and his final studio recording, 2008’s Tapestries For Small Orchestra, are all on Bandcamp, along with several other titles).

If I had to pick a Top Five, or a Beginner’s Guide, I would say start with Intents & Purposes, then Thoughts, Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley, 17 Musicians In Search Of A Sound: Darfur, and Tapestries For Small Orchestra. But I’ll tell you straight out: there are no bad Bill Dixon records. (Though you may want to save the two volumes of Papyrus, duos with percussionist Tony Oxley, for last.) He never could be coerced to do anything he didn’t want to do, so when you listen to his music you are listening to an extremely pure and focused artist at work. Dive in. You won’t be sorry.