For all the extensions of the trumpet's sound capability that Bill Dixon has added in nearly a half century of playing, this latest work communicates injudicious pinpoint statements and understatements. Motion here is sensed in the minutiae of which tones Dixon bends, savors, clips, or glances off (see "Twice Upon a Time") as much as in the contour and sequence of phrases. Implication dominates the logic of Vade Mecum. One story unfolds between the sounds that Dixon articulates, another in the silences, and still another follows the trajectories sketched by bassists Barry Guy and William Parker, and drummer Tony Oxley.

Dixon's explanatory note for the album pinpoints the agency of the music: "all compositions are by Bill Dixon; the lines of Oxley, Parker, and Guy are their own." There was no printed or detailed spoken map for this recording. Searching for compositional structures after the fact reveals primarily the attributes that - according to Dixon -inhere necessarily in all music: beginning, middle, and end. He evolves the shapes of the pieces as foreknown destinations whose specifics are in part determined by the other musicians creations. "I like the accident of purpose sometimes. I actually tell the players sometimes 'Don't listen to anyone... don't think at all.' I don't want any thinking in the room. When I want a certain kind of thing I will suggest that on the instrument; they know how to listen for that." Thinking and listening happen in the practice room. In recording and performance situations every practiced resource is on call at once, to be summoned in the moment. Dixon continuously probes the theorem "you can play everything you know" that skills honed through decades must be at the fingertips to be spontaneously deployed in improvising.

Students of Bill Dixon's music - players and listeners are often surprised to hear him discuss musical projects in problem solution terms. As he puts it, his musical projects pursue one particular goal or idea to its fullest, and then he moves on to the next. Some large orchestra pieces for his ensembles at Bennington College have taken their final form only after semesters of development, and Dixon organizes performance series to attack one specific musical problem across the span of several days. The ultimate laboratory situation is documented in endless hours of solo tape from Dixon's studio- stretching, reconfiguring, compounding lines to a definitive realization for that moment. The record you are holding now, Vade Mecum, is at once a fresh beginning for Bill Dixon's new quartet and the acme of a group context and musical ideas that he has been distilling for more than a decade.

Twenty-five years on faculty at Bennington College in Vermont have brought Dixon enormous experience in scoring for whatever groups of instruments present themselves. I Vade Mecum represents an opposite pole of his working situations, in which - as in the prior Soul Note records, Iii Italy, November 1981, Thoughts, and Son of Sysyphus -- the instrument and musician selections are Dixon's, and this new work shares with them the bass-strong small group format. "Everyone knows how much I like the two basses and I never really did finish with that." Where the other records feature associates from Bennington (Art Brooks, Steven Haynes, Marco Eneidi) and long-time collaborators (Alan Silva, Mario Pavone, Laurence Cook, John Buckingham).

the new quartet came fresh from the drawing table for its first meeting in these two days of recording.
The group embodies Dixon's principle of orchestral playing as viable for any group. "If I play by myself-which I do a lot that's an orchestra piece. If I play with another person, that's an orchestra piece, because what we're trying to do is cover the range of an orchestra. "Dixon, Guy, Parker, and Oxley share histories of leading orchestras in their own music, and they have all transferred their understanding of the layers, colors, and reactions of large groups to their own self-sufficient solo musics. The quartet's unity derives from the compatibility of improvisers who understand the orchestra from experience as players and directors. "Two people can't play the same orchestra, you understand, so you have to find the places where you can be ... When you have a point of view musically, then it allows the two orchestras to co-exist. Even a solo is orchestral because we're covering the range of dynamics, of placement of tones, densities, lines."

Looking to earlier episodes of Dixon's two-bass quartet, contrast is immediately apparent with the roles of basses and drummer for the November 1981 concerts: there they provide constant layers of sound as architectural support for Di xon's figures. Vade Mecum incorporates the musicians in a more fluid and spacious network. "I have an affinity for the two basses, drums, and trumpet. I don't know why more in us icians aren't using it -more trumpet players especially: it ties in so much better than the piano as an instrument, because it's more liquid. The bass players today are remarkable; I like that kind of feeling tone... and if you have the right drummer..."

Rhythms and pulse function more for their coloristic value than as velocities or in a metric framework. Sounds are j . juxtaposed to make intervallic sense one to another, so that the focal point of any passage is its direction rather than a tonal center. In fact, Dixon recalls instructing the bassists to change tunings during the pieces. Moments at the beginning of the title track show the impact of Parker and Guy (heard throughout the record in separate channels) in a pizzicato thicket recalling November 1981, but demonstrating the important corollary that cohesive high-energy playing does not always mean high-density playing. Vade Mecum offers a masterclass in narrow tensions that do not go up in flames. and in deceleration without loss of momentum.
In a recording session nine years ago, Dixon epitomized the way he uses drums, advising the drummer to "do some things nothing percussive". Tony Oxley's approach to percussion stretches this conception to its edge. He generates streams of sound that range from solid waves to precise spurts and splashes, all aimed more at flow and comment than drummerly riffs, timekeeping, or punctuation. Oxley has also created an exemplary instrumentarium and playing system to accompany his musical understanding. The same is true of Guy and Parker, who have furthered the extended techniques wrought by both symphonists and improvisers. and most strikingly of Bill Dixon's rewriting of the physical textbook of trumpet playing:
"Since no instrument tells you what to do with it, you're free to do with that instrument what you want.
I try to play anything I think I can hear on the instrument that relates to what I'm trying to do within that context. I decided to use the register that's off the instrument - the pedal tones - musically. I also decided I wanted to learn to use the upper harmonics musically."

In Vade Mecum, Bill Dixon has created a kinetic, uncompromising music of infinite subtlety without the apocalypses that too often are the only signature of modem music. To grasp it is to study it.

- Ben Young
March 1994
Ben Young is the author of the forthcoming discography and performance history of Bill Dixon, Dixonia.