Jazz This article is more than 13 years oldObituaryBill Dixon obituary
This article is more than 13 years oldFree-jazz trumpeter with a hypnotic, slow-moving soundThe trumpeter Bill Dixon, who has died aged 84, worked extensively with the pianist Cecil Taylor, the saxophonist Archie Shepp and many of the post-60s European free-jazz fraternity. He was a dedicated representative of the movement that fashioned its own language, owing little to the great American songbook, or any songbook.
When he came to play with Taylor and the percussionist Tony Oxley at the Royal Festival Hall in London six years ago, Dixon brought gravitas to a show sometimes in danger of capsizing under the weight of Taylor's dissonant blizzards of notes. Unaccompanied, he delivered a hypnotic trumpet performance, throwing breathy long notes against electronic echoes, paying respect to space and silence.
It was typical of his disciplined and rigorous work from the 1960s onwards, when he steadily deepened his reliance on the expressiveness of timbre and tone-colour, and evolved a signature sound of slow-moving, low-end melody lines, often expressed through understated half-valve slurs, expressive growls, vocalised sounds and dramatic vibrato. Like Taylor, Dixon was fascinated by dancers – he had a long creative relationship with Judith Dunn – and his music frequently seemed to suggest the graceful, weightless movement of dancers in space.
He was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, but grew up in New York, where his family relocated during the Depression. As a high-school student, he played the trumpet but was more dedicated to visual art. He devoted himself to formal music studies after his return from military service in Germany in 1946. Dixon attended the Hartnett Conservatory of Music in Manhattan, and by 1948 he was working nights as a trumpeter and arranger around New York while holding down an administrative day job at the United Nations, founding the UN's Jazz Society in 1953.
Dixon was a natural organiser and a combative politician. He believed that the music's marginalised newer manifestations could flourish outside the commercial nightclub circuit, and sought to recruit Greenwich Village's coffee houses as venues. From 1961 to 1963 he worked regularly in proto-free ensembles with Shepp, including appearances in Europe. The Danish saxophonist John Tchicai was drawn into the Dixon/Shepp orbit in 1963, and when the innovative New York Contemporary Five evolved from these relationships, Dixon became its arranger.
In October 1964 Dixon presented a four-day concert series at the Cellar Cafe, New York, entitled the October Revolution in Jazz. The musicians were mostly little-known, but that was to change. They included the pianists Sun Ra and Paul Bley, the drummer Milford Graves and the double bassist David Izenzon, soon to become a cornerstone of Coleman's group. With these influential gigs, free jazz came of age. Dixon attempted to capitalise on the momentum by founding a lobbying and self-help organisation, the Jazz Composers Guild. Its principal purpose was to bargain for better deals for musicians, but the guild was short-lived.
In 1965 Dixon and Dunn began a creative partnership that was to take their conceptions of free jazz and dance all the way to the Newport jazz festival. The following year, Dixon played alongside the saxophonist Jimmy Lyons on Taylor's classic Conquistador! album, revealing new ways for a traditional hard-bop horn section to function in a radically transformed context.
Dunn taught dance at Bennington college, Vermont, where Dixon created the black music division, devoted to new departures in music with African-American connections. The division ran for a decade from 1975, and Dixon's teaching was cherished by many students for its imaginative openness.
His growing sophistication as a composer was revealed in the progress of his pieces from poignant miniatures to grand designs between 1970 and the 90s. Teaching, and the temporary eclipse of jazz by rock, lessened his playing life in the 1970s, but it was revived a decade later when Italy's Soul Note label commissioned a series of fascinating albums, including November 1981 (1981), Sons of Sisyphus (1988), and Vade Mecum (1994) using such innovative devices as trumpet or double-bass trios. In the 1990s he launched his probing association with the British percussionist Oxley, with whom he worked in Europe.
Dixon retired from teaching in 1995 but continued performing extensively, mostly in Europe. His unique trumpet sound and meticulously crafted, stylistically sweeping and sombrely low-register compositions represent a legacy that has yet to receive its proper due.
He is survived by his partner, Sharon Vogel, a daughter, Claudia, a son, William, and two grandchildren.
William Robert Dixon, jazz trumpeter, born 5 October 1925; died 16 June 2010
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