Uploaded January 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago
Bill Dixon - trumpet
Aaron Siegel - percussion, tuned percussion
Ben Hall - percussion, tuned percussion
from 'Weight/Counterweight' (Brokenresearch records, 2009)
[NB: I'm sharing one song to give a taste of the album as a whole. Released in a limited, 2 vinyl edition of 500 copies in 2009, as of January 2022, the album is out of print. No copyright infringement is intended, and I'll remove on request.]
"Recorded in April of 2008, Weight/Counterweight, the new release by Bill Dixon marks his return to small group playing. The group, assembled by Hall at Dixon's suggestion, marks a new direction in Dixon's instrumentation with no untreated trumpet whatsoever and a barrage on pitched and unpitched concert percussion creating landmark skeletal architecture which Dixon pushes out from into unmediated solos of gravity and weightlessness." (Press release)
'Fanfares from the Abyss'
Dixon's 'late style' digs deeper than ever. His music, which had always been profoundly introspective, became a subtle criss-crossing of textures and shades for which the analogies with painting--reflecting his own visual arts practices--are particularly apt: a chiaroscuro type of sound, taking place in a barely-lit interior or an indeterminate nocturnal outside, or the massed forces of blocks of sound made up of intricate and intimate detail that only reveals itself on a second or third listening. The music is invariably slow, almost glacial, though there are bursts of energy that develop slowly, like magma or miasma. It's almost always spacious, giving the quality of silence even when there's no actual silence. A belligerent, almost aggressive pursuit of beauty characterises all his music, which refuses a programme and insists on abstraction. But, as Dixon told the players on 'Tapestries for Small Orchestra', abstraction is only the core or essence of something once everything else has been stripped away: not absence, emptiness, or vapidity, but a centre, a beacon, a burning flame.
The power of Dixon's late works lies as much in his compositions and their realisation by improvising players as in his own playing. Never one to foreground himself as a virtuosic 'soloist', Dixon's approach was collaborative, a contribution to the collective texture of the music, and, in his final recordings, it became starker and more stripped down than at any point. Dixon had been working with electronic modifications to his trumpet--principally, reverb and delay effects--since the 1970s, as can be heard on tracks from the solo box set 'Odyssey', but it was in the 1990s that he began to incorporate these as a key part of his style, on recordings like 'Berlin Abbozzi' and his trio with Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley. Though not all listeners responded well to these effects, Dixon argued that the electronics helped to bring out hidden resonances and added dimensions of the harmonics he favoured: they also worked with a style that had changed as his body aged--he concentrated, for instance, far more on lower than higher notes--to best advantage, in a shower of breaths, whispers, grunts, sudden blarts and blasts of noise, at once vocalic and machine-like, an aeolian series of gusts, eddies, and other airborne movements and a focused study in extension, decay and the perception of time. With Dixon's use of reverb and delay, every sound has its double, nothing dies away straight away: the sounds seem to fight off the effects of time and the weight of mortality and, if only temporarily, to win out a kind of floating, suspended space--part purgatory, part paradise--in which a process of reckoning and acceptance can be staged.
'Weight/Counterweight', recorded with two young percussionists in 2008 and released in a limited vinyl edition with no liner notes and only the barest of information, is the most extended opportunity to hear Dixon as player from his late work. Working in a freely improvised context--though Dixon eschewed the division between composition and improvisation, insisting that he wanted even completely improvised recordings to sound as if they might have been composed (and vice versa)--Siegel and Hall are heard as much on tuned percussion (gongs, dowels, bowed cymbals, vibraphone, glockenspiel) as on drums, giving the music a floating, meditative quality punctuated by bursts of slowed-down drama, like a quiet, suppressed explosion.
'Contrapposto', is the penultimate piece on the album. Whispers from the edge of consciousness, rumours from the sky; fanfares from the abyss, ram's horn blasts from beneath the earth.
(streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/01/fanfares-from-abyss-bill-dixons-late.html)
Bill Dixon - trumpet
Aaron Siegel - percussion, tuned percussion
Ben Hall - percussion, tuned percussion
from 'Weight/Counterweight' (Brokenresearch records, 2009)
[NB: I'm sharing one song to give a taste of the album as a whole. Released in a limited, 2 vinyl edition of 500 copies in 2009, as of January 2022, the album is out of print. No copyright infringement is intended, and I'll remove on request.]
"Recorded in April of 2008, Weight/Counterweight, the new release by Bill Dixon marks his return to small group playing. The group, assembled by Hall at Dixon's suggestion, marks a new direction in Dixon's instrumentation with no untreated trumpet whatsoever and a barrage on pitched and unpitched concert percussion creating landmark skeletal architecture which Dixon pushes out from into unmediated solos of gravity and weightlessness." (Press release)
'Fanfares from the Abyss'
Dixon's 'late style' digs deeper than ever. His music, which had always been profoundly introspective, became a subtle criss-crossing of textures and shades for which the analogies with painting--reflecting his own visual arts practices--are particularly apt: a chiaroscuro type of sound, taking place in a barely-lit interior or an indeterminate nocturnal outside, or the massed forces of blocks of sound made up of intricate and intimate detail that only reveals itself on a second or third listening. The music is invariably slow, almost glacial, though there are bursts of energy that develop slowly, like magma or miasma. It's almost always spacious, giving the quality of silence even when there's no actual silence. A belligerent, almost aggressive pursuit of beauty characterises all his music, which refuses a programme and insists on abstraction. But, as Dixon told the players on 'Tapestries for Small Orchestra', abstraction is only the core or essence of something once everything else has been stripped away: not absence, emptiness, or vapidity, but a centre, a beacon, a burning flame.
The power of Dixon's late works lies as much in his compositions and their realisation by improvising players as in his own playing. Never one to foreground himself as a virtuosic 'soloist', Dixon's approach was collaborative, a contribution to the collective texture of the music, and, in his final recordings, it became starker and more stripped down than at any point. Dixon had been working with electronic modifications to his trumpet--principally, reverb and delay effects--since the 1970s, as can be heard on tracks from the solo box set 'Odyssey', but it was in the 1990s that he began to incorporate these as a key part of his style, on recordings like 'Berlin Abbozzi' and his trio with Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley. Though not all listeners responded well to these effects, Dixon argued that the electronics helped to bring out hidden resonances and added dimensions of the harmonics he favoured: they also worked with a style that had changed as his body aged--he concentrated, for instance, far more on lower than higher notes--to best advantage, in a shower of breaths, whispers, grunts, sudden blarts and blasts of noise, at once vocalic and machine-like, an aeolian series of gusts, eddies, and other airborne movements and a focused study in extension, decay and the perception of time. With Dixon's use of reverb and delay, every sound has its double, nothing dies away straight away: the sounds seem to fight off the effects of time and the weight of mortality and, if only temporarily, to win out a kind of floating, suspended space--part purgatory, part paradise--in which a process of reckoning and acceptance can be staged.
'Weight/Counterweight', recorded with two young percussionists in 2008 and released in a limited vinyl edition with no liner notes and only the barest of information, is the most extended opportunity to hear Dixon as player from his late work. Working in a freely improvised context--though Dixon eschewed the division between composition and improvisation, insisting that he wanted even completely improvised recordings to sound as if they might have been composed (and vice versa)--Siegel and Hall are heard as much on tuned percussion (gongs, dowels, bowed cymbals, vibraphone, glockenspiel) as on drums, giving the music a floating, meditative quality punctuated by bursts of slowed-down drama, like a quiet, suppressed explosion.
'Contrapposto', is the penultimate piece on the album. Whispers from the edge of consciousness, rumours from the sky; fanfares from the abyss, ram's horn blasts from beneath the earth.
(streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/01/fanfares-from-abyss-bill-dixons-late.html)
