This concert was among the most eagerly anticipated events of this year’s Victoriaville festival, and turned out to be its most controversial. Though I didn’t attend Victo this year, it sometimes almost seems like I did – I’ve heard about this performance from a lot of people, many of whom were exceedingly unhappy, disappointed or angry about it.

A lot of things went wrong. An ugly scene at the press conference got things off to an ominous start. According to Josef Woodard in the JazzTimes, Dixon did a memorably splenetic turn there, delivering himself of “a seething rant” in which he “bitterly assail[ed] critics and Canada herself for not bringing him up earlier.” At the concert, Victo-goers, having paid $30 a seat, were subjected to an hour’s delay; then, rather than the programmed two hours, the musicians delivered a scant 50 minutes of music. Taylor devotees, some of whom had made the pilgrimage to Victo especially for this concert, were irate because of the absence of the piano fireworks they’d anticipated: the entire concert, apparently following Dixon’s lead, was minimalist, quiet and slow.

Given the concert’s notoriety, I was very curious to hear this recording. Was it possible that the problematic context of the original concert had meant an unduly cool reception for the music? Would the CD reveal more musical depth and subtlety than were audible in the venue of the Colisée des Bois-Francs (a hockey arena)? Certainly the opportunity to hear Taylor play with unwonted restraint and trying something different was one I found inviting. And of course, given my regard for Taylor’s 1966 Blue Note recording Conquistador!, on which Dixon played a key role, their reunion almost four decades later couldn’t help but catch the eye.

In the event, the CD merely reconfirms that this was an awkward and deeply unsatisfactory concert. The comments I’ve heard from the concert-goers mostly concerned Bill Dixon’s role in the music, and this seems to me just: the blame for the concert’s failure must lie on his shoulders. On the evidence of this CD his abilities as a trumpeter have dwindled to almost nothing. His entire sonic palette is now little more than flatulent releases of air, fed through a reverb device which is kept in the “on” position for the entire performance. At best the results are innocuously atmospheric – rather like the echoey sounds one might hear in a documentary on whales. But as the performance progresses, with Taylor and Oxley gamely trying to approach Dixon on his own territory and receiving virtually no response, it’s hard not to find the trumpeter’s playing solipsistic, even weirdly infantile, in its regression to the sounds of gurgling, breathing and farting, its indifference to line, shape or direction, and its inability to enter into meaningful dialogue.

Any disc with Taylor and Oxley isn’t going to be a complete waste of time, and certainly this one has curiosity value: Taylor’s never recorded anything else like it, and it would certainly be fascinating to hear him explore this minimalist vein in a different context. (Here the trumpet is so prominent in the mix, and the piano and drums are spread so oddly between the speakers, that I find it impossible even just to mentally edit Dixon out and concentrate on the often superb exchanges between Taylor and Oxley.) On the whole, though, this is a strikingly poor CD. The obvious question, then, is why Victo released it, and did so with unusual speed (just over three months after the concert). Is this a cynical effort to cash in on the cachet of the performers’ names, regardless of the quality of the music? A sign of genuine (if misplaced) enthusiasm about the music? An attempt to counter the negative feelings generated by the star-crossed gig by at least giving people a second chance to hear the actual music? I really don’t know. What I can say is that as a musical and historical curiosity the CD has some documentary value, and will thus have some interest for serious devotees of any of the three musicians involved. But there is otherwise little to recommend it.

Nate Dorward

Cadence, December 2002