On June 16, composer, musician, producer, visual artist, and educator Bill Dixon died during the night at his home in Bennington, VT. He was 84 years old.
Since his first release in 1962, the Archie Shepp-Bill Dixon Quartet, Dixon has ceaselessly produced challenging, unique, and creative jazz music. Just like the Earth-shattering low-end blasts of his horn, his compositions and playing have had a massive impact on the trajectory of contemporary experimental music. He worked with many first generation free jazz artists, including Cecil Taylor, Marzette Watts, Alan Silva, Jacques Coursil, and Jimmy Garrison, and in 1964 he organized the Jazz Composer's Guild and the October Revolution in Jazz, which hosted performances by Taylor, Shepp, Sun Ra Arkestra, Giuseppi Logan, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Paul Bley, Ornette Coleman, Andrew Cyrille, and many others. In addition to his superb musical contributions, Dixon also played a relentless organizational role by bringing experimental jazz to new audiences. Similarly, as the founder of Bennington College's Black Music Division, for which he was a professor and chair from 1969-1995, Dixon had an equal passion for enlightening students about the rich and frequently neglected musical traditions that were such a deep part of his life, and that he so greatly influenced. read more
