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