Music Monday: Bill Dixon and Lyman Woodard

I continue to be fascinated by late 1960s and 1970s American jazz music in all its diversity. Not only does it feel like it has well and truly shaken free from the shackles of post-war jazz styles, whether swing, bop, hard bop, or free jazz traditions, but it also has embraced the influences of R&B and rock (as well as jazz’s more longstanding wellsprings of gospel, soul, and blues music). I’m no jazz historian, but it feels like the decline of jazz as a significant commercial musical form created new opportunities for labels and artists perhaps less fettered to the expectations of a particular audience.

This week, I’ve been enjoying The Bill Dixon Orchestra’s Intents and Purposes. It’s a pretty wonderful album that I listened to yesterday while reading Ed Watts’s Mortal Empire: How Rome Fell into Tyranny(2018). The Bill Dixon Orchestra was a ten piece ensemble that included Byard Lancaster and Robin Kenyatta on alto sax, Jimmy Garrison and Reggie Workman on bass, Bill Dixon himself is on trumpet, and intriguingly Catherine Norris on cello. I have no idea who she is (and couldn’t really find much about her on the web other than she appeared on an album Noah Howard recorded for ESP’ disk in 1968 (Noah Howard At Judson Hall). Avant-garde jazz in the 1960s and 1970s tended to be a pretty masculine space and seeing a woman listed in the band is not all that common.

The album itself is brilliant. I found the interplay between the percussion, sax, and trumpet lines particularly compelling, but the cello adds something to the recording that makes it sound truly distinct. Check it out. 

I’ve also gone back to the The Lyman Woodard Organization’s amazing 1975 album Saturday Night Special. For some reason it just feels like a summertime album suffused (as the the liner notes for the re-release suggest) with the sounds of Detroit. It’s a masterpiece of soul jazz made all the more fantastic by Lyman Woodard’s organ, electric piano and Mellotron and Ron English’s guitar and bass. The album cover showing a gun, a wad of money, and cigarette papers was photographed by Leni Sinclair the famous activist and artist. 

The album came out on Detroit’s Strata label which embodied many of the same community oriented practices operations such as Phil Cohran’s Affro-Arts Theater in Chicago. Strata combined political activism with poetry, music, recording and performance venues at the very moment when Detroit’s manufacturing base had started to struggle in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis and “stagflation.” You can read a bit about Strata here.

The album itself, when set against this backdrop, evokes a kind of determination and even a bit of optimism. The music (and the rest of Strata’s fairly limited catalogue; see especially Kenny Cox’s album Location with the Contemporary Jazz Quintet as well as his two earlier Blue Note albums from the late 1960s).  

In any event, these two albums are a great early summer sound track and fantastic of long summer evenings. They both offer rich sonic tapestries that both evoke a particular moment in jazz music as well as complex historical urban landscapes. Check them out.