Bill Dixon isn't a well-known name outside of free jazz circles, but he's been a part of those circles since the 1960s, when free jazz and open-ended improvisatory music came into their own as viable genres. Moreover, his trumpet and flugelhorn playing with Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor helped shape the sound. He also excelled on the solo trumpet recordings he made in the first half of the 70s-- those latter recordings could be considered cousins of Anthony Braxton's solo sax work, but Dixon operated in much deeper creative and commercial isolation. He organized and produced the 1964 "October Revolution in Jazz" at Manhattan's Cellar Café, featuring Taylor and Shepp, Sun Ra, Jimmy Giuffre, Paul Bley, Roswell Rudd, Charles Moffatt, Steve Lacy, Alan Silva, and many others, and even attempted to organize the mid-60s wave of free musicians with the short-lived Jazz Composers Guild. He later became an educator, signing on as a music professor at Vermont's Bennington College, while recording sporadically with the likes of William Parker and Tony Oxley.
There is perhaps no music that captures a more perfect combination of primal expression and intellectual thought than free jazz, and so it seems a fitting medium with which to address the ongoing war in Darfur (let's not do it the dignity of calling it a crisis, as we see it so often referred to). After all, what human endeavor so effortlessly combines intellectual justification and basic primal instinct as war? Dixon has formulated a sort of controlled burn for his large orchestra, which features seven horn players (himself included), six woodwinds, double bass, cello, drums, percussion, and vibes. The primary source of tension comes from the contrast between denseness and sparseness, and the balance Dixon strikes between the two seems predicated on keeping the listener guessing.
The brutal build of "Prelude", for instance, begins as a soft conversation between woodwinds before evolving into a brass shouting match. The band comes together as the discord rises in volume and violence, finally reaching a point where it feels like it has to cut to silence. But it doesn't, instead growing louder and more dissonant for another 20 seconds. In this way, it echoes the conflict it's named for, a war that began with quietly given orders to kill that's since spawned an endless, static shouting match. The title track is a fine example of orchestrated chaos, with the band lurching through a series of apocalyptic swells and sparse, running skirmishes. It has the rhythm of battle-hanging dread followed by confusion, unexpected awkward silence, and deafening, disorganized noise.
Darfur does these things so well that over the course of its diverse and challenging 56 minutes, one can't help but hear its statement on the war-- politicians seem to care about just enough to grandstand about it and then follow their words with a paucity of action. From a listener's standpoint, the project's tonal and textural variety and relatively simple organization makes it more approachable than a great deal of free music for newcomers to the genre, though it still takes a willingness to abandon usual structures. In fact, for its flow from violence to calm and back, it bears as much similarity to modern chamber works like Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" as it does to Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor and other free jazz luminaries. Whatever the associates, though, Dixon has created an outstanding work of modern jazz and political commentary.
