Uploaded April 2010 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
The second track from Taylor's poetry album, 'Chinampas'. Transcription is my own, and therefore may include a few errors.
The second track from Taylor's poetry album, 'Chinampas'. Transcription is my own, and therefore may include a few errors.
![Bill Dixon / Aaron Siegel / Ben Hall - Contrapposto
Bill Dixon - trumpet
Aaron Siegel - percussion, tuned percussion
Ben Hall - percussion, tuned percussion
from Weight/Counterweight (Brokenresearch records, 2009)
[NB: Im 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 Ill 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 Dixons suggestion, marks a new direction in Dixons 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
Dixons 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. Its almost always spacious, giving the quality of silence even when theres 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 Dixons 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, Dixons 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 Dixons 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, rams horn blasts from beneath the earth.
(http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2022/01/fanfares-from-abyss-bill-dixons-late.html) Bill Dixon / Aaron Siegel / Ben Hall - Contrapposto](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/O9yTqCXAyNk/mqdefault.jpg)









![Maurice Weddington - When the Sun Set (1972)
Broadcast recording by the Dutch Radio Chamber Orchestra. (The piece does not call for a conductor, but was given under the direction of the composer) Recorded in the studio of the socialist VARA radio station in Hilversum, 1973. The recording took place in the wake of Weddington’s first-prize win at the Gaudeamus Music Week, and is taken from Charles Amirkhanian’s radio show ‘Ode To Gravity’. (The full recording, complete with interview with Weddington, is available at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/OTG_1973_XX_XX/OTG_1973_XX_XX_B_ed.wav)
Chicago-born and Europe-based, Maurice Weddington’s music has been widely performed but little recorded. As far as I can determine, the only commercially available recording is of his piece for solo flute, ‘Deovolente’ on Laura Chislett’s ‘The Flute in Orbit’, where it features alongside works by Carter, Finnissy, Zimmermann, etc (https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8065863 the-flute-in-orbit) Given this, I include further information below. See also ‘Composer Maurice Weddington: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie’ (1995): http://www.bruceduffie.com/weddington.html.
“Maurice Weddington was born in Chicago, where he received his formal education at college and music conservatory. He began playing wind instruments at the age of nine, has lived in many different countries, worked as a film actor in Denmark, represented Denmark at two International Society for Contemporary Music festivals: Graz, Austria 1972, Bonn, West Germany 1977, was awarded the Danish National Art Grant 1976, 77, 78 and taught flute and English in Germany. Since 1992, Weddington has also been directing, producing and composing the music for films of ancient Chinese paintings, primarily horizontal scrolls, from the collections of various prominent international museums. To date: Maurice Weddington has composed more than 60 compositions, directed and produced three films and divides his time between the USA and Europe with periodic travels to the Far East.”
(Biography taken from Maurice Weddington’s website: http://maurice-weddington.com/frames.html)
“Maurice Weddington heard classical music for the first time in the late 50s, when he was attending Dunbar Vocational High School. “A very weird schoolmate introduced me to Stravinsky by playing a recording of Le sacre du printemps. It did impress me deeply. In fact, it changed my life. It showed me how serious music could be put together. So I signed up for a theory course.” He already knew how to play the trumpet, flute, and bassoon, and jazz was a passion. “I was of course in love with Monk, Miles, and Coltrane. Jazz gave me scope. Yet I’m still amazed that I didn’t think twice about becoming a classical composer. I knew at 16 this was the only way I could express myself.”
At Wilson Junior College he took all the music courses he could, then took composition classes at the American Conservatory of Music and the University of Chicago. “I spent a lot of time at the public library going through their record collection. That was where I came across the Russians–Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff. The Hungarians too. Bartok was absolutely my hero.”
But Weddington graduated in 1962, at a time when only a handful of blacks had managed to make a career as classical composers. “Given the institutional racism in this country, I wouldn’t have survived here back then. I felt Europe was my destiny and destination. There I could immerse myself in classical music. So I decided on Paris. What the heck! I wanted to study with Olivier Messiaen, who, I was told, would take in promising students regardless of their background. I bought a ticket on Pan Am.
“When I got to Paris I found out that Messiaen was on sabbatical that year,” he says, chuckling. “I didn’t know anyone there. I had no money. Some Algerians took me in. Their butts got kicked by the French a lot. So was mine. I stayed alive by the will of God and what little money was sent from home. I bummed around and hustled. I never hung out with artists or musicians, but I made sure that I composed every morning.”
[...] He spent the next year hitchhiking around Europe and writing music, and finally wound up in Copenhagen [...] He got to know Denmark’s tiny composer community, which was wowed by a quintet he’d written. And he kept on writing. “One afternoon I looked out my window and saw the sun quickly setting. I started to hear this music and wrote it down after I came out of my reverie. The music became the basis for ‘When the Sun Set’. Later I used some of the materials for my orchestral piece ‘Midnigh’t, set to a provocative text by Martin Luther King.”
In 1971 ‘When the Sun Set’ won the coveted Gaudeamus Prize, an award Weddington also won in 1972 and ’73.”
(Ted Shen, ‘Return of a Native’, Chicago Reader, October 5, 1995: https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/return-of-a-native/) Maurice Weddington - When the Sun Set (1972)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WNOCyni_SBo/mqdefault.jpg)