EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 4 - Modern Creative
Genre of the Day - Modern Creative
Album of the Day - Intents and Purposes by the Bill Dixon Orchestra (1967)
June 4, 2024
I find myself sometimes yearning to experience a time when the possibilities promised by the future felt unanimously amazing and world-expanding. There’s plenty of genres that explore the decay of this phenomenon like Utopian Virtual, but looking back to when it actually pervaded daily life, no recent decade readily embodied these sentiments better than the ‘60s. I find time and again when I encounter albums from the ‘60s, or genres that peaked in the decade, that few genres were untouched by a feeling of world-expanding possibility aligning with the era’s cataclysmic social shifts and counterculture. This notion was especially prevalent in jazz, as radical musical thinkers like today’s flagship artist Bill Dixon convened at events like the October Revolution in Jazz.
Avant-garde music is like a bird—you can embrace total, open experimentation, leaving the bird to fly away, or you can lean into overcalculation, the bird languishing in its cage. No matter the musical arena, those seeking balance always emerge to try to strike it. That’s where today’s genre—though some detractors balk at the classification, RYM nerds couldn’t be bothered, I guess—slots in the free jazz party of the mid-20th century. These so-called ‘modern creative’ jazz thinkers tempered free jazz’s unfettered extravaganza with a healthy dose of structure as well as influence and instrumentation from classical music. It takes a post-minimalist, birds’ eye view on a balanced, but still wildly experimental and interesting, approach.
How is that any more creative than other forms of jazz, one asks? In its defense, the genre didn’t pull the name out of thin air. In 1965, some like-minded musicians formed the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago. I get the sense that despite the strange choice to suffer through suffocating summers and blisteringly cold winters that Chicago is an undeniably smart city. Whether you see the founders of the AACM as pompous or pioneers, it ushered in a new paradigm into the jazz landscape and also deserves its props for providing music education free of charge. Its lofty ideas had an immediate impact among experimental jazz musicians. One of the key thinkers of the AACM, Anthony Braxton, developed the highly influential idea of ‘language music’, underpinning Modern Creative’s obsession with incorporating complex structures of logic while retaining the comparative instrumental liberty jazz provides.
Bill Dixon, trumpet master and professor extraordinaire sums up his intents and purposes within that ~creative~ musical moment in just thirty thrilling minutes, aided by a swathe of co-conspirators on trombone, clarinet, saxophone, and strings duty. The thirteen-minute opener “Metamorphosis 1962-1966” is a wide-lens view of sonic thought evolution on one record. In the first few minutes, his caterwauling horns exclaim over rhythmically dense clacking and pounding percussion. That’s just the appetizer: humble bass that follows for a short time after the three-minute mark serves as an aural palate cleanser before you get pulled back into the unpredictable and raucous remainder of the suites, though surprisingly melodically congruent in emphasizing structured ideas. The two “Nightfall” pieces evoke their name vividly. The first suite is ominous and uncertain like the fear that comes with night’s onset; the second suite settles with a resolute calm as the night stills before dawn. “Voices” is the most fascinating piece from an already-astounding album. Over disconcerting strings, Bill Dixon conducts his orchestra to explore horns’ voicings like nothing I’ve ever heard, commanding them to chat, whimper, yell, and coo. Though not modern if my calendar is right, these compositions remain stunningly creative and valuable wellsprings of ideas.