A black stage with a single light shining in the middle was the only backdrop needed to hear Bill Dixon’s powerful trumpet solo. No words were spoken once the music started. No one in the audience heard Ran Blake or Bill Dixon discuss their music, or even announce pieces’ titles. They instead were just treated a night of beautiful music.
The Saturday night performance in Crowell culminated a visit to Wesleyan by Bill Dixon, Francesco Martinelli and Ran Blake. From February 7-12, Wesleyan hosted these world-renowned artists for a series of seminars and performances.
Both Dixon and Blake are known for their interesting, somewhat experimental styles of music. Dixon is an avant-garde jazz trumpet player, while Blake is a solo pianist who attributes film noir as one of the biggest influences on his music.
Because Blake and Dixon are international musicians, the night started with an announcement that the concert was being broadcast around the world via a webcam set up by graduate students. This is the first official broadcast of its sort from the music department at Wesleyan. There were verifications that people were tuning into the broadcast in at least Israel and Canada.
Immediately following, Bill Dixon entered and commenced with a long solo piece, entitled “The Art of the Solo,” that had five different sections. Two microphones placed on the center of the stage electrified his trumpet playing. Many of the sounds it produced were breathy and echoing. Some sections had a cavernous enveloping feel while others were composed of quick shorter sounds.
The second piece used the echoes created by the microphone as the foundation for the piece.
“The music Dixon played seemed to be coming from the time the earth was created,” said Matt Leddy ’08.
Dixon has been playing avant-garde jazz since the 1960s and has taught at various universities since then. He founded the Unite Nations Jazz Society in the 1950s and in 1964 he organized and produced a four-day concert series entitled “The October Revolution in Jazz.” He has composed over 200 original works, many of which have been studied in numerous academic works.
When commenting on his piece for the concert in the playbill, Dixon wrote, “I have a vision, sometimes, of how I want to begin to place some things… But most of the time I am content to let the ‘sounds’ themselves dictate where they must go.”
Ran Blake, the second performer of the night, is as much an artist as an educator. He has been working at the New England Conservatory of Music for over 30 years. His influences include gospel, blues, Euro-American contemporary music and film noir. He works primarily as a solo pianist but has collaborated with many other great musicians, including Wesleyan Professor of Music Anthony Braxton.
Blake performed eight different pieces during his half of the show, with the overall title “NOIR: Whirlpools.” Blake’s pieces contain some more traditional elements of jazz in them, although they also experimented with all sorts of new sounds and rhythms.
Between two pieces in the concert Blake walked abruptly off stage, sat in the front row of the audience for a minute or two, put on black sunglasses, and returned to the stage to perform his next piece still wearing the sunglasses. While the audience seemed confused at first, thinking that Blake was finished, they were pleasantly surprised when Blake returned to the stage. His piano was also amplified with microphones, as was Dixon’s trumpet.
“The dramatic lighting and unusual auditory effects created throughout the entire performance were so interesting,” said Jacob Mirsky ’08.
“Large audience turn-out and how captivated everyone seemed was what I was very impressed with,” said Zach Frosch ’08. “I personally was not even aware of the time passing while the music was being played.”
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