Bill Dixon and “the form of the song”
On Dixon as a composer of songs
What is the relation of free jazz (bearing in mind all caveats on the term) to song? For all its reputation for noise, melody is everywhere. Ornette Coleman is the exemplar here, his approach primarily motivic, melodic. Glorious surges of melody flowed out of Cecil Taylor, which, like Charles Mingus, he would call or sing out to musicians in rehearsals. John Tchicai, a singer of songs on his solos through the alto aslant. The extended, angular unison melodies of Sunny Murray, ‘Giblets’ or ‘Hilariously’, imbued with a kind of unparseable, a bright and bitter hope. Ornette Coleman and ‘What Reason Could I Give’ with Asha Puthli, or the version of ‘Lonely Woman’ sung by Patty Waters on Marzette Watts’s The Marzette Watts Ensemble (a record produced by Dixon); the tapestry of melodies in Don Cherry’s work; Clifford Thornton’s The Gardens of Harlem, the extraordinary cracked melodies of Arthur Doyle’s prison-composed Songbook: musicians continued to write songs, with words or without, with vocals or not, songs that in mood or form went beyond the usual designation of the up-tempo number, the ballad, the ‘tune’.
This is the tradition, too, explored in Elaine Mitchener’s ‘Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde’ project: Christine Spencer singing Archie Shepp’s ‘On this Night (If that Great Day Would Come)’, Ella Jackson singing Muhal Richard Abrams’s ‘How are You?’ on Things to Come from Those Now Gone, Abbey Lincoln on ‘Triptych’ from We Insist!, Andrew Hill’s work with choir on Lift every Voice, the songs and processionals and chants throughout Sun Ra: a tradition of song neither that of Broadway nor the jazz standard nor the pop song as it came to be understood with the advent of rock; not folk song nor classical lieder, nor musicals, nor art song per se, but another kind of work, another kind of structured intimacy.
This expanded sense of song form had been a part of jazz since well before its codification into the Great American Songbook. (It goes back at least, for example, to Adelaide Hall on ‘Creole Love Call’ in 1927). And it’s not just there in the more overtly composed, art song-styled vocal pieces like those of Shepp or Abrams. Monk and Herbie Nichols didn’t—or didn’t always—write ‘heads’ to be soloed over: they played their compositions. ‘Monk’s Mood’ or ‘Crepuscle with Nellie’ are through-composed pieces. Many Ellington and Strayhorn pieces, both in miniature and more expanded form, contain little ‘soloing’ per se. ‘Melancholia’, ‘Reflection in D’, ‘Absinthe (Lament for an Orchid)’, ‘Star-Crossed Lovers (Pretty Girl)’, ‘New World-A-Coming’. This is not to undervalue the extended improvisation which is one of this music’s greatest contributions, nor to separate ‘mere’ song from capital C composition, but to emphasize that these are all imbricated in ways not often acknowledged. And there is no name for this imbrication, still, because of the delimitations, the expectations and assumptions historically placed on Black composers. Perhaps that’s what “the American songbook” really means, its true form.
When Bill Dixon improvises on trumpet or flugelhorn, is that ‘jazz’, and when he writes a through-composed piece of music for a soprano, is that ‘classical’, even though the latter may contain more ‘jazz’ chords than the former? Ben Young notes: “For any number of reasons—which may never fully be known—Dixon’s musical activities in the late Seventies focused more heavily on the composition and refinement of his own songs—short pieces with and without words.”
Hired in 1968 at Bennington College, Vermont, initially to work with his then-partner Judith Dunn in the dance department, Dixon began playing piano for Dunn’s dance classes, not, he insisted, “[as] an accompanist, but [as] a musician-composer”.[i] Dixon began studying piano, his second instrument, in 1958, renting an instrument and teaching himself by studying for twelve hours day. The piano, he remarked, gave him a renewed spatial sense of the music. “You can look at it and see the juxtaposition and distance of notes, unlike the trumpet and saxophone, where you snatch the notes out of the air without being able to see the relationship”. Ten years later, working increasingly with the instrument at Bennington, “I wrote a lot of songs”.
Not pop, but Ellington- or Strayhorn-styled songs that grew out of playing the piano in that context of dance classes. When I became very attached to Hugo Wolf, I wrote some songs like I imagined he would have written. I really liked the form of the song—some of Berg’s songs, for instance—but there was no place for me to go doing that. So I just wrote them and used them where I could [...] None of them were abstract […] it was good for me because it was utilitarian.
Writing a waltz at the request of dancer Jack Moore, or songs to be sung by students in recital, Dixon worked within established forms that were “rhythmically intact” but “melodically, harmonically and spatially interesting for me”. Composed on his studio electric piano for students, recitals, theatre or dance pieces, rehearsals, the resulting pieces were acts of community, extending the commercial freelancing work he used to do transcribing Miles Davis solos and gospel songs. Dixon’s earliest recorded music on Archie Shepp—Bill Dixon Quartet (1963) found him writing for small, piano-less groups reminiscent of those of Ornette Coleman. Beginning with the septet pieces on his side of the split record with Shepp the following year, and maturing in the long work ‘Pomegranate’, performed at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, the record Intents and Purposes (1967) and his work with the University of the Streets orchestra (a single, lo-fi bootleg of a 1968 performance of which is available), he moved towards long-form, suite-like structures. This preference for longer modes would characterise—though not exclusively—much of his ensemble music from that point on. In the earlier ’60s, however, Dixon also freelanced for Savoy Records by transcribing lead sheets for gospel songs for the purposes of copyright registration, and in 1965, he composed two song for a staging of Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule as part of a
