A Visionary Vibe Architect
On the under-appreciated Walt Dickerson
When a jazz musician arrives on the scene with genuinely innovative ideas, he or she is usually recognized – and, frequently, revered – for it. But there are those rare cases when the planets don’t align, and an artist’s sonic innovations go largely unnoticed beyond the community of musicians.
That’s the Walt Dickerson story.
The Philadelphia-born vibraphonist, composer and thinker came up in the hard bop era of the late 1950s, a time when horn players and instrumentalists worked to establish musical identities that would set them apart from others. Dickerson did this fantastically well. He developed a sound that was radically different from the reigning big names on the vibes, like Milt Jackson and Lionel Hampton. Where those legends favored extroverted flagwaving gestures, Dickerson hovered at close range over the vibraphone’s metal bars, playing with lightness and keen sensitivity to the coloristic possibilities of his instrument. He peeled off the felt from his (already small) mallets to gain pinpoint control over the attack, and, through these equipment modifications, brought out nuances that are sometimes neglected: He was an absolute master of dynamics, chordal shading, texture. His playing could be wild and impulsive, alive with the spirit of free improvisation; it could also be deeply spiritual. As some of his later solo records suggest, he was in pursuit of a kind of radical consonance.
Dickerson made his debut as a leader in 1961. He was named DownBeat magazine’s Best New Artist in 1962, the year he released his most acclaimed work, To My Queen. In an extensive and illuminating 2003 interview with journalist Hank Shteamer, Dickerson explained that his suite was an attempt to “express those very beautiful, poignant, intellectual, brilliant, beautiful sides of her. So therefore it couldn’t fall in the realm of most songs or most compositions in the genre but had to escape those restrictions in order to exemplify her. And in doing so, it did open up a new vista of explorations.”
Over the next few years, Dickerson collaborated with some of the music’s emerging visionaries – pianists Andrew Hill and Sun Ra (in a rare sideman role), drummers Edgar Bateman (who played with John Coltrane) and Andrew Cyrille (who went on to groundbreaking work with Cecil Taylor) – on records that trace a rapid evolution away from conventional hard bop and into disarmingly beautiful epic quests. One of those, Impressions of a Patch of Blue, transforms Jerry Goldsmith’s music for a film about an interracial romance into a platform for fitful, let’s-question-everything exploration; check Sun Ra’s applecart-upsetting solo entrance on the main theme.
Dickerson disappeared in late 1965 and spent the next decade away from jazz. When he returned, in 1975, his music, always thoughtful, radiated serenity cut with faint grace notes of doubt. On solo vibes recordings (!) and two transfixing duet sessions with bassist Richard Davis, Dickerson celebrated the placid calm created by the instrument, and also his ability to shatter that calm with firestorms of dizzying technique. Central to this: His inquiries into the magic of sustain, and the resonant properties of precisely voiced chords when they are held. Using the vibraphone’s sustain pedal and electronically controlled tremolo settings, Dickerson conjured waves of thick, drone-like sound that expand, contract and abruptly swell as they hang in the air.
Hearing Dickerson in our current moment of music as ambient salve is interesting. He was a visionary whose ideas about texture – and creating motion within slow or static harmony – didn’t travel as far as they probably could have in the jazz realm. Yet those ideas are still hanging around, and they’re shared by people working in contemporary classical composition and loop-based electronic music and who knows where else. The public at large missed out on Walk Dickerson when he was alive. But he did leave behind some thought-provoking records; it’s never too late to appreciate a sonic innovator.
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