I wrote the program notes for the Coast Jazz Orchestra’s Fall 2025 Concert at the Hopkins Center for the Arts (Hanover, NH), celebrating three pioneering artists/educators of Black Creative Music—all named Bill (Bill Dixon, Bill Cole and Bill Lowe):
Today’s concert is exciting for many reasons. It’s a celebration of the legacies of three pioneering artists/educators/organizers of jazz and Black Creative Music: Bill Dixon (1925-2010), Bill Cole (b.1937), and Bill Lowe (b.1946). It’s an exploration of the music’s ancestry and the legacies of three deep practitioners of their craft who challenge and advance potentially transformative concepts of aesthetics, pedagogy, and humanity. And, quite frankly, it’s a good hang (or I can let you be the judge of that, actually). To round off the concert, the Coast is performing Such Sweet Thunder and Lady Mac by Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967) and Duke Ellington (1899-1974), and Shadrack (Portrait of Bill Cole) by Joseph Daley (1949-2025), which he dedicated to Bill Cole.1
The Billy Strayhorn connection is quite fitting, besides his being technically a fourth Bill on the program. Strayhorn largely grew up in Pittsburgh, just like Bill Cole, and even played in a band led by Bill Lowe’s father in that city in the 1930s, Jack Spruce and his Pittsburgh Cotton Pickers. But he is most known for having been Ellington’s right hand (and, as Duke often joked, his left hand and the eyes in the back of his head). His credits include some of the most popular tunes in the jazz canon, like Take the A Train and Lush Life. His inclusion in our program also extends our timeline to 10 years before Dixon, where 1915 also happens to be the year to which the Coast Jazz Orchestra can trace its origins.
Joseph Daley is also deeply intertwined with today’s occasion. Taylor Ho Bynum met Daley through Bill Lowe, and the three of them played in the premiere of Bill Dixon’s Index in 2000. Joseph and Bill Cole have their own fifty years of musical collaboration, with Joe first performing alongside Cole at Dartmouth in 1977. And not only was it through Joseph that Taylor met Bill Cole, but it was through Taylor that I met Bill Cole, and by extension Daley and Lowe. It’s a beautifully interwoven, intergenerational tapestry of relationships that has generated even more beauty; isn’t that what the music is about? Isn’t that what humanity is about? Although Joseph Daley passed away three months ago, his spirit lives on in each of us, and tonight, we’re sharing his continuing positive vibrations.
To aptly describe the legacies and unique pedagogical innovations of these musicians is a task that calls for much more than a single essay – but I will do my best. What is most apparent is that their pedagogies do not firstly isolate sounds into sets of correct pitches or rhythms or harmonies. Rather, they recognize that the sound incorporates their whole way of being. The music is not just the music. To play the music for them is a cultural, political, and spiritual affair, one that necessitates every facet of oneself, and one that attempts to draw out the essential humanity of every participant, both player and listener. It incorporates all modes of art – visual, movement-based, literary. It foregrounds love, sensitivity, justice, advocacy, connection – things which might be less prioritized in a more technically-minded conservatory jazz studies program. In their teaching, they did not assume a traditional top-down model, but rather, they elevated their students to become co-creators and fellow investigators of the music. They acknowledged and continue to acknowledge the racial and economic realities of their times, and yet, they’re motivated by a belief in the music which can provide sanity within and pave a way toward transcending the material conditions they face.
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“Anything that is abstracted from something is the essence of that something. That’s what it is. It is taking those things that shape and define it, stripped away the filligree… You’re going to the center.” – Bill Dixon
Bill Dixon arrived at Bennington College in 1968 and set up their Black Music Division, a separate curricular division, in 1974. A pioneering trumpet player and accomplished visual artist in his own right, Dixon was also a prolific producer and advocate. Just four years prior, he had organized the 1964 October Revolution in Jazz, a four day festival which took place at the Cellar Café in New York City. This groundbreaking series of performances and discussions served as the catalyst for the subsequent Jazz Composers Guild, a collective of artists who asserted their dignity to remove themselves from the disrespect and exploitation of the music industry. This group included musicians like Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Paul and Carla Bley, and more. Although short-lived, the organization came at the forefront of a larger movement across the country in the 1960s for artists to create on their own terms and helped push forward a ‘do-it-yourself’ mentality, evidenced in groups like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago, the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, and the burgeoning loft jazz scene in New York City. As a bandleader, Dixon recognized the primacy of silence. And yet, he had a knack for drawing out the specific sounds that only each player could make, and by extension, the sound that only the particular ensemble at that particular moment could make.
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There’s a framed note on the upright piano in Bill Cole’s studio which captures what he yelled out to Max Roach across the street:
“Bill Cole said
Hey
man,
listen to me!
There have been times,
man,
when
your music
has gotten me through.
I mean, when
your
music has gotten me
through.
You hear what I’m saying?”
The same year that Bill Dixon started the Black Music Division, Bill Cole arrived at Dartmouth after teaching stints at Whitman College and Amherst College. With him, he brought the John Coltrane Memorial World Music Series. Interestingly, in a series that carried Coltrane’s name, Bill organized programming that featured Indian Classical Music alongside Cameroonian guitar and free jazz with the likes of Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, and Sun Ra – all in addition to his own Seven Cycles, seven performances from 1975-1982 which included as many as 40 musicians, drumming ensembles, and Gospel choirs. Cole believed that John Coltrane, through his identification of his music as a form of folk music from the African diaspora, “paid tribute to that universal essence” found in other folk musics around the world, like in Asia and Africa. Thus, the music is inseparable from the history and culture of those who created it and is much more expansive than traditional genre labels would typically ascribe. To that end, as an educator, Bill Cole was outspoken in his classes about the racism, classism, and sexism that plagues this country. This attracted the unwanted attention of the Dartmouth Review, which launched an unrelenting series of articles, often shockingly explicit in their racism, attacking Cole and his teaching as an exemplar of all the supposed ills of multiculturalism, with Review students even invading and interrupting his lectures. Despite needing to negotiate his exit from the institution, Cole received an outpouring of support from faculty colleagues, as well as current and former students from around the world. These dozens upon dozens of letters attest to his deep care for and impact upon his students.
Tonight, we’re playing two tunes of Bill Cole’s, which he premiered in 1986 at Symphony Space in New York City, He Who Beats a Drum for a Mad Man to Dance is No Better Than the Mad Man and One Should Not Go to Bed with the Roof on Fire.2 The pieces were inspired by Yoruba proverbs that Cole had received from his own mentor, Fela Sowande. With arrangements by Julius Hemphill, the original ensemble featured an instrumentation strikingly similar to the small ensemble we have tonight, with Olu Dara on the cornet, Joseph Daley on the euphonium, and Abdul Wadud on cello, among others.
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Bill Lowe’s career has taken him through Columbia, Barnard, Wesleyan, Yale, New England Conservatory, Northeastern, Williams College, and more, as a professor of both music and African American Studies. His 2023 album, Sweet Cane, is named after Cane, an experimental novel by Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer published 100 years ago – a book which Lowe has regularly taught in his classes.3 He describes the book as such, “It’s about fear, the way that other novels are about wind and or the water. In ‘Cane,’ the stories have to do with how individuals respond to fear in the South.” Tonight’s Evening Song comes from that album. March of the Mu’tafikah also carries a literary inspiration – named after a team of anti-colonialist art-nappers in Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo. (Bynum actually arranged this piece when he was in college in the mid-90s!)
In Birthmarks, a documentary directed and produced by his daughter Naima, Bill Lowe recounts the moment of his assault by the Newark police.4 As a young news reporter in 1967, Bill was on the scene, covering a protest outside the 4th precinct of the Newark police department. The state violence that ensued left him with a constellation of scars on his back. He had been dragged across the asphalt with glass shards in his shirt, despite the “journalist” tag he was wearing. The film follows a series of conversations between the father and the daughter, and in it, Bill not only conjures his memory of that moment, but he questions the nature of memory itself. He asks,
“What does all of this mean to Naima? And what does my remembering mean to her?
How does that work?
How does that work?
How does that work as a musical improvisation?
How does that work to make meaning?
How does that work to make memory?
How does that work to leave some sort of legacy?”
In many ways, these questions encapsulate the deep engagement with the music, which has been embodied by all the artists featured on tonight’s program. They grapple with self-determination, with identity, with memory, with legacy, and with music. How do we understand our current conditions? How do we advocate for each other as fellow humans who are deserving of dignity and love? How do we acknowledge and overcome not only our own flaws and mistakes, but those of our fellow community members? How do we carry forward the lessons from the past into what we can only hope is a better future?
And what do we do when we recognize that it takes all of us to get there?
In a world and culture that seeks so desperately to pedestalize singular great heroes, Bill Dixon, Bill Cole, and Bill Lowe, all can rightfully claim some piece of that recognition. However, their practices demonstrate that, perhaps, we need to reframe this individualistic way of understanding history and ourselves. The music does not exist without sensitivity and responsibility to the collective. As Taylor Ho Bynum has said, “For every Miles Davis who becomes famous, there are 100 artists who are working in the trenches, and the music wouldn’t survive without them.”
To learn more about the history of Black Creative Music at Dartmouth, visit the Dartmouth Libraries digital exhibit at: https://exhibits.library.dartmouth.edu/s/bcm/
And browse the digital collection at: https://www.library.dartmouth.edu/digital/digital-collections/black-creative-music.
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(1) Learn more about and listen to Joseph Daley’s Portraits: Wind, Thunder, and Love: https://www.jodamusic.com/album-info/portraits
(2) Learn more about and listen to Bill Cole’s Music for Yoruba Proverbs on Bandcamp: https://billcole.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-yoruba-proverbs
(3) Learn more about and listen to Bill Lowe’s Sweet Cane on Bandcamp: https://billlowe.bandcamp.com/album/sweet-cane
(4) Learn more about and listen to Naima Lowe’s Birthmarks: https://www.naimalowe.net/#/birthmarks1/
Daniel Lin 