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BILL DIXON & EXPLODING STAR ORCHESTRA – s/t
CD Thrill Jockey THRILL192
Streetdate: February 8
Distribution: Wide
http://www.thrilljockey.com
Back in September of 2006 both ROB MAZUREK and BILL DIXON were performing at the Guelph International Jazz Festival in Ontario, Canada, where the two horn players met for the first time there at a workshop the latter was conducting. Later that day Mazurek saw his long-time hero perform for the first time, but it was an impromptu performance after Dixon’s sound check that really left a mark on him. A photographer wanted a shot of Dixon playing his trumpet. “He put horn to lips and played the most sublime, powerful sound I have ever heard from any player ever,” says Mazurek. “It was as if the church was going to crack open and a million white birds would fly from his chest, leaving traces of gold and silver in the light-blasted sky. What felt like an eternity was, in fact, one minute of sound. He ended the piece with an ascending flurry, and it was as if his sound had penetrated the granite pillars to be embedded in the rock for all of eternity.” Clearly, an impression was made.
Although Mazurek had long been inspired by Dixon’s life and work, meeting him and hearing him play in the flesh was an altogether revelatory experience. Mazurek was enthralled when his elder responded in return, catching the gig by the Sao Paulo Underground, with whom Mazurek was playing, and then charging backstage once the gig was over. “He walked directly up to me, gave me a big hug, and said that the performance was powerful and intense and fantastic, and the juxtaposition of rhythms, the dense structures, the sound, the sound…,” he recalls. “I was stunned.”
Bill Dixon’s consistent refusal to compromise and a lengthy career in education – he taught at Bennington College from 1968-1996 – prevented the kind of widespread acclaim accorded to contemporaries and/or past collaborators like Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Alan Silva, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane. In the early 60s he was a crucial figure on the developing free jazz, or “new thing” happening in New York, and in 1964 he organized and programmed the highly influential October Revolution in Jazz, an event that practically introduced free jazz to a broad public. He also co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild, a highly practical organization to sought to function like a union, giving cutting edge members like Paul Bley, Sun Ra, and Shepp increased leverage with record labels and concert promoters. He went on to record a couple of albums with Shepp, and worked as a sideman on recordings by Taylor (Conquistador, Blue Note, 1966), but by the time Dixon recorded the classic Intents and Purposes in 1966 it was clear that he had much more in mind than free jazz, creating one of the most distinctive and original albums in the history of the music. Within two years he was essentially missing from the scene, and although he never stopped playing and writing, education took much of his time, and he no longer performed as much as he’d done earlier in the decade.
His focus on sound and texture presaged developments in free improvisations by decades, and there’s no doubt that the unconventional abstractions played by trumpeters like Axel Dörner, Franz Hautzinger, Greg Kelley, and Peter Evans all have essential roots in the music of Dixon. He retired from Bennington in 1996 but he remains in Vermont, and finally it seems as though Dixon is finally be recognized as the genius he’s long been. In 2007 he was chosen as the Vision Festival’s Lifetime Recognition recipient, a logical honor, as the October Revolution was the virtual blueprint for it.
Mazurek and Dixon spent hours talking together at Guelph and the latter suggested they do some music together and he invited Mazurek to come visit him and his wife Sharon in Vermont. Within a few weeks he took up the offer, traveling to Bennington and proposing what eventually became the recording you now possess. Mazurek wanted to pair Dixon with his Exploding Star Orchestra, which he formed back in 2005, drawing upon a broad cross-section of Chicago’s most exciting young improvisers, for a performance presented by city’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Of course, the rousing success of that performance led Mazurek to record the band, resulting in last year’s We Are All From Somewhere Else (Thrill Jockey 181).
Dixon liked the idea and agreed to proceed, and before long the prestigious Chicago Jazz Festival had signed on to present the concert. Incredibly, Dixon had never performed in Chicago before (although once he started communicating with the Jazz Institute of Chicago, which programs the festival, he was invited for a one-off quartet gig in the city in the summer of 2007). Toward the end of August, Dixon arrived in Chicago where he led open rehearsals for the concert at the Chicago Cultural Center, allowing fans and bystanders to check out the navigations. Two pieces, one by each horn player, were developed.
Mazurek’s piece, “Constellation,” was initially envisioned to revolve around a video score, realized by seven laptop musicians, while others would either respond spontaneously to electronics or be conducted by the cornetist. The video score would also provide the audience with a kind of narrative to follow during the performance, but once Mazurek realized it would still be light outside when the concert occurred. The text read by Damon Locks of The Eternals was initially the set of instructions written for how to the musicians should interpret the video score. There are two distinct versions of Dixon’s piece, “Second of September,” for which Dixon arranged his written material with spontaneous conducting. The music was all recorded live with no overdubs.
Considering how small Dixon’s discography is, any new addition is always welcome, particularly when it places him in a new context. Although he’s worked with medium-sized ensembles before, there has been little documentation. This new album joins Intents and Purposes and The Enchanted Messenger (Soul Note), an outing led by drummer Tony Oxley, as the only recorded evidence of his work with a larger group.
“The experience of working with Bill Dixon on this project was a defining moment in my personal trajectory as a projector of sound and vision,” says Mazurek. “Words cannot really describe the power and beauty of Bill Dixon. You only have to open your life and listen.”
LIVE – EXPLODING STAR ORCHESTRA (support: ZU)
Jan 20 BE – Paradox, Tilburg
Jan 21 DE – MTC Club, Cologne
Jan 22 BE – De Kreun, Kortrijk
Jan 23 BE – Botanique, Brussels
Jan 24 CH – L’usine, Geneve
Jan 26 IT – Teatro Arcimboldi, Milano
Jan 27 IT – TBA, Forlì
Jan 28 IT – TBA, Rom
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STEAMBOAT SWITZERLAND – Zone 2
CD GROB 859
Distribution: A-Musik / Metamkine
http://www.churchofgrob.com
http://www.lucasniggli.ch
http://www.dominikblum.ch
Zone 2 is the fifth CD of the power trio Steamboat Switzerland and the fourth that the Swiss musicians have released on GROB (2001: Budapest, GROB 315; ac/dB [Hayden], GROB 316; 2005: Wertmüller, GROB 655). Steamboat Switzerland – DOMINIK BLUM, organ; MARINO PLIAKAS, e-bass; LUCAS NIGGLI, drums – are a rousing live band who have developed an absolutely individual way of playing and expressing themselves out of their examination of sludge metal, post-serialism and free jazz. Their records, however, differ greatly from their live repertoire, already classic (the band has given many hundred concerts in the ten years it has existed). Their studio albums are recorded live, and sometimes come together from concert recordings, but they follow a strict design that the band has either not tried out, or done so only temporarily. And just as the albums do not even try to mirror the live situation, neither do the live performances contain the program of the current CD. Zone 2 isn’t an exception: it is simply the first recording which is primarily played on acoustic instruments; the amplification is not foregrounded. Marion Pliakas changes to the acoustic guitar, Lucas Niggli plays a reduced drum set and Dominik Blum can be heard on piano. The music – one continuous piece – is improvised.
FELIX KLOPOTEK, author and co-manager of GROB, gives his impressions in a short text below.
There is a kind of flourish, a start. Isn’t there? You put the CD into the player, turn the amplifier up and after a few seconds there is a bang, no, it’s not a bang, but rather a lush entry, a well-placed beat. OK, a start. Or could it be any point in their improvisation which has already gone on for a while? That could be it: the musicians have already played a half-an-hour, and then the recording engineer pushes the button to record! Because the start doesn’t refer to any kind of dramaturgy that follows. The music that we hear afterwards is infinite music, not fixed, following no sense of suspense whose procedure would necessarily contain a point toward which everything strives, in order to ebb away afterwards.
It doesn’t matter if the start is really a start or any point in the coordinate system of time/sound. That makes up the infinite character of the music. The musicians could stop – whenever they want. And continue – whenever they want. Let’s say, in four days? Of course, no one would want to buy the 20-DVD box, on which the first and last DVD, music could be heard in the narrowest sense, while the 18 DVDs in the middle didn’t document anything else than the four-day break.
Whoever gets lost in the ocean of infinity also loses touch with the concept of infinity – one has to know where one is and how one masters the situation, which is always a concrete one. Therefore, the 45 minutes of music that we hear after the start (we’ll just assume that is “really” is one) are not just any 45 minutes of music, but rather the span of time that the musicians wanted to play and found to be valid, beyond this moment – in sheer endless processes of discussing, mixing and mastering.
What follows the, now stumbling again, … the start is a breathless sense of suspense, which is breathless because one never knows how it will develop, and yet is coherent. Always when the music has advanced, one feels a sense of confirmation: however it happened, it had to happen this way. But this insight of the listener is a retrospective one. At minute eight we do not know what new patterns will result three minutes later out of this infinitely (not again!) finely woven set of instrument voices. Afterwards everything is clear.
The musicians achieve this through dense interaction, which does not take on the character of direct communication – call and response; permanent playing all the instruments, which has nothing to do with permanent high energy performing (there is no break-out, only compression, amalgamation, entanglement); complete absence of domination – no one overdoes another; exceeding the instrumental limits – who makes which sounds: the guitar can sound like a contrabass or like a percussion instrument, it can apparently make such diffusely hovering sounds as the table-top guitar of Keith Rowe; the drum set can be a piano played from the inside; and the other way around: the piano is used strictly percussively. Those are all surprisingly simple means, tested a thousand times and played again and again. But they are a means. The fact that the musicians do “crazy” things with their instruments isn’t enough in itself.
And of course there are passages when the piano sounds like a piano, the drums like drums, and the guitar like a guitar. The sound of all the instruments together is, however, not a guitar-drum-piano triad, but rather something else, located far away from conventions.
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N E W S
* MIDORI HIRANO (Noble Records) will join the Berlinale Talent Campus #6 at Berlin’s Film Festival in February 2008, see
http://www.berlinale-talentcampus.de
* A short film with a musical twist (by VIRUS SYNDICATE), throwing forward questions about stereotypes, prejudice and divided cultures… could we all do more to be more united?
http://www.60secondsoffame.co.uk/bafta/BlindAuraPictures/_entry/0000000016f808e6011745a8609417af/jsps/entry?f..1199620750597
Dense Promotion
http://www.dense.de
http://www.myspace.com/densepr
