To say that Bill Dixon is an under-acknowledged master of music is a cliché that still surprises and mystifies me. Yet none other than the once reviled now revered Cecil Taylor has twice to my knowledge gone on record as saying that he considers Dixon one of the most important composer/musicians currently active; in fact on one of these occasions referring to him as a genius. To anybody reading this who is unfamiliar with Bill Dixon's work, I urge you to heed the words of the master pianist rather than search out those of writers and critics. Find some of the man's music and dig in. It's no sailboat ride but is wroth every second that you devote to it. His chosen road has been a hard and turbulent one. We are all faced with choices. Bill Dixon's life and music speak to us above all else of the importance of facing up to this fact and the consequences engendered thereby.

When he chose to play the trumpet in 1946, aged 20, Bill Dixon made a momentous decision, one that he has lived with every day since because for someone with his integrity and dignity a career in music for a Black man was always going to be fraught with difficulty. Insofar as a life can never be truly detached from the art that emerges from it, then biography is important. Yet the resultant art exists, once released into the world, independent of the circumstances under which it was related and must ultimately stand or fall of its own volition.

The six cd's that comprise Odyssey are in many ways the aural equivalent of a painter's retrospective exhibition. As a painter himself I am certain that Bill would have some sympathy for this viewpoint; indeed the recordings have as accompaniment (as well as an excellent book of essays) a beautiful book of reproductions of prints by the author covering a time span similar to that of the music.

William Robert Dixon ha spent more than fifty years composing music and playing trumpet, flugelhorn and piano. During that time he has had a mere fifteen commercially issued recordings. Not much, one might say, for a life given to art particularly in an age where for many lesser musicians, recorded documentation has become a real self indulgence. Yet here already is a contradiction. For although the commercially recorded output of Dixon has been scant, he has probably (almost certainly) documented more of his work through private recording than any other musician in the jazz/improvised music field. The Odyssey set has been mined from this lifework. In the making of these recordings Dixon has, on occasion, utilized effects and/or overdubbing. However, most of the material is pure trumpet or flugelhorn playing; one man alone in a studio with his horn and his imagination.

Bill Dixon on solos: - "For so many of the solos, I had a tape recorder set up in my studio. When I turned the lights on I just reached over and turned the tape recorder on, so that I never had to get ready to record. There's a funny thing about taping yourself: even if you've been doing it the longest time, there's just something artificial about saying 'Now I'm going to record'. I wasted a lot of tape just because I had the thing going all the time, but I never had to make a decision to turn the machine on. While the solo pieces were done in the studio, it was more like a sketchbook than a studio recording. 'Here's an idea, let me work this out Š' 'Almost everything I did with what you might call studio solos came out of this context. My use of the studio was just a little bit different from what I would think of other people's use was. It made no difference whether I was in there by myself, or there were two or three people, or I was giving a tutorial, this was a real situation. If it worked, it worked well, and if it didn't work, I knew it and knew how to correct it. Nothing was frivolous. "With the trumpet you have to find as much time as possible to work on your things from the standpoint of being real. Practice is not enough. I never practice scales hour after hour ---I used to do that. In other words, for the limited amount of time I'm allowed to play, it has to be real. That was real playing, but I was also teaching myself things and these pieces were coming out of it." (Note l) Sound---no sound. All is composition. Every piece the result of the 'accident of purpose', the infinite plasticity of the sound. Woodwind instruments seem to tell you how to play them ---these notes (on the trumpet) are plucked from the air, shaped from silence. What, in fact is composition? It certainly isn't necessarily the writing down of notes on manuscript paper. At best, these calligraphic marks can only ever approximate the pitch, timbre and rhythmic inclination of a conceived sound. Bill Dixon must in the final analysis be considered/discussed as a composer. One who organizes elements into a larger cohesive single element, whether it be for orchestra, small ensemble or solo. Bill Dixon again: - "If I play by myself ---which I do a lot ---that's an orchestra piece. If I play with another person that's an orchestra piece, because what we're trying to do is cover the range of an orchestra. ." (Note 2) Range is important to Dixon. It is one of the things that mark out his music, separate it from much that is contemporaneous with it. I'm thinking here not only of his instrumental range (which is phenomenal) but also his emotional range and that which is apparent in his arrangement of group sounds. Go back if you will to 'Son of Sisyphus' or further, to 'Winter Song 1964' the first piece to turn me on to his music, and you should hear what I mean.

The music collected here was recorded in New York City, or at Bill Dixon's studio in Bennington, Vermont where he both taught and ran the Black Music Department for more than thirty years. The one exception is 'Jerusalem' which was recoded in that city and dedicated at the beginning of the performance, to its people. At almost 27 minutes duration I is by far the longest; piece of the set. 'Jerusalem' opens with the trumpet processed through effects and as is the case on some other pieces, the mere passage of air traveling through the horn becomes part of the resultant sound, a constituent part of the improvisation. Soon however, the warm brass sound breaks through as melodic lines begin to develop, shards, nailed together by rhythmic invention and punctuated by silence ---Bill isn't afraid of the silence and these 'episodes' only serve to throw into greater relief the improvised lines that emerge from it. Here as elsewhere Dixon will often work a comparatively small area, repeated phrases with subtle tonal or rhythmic adjustment, before moving on to the next idea. Facing death yet not dying. As Bill has said elsewhere, this itself is a major achievement. Odyssey covers the period from 1970---l992 with the vast majority coming from the 1970's. I find this particularly interesting as that was a barren decade for Bill Dixon records. Apart from two lp for the Italian Fore label (of which some tracks are reproduced here) a box set for Cadence Records! (all of which is reproduced here) and a (recently re-isssued) album with Franz Dolman, there were no recordings to my knowledge between l967 and l983. In total, there is a staggering amount of music here, spread across five cd's. The sixth cd has 70 minutes of M. Dixon talking about his work. This in itself should almost be worth the price of admission to anyone who claims to have an interest in the music. As Bill shares his knowledge of the conception, genesis and fruition of his work, intoned in a deep;, sometimes cracked voice, one is certain that a masterclass is taking place . Some may question the wisdom of putting out a 6 cd solo set, yet, the reality once one enters Bill Dixon's sound world is one of unexpected variety. Any suggestion of a track by track analysis would be both tedious and foolhardy but a few examples may give some idea of the breadth of material that has been organized and presented here. Some tracks, for example 'Tracings II' (1974-75) and 'The End of Silence' (1973) make use of studio treatment especially reverb to make their point. This, coupled with a mighty technique make these pieces and others such as 'Masai' and 'Spaces' both from 1973 almost disturbing in their ability to open up ones perception of what a solo instrument can do. Then there is the playfulness (play can be a serious business of course) of 'I See Your Fancy Footwork' again from 1973. The title encompasses three pieces that include Dixon's son William Dixon II who can be hard speaking and whistling. But there is no sense of contrivance about these; pieces; they were never at any time a conscious attempt at a duet. Instead there is a man playing, concentrating, intent on his purpose yet prepared to accept the unintentional as part of the process. Most of cd5 is, taken up with the pieces entitled 'Relay-Dance' #l - #8. They consist of Bill dueting with himself on trumpet (#l) and trumpet and piano (#2 - #8). Dating from 1970 these pieces were improvised for dancers choreographed by Judith Dunn, a long time collaborator at Bennington College. Reflective and beautifully crafted, I was often reminded whilst listening to these particular pieces, of Chet Baker; something to do with a sense of vulnerability in the sound, I think.

The vast majority of the 61 pieces are however solo trumpet, but what beautiful trumpet playing! If I use the term lyrical to describe much of this playing, I do so not in a pejorative sense but in a complimentary and affectionate one. Bill has spoken to me of the tendency of the critical establishment to view so-called lyrical players as being less significant or having less depth than more 'robust' players. With this in mind (and anyway I am a musician not a critic) I use the term lyrical judiciously. I know that Miles has always been and will always be at the very pinnacle of Bill Dixon's hierarchy of trumpeters, and Miles' spirit permeates this music, from the classic simplicity of pieces such as 'Changes', 'Concordde', and 'Hush' to the fuzz and distortion of 'Mosaic' and 'Masai' although Miles achieved his aim in a completely different way of course.

Bill Dixon on Miles Davis: - "I always thought Miles Davis made the most beautiful sound, it always had an effect upon me. He, Tony Fruscella, Armando Ghitalla, Fats Navarro, Freddie Webster and Clark Terry all literally found it impossible to make a bad or unattractive sound. If you listen closely to some of those things like 'Long Alone Song' (cd2), you might say that it sounds like Miles Davis sound, using an air attack from the back of the throat. I haven't used my tongue to attack the notes in many years. What I worked on was stopping the air in the throat. And when tone by itself wasn't going to do it for me, I began to explore quarter tones and multiphonics." (Note 3)

What becomes more and more apparent to me as I listen to this music is the astonishing level of creativity that Dixon has been able to maintain over the years. This is music that is a triumph of the human spirit; an example of how this music just demanded to be conceived and created.

Bill Dixon: - "I have the idea that a person is playing the music and the other rather essential idea that the music being done is being done because there is a necessity for the music; it has to be done."

These crystalline, distilled improvisations seem to confirm, with a mysterious kind of hindsight, the later masterpieces "Vade Mecum", "Papyrus" and "Berlin Abbozzi". Here finally is the material to cement all of this stuff together and connect with 'Winter Song l964' and 'Intents and Purposes'. The picture is clearer now. This is how the man's music was evolving, this is how he was haring, these are some of the lessons that those students privileged to have studied with him, could and should have absorbed.

I leave the last word to the master composer in 1999. "In addition to all of the traditional things necessary to maintain a 'balanced' performance attitude on the instrument, I work on trying to pierce the innermost qualities of sound itself; multiplicities of fingerings for notes and sounds; additional and other embouchure formations; range; from the lowest possible pedal tones that I can get, to the highest harmonic, played fully (at least that is the intent) as though a 'full' tone on the particular day(s) that I can get them. It isn't easy and, as I have said, varies even though I might engage in the identical regimen every day, from day to day, relating to accuracy and success. Some of these things, as hard as they are to achieve straight across the board, sometimes come akin to 'birth pains ' and from the memory stand point of muscles, etc, are easily forgotten. Hence the unqualified necessity for the daily work. But it is also pleasurable and that is primarily why I do it. And when everything works and these 'things' function within the servicing of musical ideas then the world is fine and we are all friends again".

-- Keith G. Thompson AVANT, Issue 20, Autumn 2001 Notes 1 & 3: - From Dixonia: A Bio-Discography of Bill Dixon, compiled by Ben Young Note 2: From Vade Mecum, liner essay by Ben Young