Watch Akua Dixon and Quartette Indigo at www.chamber-music.org/extras

Akua Dixon The New York-born veteran cellist absorbed all the music the city had to offer.

BY Gene Santoro

t amazes me,” cellist Akua Dixon declares, “that “ people are amazed when they hear about a musician who plays classical music. You don’t get to play with the level of technique and expertise Iof Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson if you didn’t study the piano. And study, in this country, means classical music.” The straight-talking 66-year-old’s career has stretched nearly five decades now. In the process, it has illustrated her musical abilities and versatility; the challenges of being a string player who also happens to be black and female; and the conceptual and cultural divides still defining the jazz and classical worlds. Akua Dixon, the title of her new album, opens with ’s anthemic “Haitian Fight Song.” Listening reminded me that Mingus as a kid studied cello. The fat boy worked at it, lugging the bulky ax back and forth to school, but his white music teacher made fun of him. His new friend Buddy Collette, who played clarinet and sax, told him, “You’ll never get a job in a white symphony. Better learn to slap a bass. You’ll get more work than you can imagine.” Decades later, Collette—who during the 1940s and 1950s was on point in breaking down color bars within Hollywood’s studios and elsewhere—admitted to me that he had an ulterior motive. He led a teen- age band playing local parties, making a few bucks, and meeting girls—and he needed a bass player. Jazzin’Around

“Like Mingus, Dixon had an epiphany: “I didn’t see any place for me in an orchestra or string quartet: I was black and female. Even today, as many black string players as there are, you rarely see them in pop culture or on TV.”

That didn’t make what he told Mingus So she went on to the Manhattan School of the Symphony for the New World offered wrong. Music, to study cello with Benar Heifetz and African American classical musicians slots The New York-born veteran cellist In Dixon’s creative hands, “Haitian Fight composition with Rudolf Schramm. After in America’s first integrated orchestra; its absorbed all the music the city Song” retains its call-to-arms edge as it’s she graduated, she worked in studios, on boosters included Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Broadway, and at the Apollo Theater. Copland, Langston Hughes, Gian Carlo had to offer. reshaped into a fugue for strings—a natural extrapolation, given Mingus’s fondness for “I was an excellent sight-reader,” she Menotti, Zero Mostel, the Ford Foundation, reworked classical forms, particularly canons. explains, “I knew how to prep, and I could and the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s also worth noting that many jazz greats, just hit the gig and deliver. So I’d get a lot of When it succumbed to internal and external including Mingus, have thought of Bach’s last-minute calls to sub, too. I was a kid and pressures, for Dixon, the point—that there fugues as vehicles for his masterful keyboard having fun. But I often felt like a square peg were no full-time gigs for her in the classical improvising. As Dixon sees it, “I’m always trying to fit into a round hole. Sometimes I just world—was driven home. combining my jazz and classical backgrounds felt unwelcome. Sometimes I was blatantly Next stop: Pointer’s ambitious The String in my composing. Here the fugue form opens told I shouldn’t be there.” Reunion, which she joined with sister Gayle. into different solo sections—blues, stop Uptown was better: “At the Apollo, we As the 30-piece ensemble’s director of new time, double-time—that come out of jazz. had time between shows. In summer 1970, music, Dixon copped an NEA grant for com- Essentially, I wanted strings to be able to do we did 23 shows a week. The other string position in 1974—the first fruits of her what saxes do.” players included Noel Pointer, my sister search for a space for her voice. “1970s jazz,” Abetted by guest soloist John Blake, the Gayle, and Maxine Roach. We didn’t go down she declares, “was deeply connected to civil late great jazz violinist, Dixon got what she the basement with the traditional jazz rights. Black music was growing, and infor- wanted. “Haitian Fight Song” is another fine musicians; we bonded and found another mation was being shared in new ways, like realization of the ambitions driving her work. space way upstairs, where we’d bring Jazzmobile. I took arranging classes with Born and raised in New York City, Dixon chamber music or our own compositions. Frank Foster and Reggie Workman, improvi- absorbed music at church and concerts with That was amazing. I got to hear what I was sation with Jimmy Owens. How could I do her parents. “New York was a hotbed of writing, with people who were not afraid to this stuff in my music on my instrument? I everything,” she recalls, “and I had my ears in tell me when things weren’t right.” had to map a path where there wasn’t one.” everything about American music.” In fourth When she went back downstairs into the Recording with jazzers like Archie Shepp grade, she took up cello and started playing pit, she supported stars like , put her to real-life tests. Studio dates with with older sister Gayle, the acclaimed violinist Reverend James Cleveland, Barry White, and Eddie Drennon, the violinist-producer-arranger who died in 2009. Next step: the High School Dionne Warwick, scoping a big arc of the whose music embraced salsa, funk, r&b, pop, of the Performing Arts of Fame fame. “Going American music panorama. “Working with JB and disco, broadened her technique. “On there,” she says, “means you already play was a new education in technique and feel- his version of ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing,” she well, so I started doing freelance non-union ing,” she recalls. “He was all about one of declares, “the string charts were killing. Not gigs in all styles of music.” Like Mingus, she the things most classical string players don’t like stuff today—the icing-on-the-cake had an epiphany: “I didn’t see any place for get: how to put it there, rhythmically, make sound, whole notes and chord pads, looped me in an orchestra or string quartet: I was the string parts lock up like African drums.” passages. The advent of the synthesizer did black and female. Even today, as many black In New York, one thing can lead to another that. When you’re used to moving around string players as there are, you rarely see for a talented person connecting the dots. on your instrument for Mozart or whatever, them in pop culture or on TV.” So it happened that Dixon joined a pivotal it’s boring to listen to and boring to play.” That wasn’t making her give up the cello. institution. From 1965 to the late 1970s, continued on page 79

19 Jazzin’, continued from page 19 In 1973, Dixon founded Quartette Indigo, with sister Gayle, John Blake, and agile violist Ron Lawrence; its hot-jazz edge and impro- visational brio powered several albums. Beginning in 1978, the Akua Dixon String Ensemble worked with jazzers from Rahsaan Roland Kirk to Carmen McRae. Her Broadway credits include Cats, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Doonesbury, La Cage aux Folles, and Dreamgirls. She performed with , Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations. In 1981, pioneering drummer Max Roach called with the idea that became his Double Quartet. “He wanted a band that used a string quartet,” Dixon recalls, “and chose Maxine, Gayle, me, and Diane Monroe—he wanted it all-female. Max was the ultimate perfectionist; he liked to rehearse. For a good while it was 9 to 5, five days a week. I was expecting my daughter, so he came over to my apartment. The string quartet rehearsed while he played telephone books with brushes, to make sure he could hear us and that we were matching rhythmically. He liked to play fast with rhythmic clarity. To learn bebop phrasing, that kind of diction, with the bow first-hand from one of its inventors, was major. When you learn cello, you learn European classical bowing. But jazz phrasing isn’t Mozart’s.” After decades training students via programs in Carnegie Hall, Harlem schools, and elsewhere, Dixon laughs, “For this CD, I was the teacher again. I used players who, aside from my special guests (including Regina Carter on three tracks), never played jazz before but are fantastic classical players. I was able to impart some of the knowledge I’ve gathered. See, string players take theory, but it’s not applied to their instrument; it’s not something they use when they’re performing. In jazz, you have to. Most classical players have a lot of difficulty with syncopation; when they try to swing, they sound like they’re skipping rope. You have to learn new bow strokes. It’s not a white-black thing. The strings on Fantasia swing wonderfully, and on Charlie Parker with Strings they’re stiff. I meet plenty of African American string players today who can’t swing correctly.” Duke Ellington, who knew nothing meant a thing without it, gets reparsed on Akua Dixon. “I recomposed ‘Lush Life.’ First, an atonal intro. It’s already a challenging piece for vocalists, which is why not many sing it. My chords made it even harder. There are clashes in the string parts’ harmonies, places where you have to bend notes to make chords work. Lieder, like Brahms’s shaped what I heard. Then it goes into swing.” It’s a fascinating path across the great divide.

Gene Santoro has written a biography of Charles Mingus, Myself When I Am Real (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Highway 61 Revisited (Oxford 2004), about American music’s complex roots. His next project recounts his bout with Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

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