MUSIC No Limits

DENNIS GONZALEZ, WITH HIS BIG mane of hair, steps to the mike with his trumpet. He starts a composition that has a melody line you could hum.

Ho-hum? Well, most jazz events barely get past this prefatory point before they’re predictable as all get-out. Each player takes a solo that everyone dutifully applauds even if it’s no good, and the next melody line starts the whole drill off again. But when Gonzalez and company start to improvise, journeys begin. Dennis quotes from trumpet sources as diverse as Satchmo and conjunto, the drummer kicks in with a rhythm culled from Lebanese folk dance, and the other band members emote on instruments ranging from the familiar to the just plain weird. Listen right and you hear gongs, ragas, desert winds, reggae, the mall on Mars, a hint of Sousa, and plenty more. Jumbled and unharmonious to some ears, it is compelling and hearteningly individualistic to others. Initially mocked by area jazzers, Gonzalez has become an internationally recognized avant-gardist who has released twenty-one records on his own label. Anyone seeking an out from the musically mundane needs to know about him.

Born in Abilene in 1954 and reared in Mercedes, Dennis Gonzalez came to Dallas about a dozen years ago. In 1977 he founded daagnimRecords (dallas association for avant-garde and neo-impres-sionistic music), which didn’t fit the established jazz pigeonholes.

There were two entrenched jazz camps here in those days, the fusionists and the reactionaries. The latter came from bop and R&B doctrine and avoided the avant-garde out of tradition. The fusionists sought commercial success, and if there was one thing Gonzalez was unlikely to generate, it was that. His compositions were way too weird for mass taste.

“The musicians here were very zealously holding on to their little slots,” remembers Gonzalez. “Here I was, a twenty-four-year-old just come to town, and I didn’t do any of the standards. 1 wasn’t sitting in at the clubs, I didn’t hobnob with the ’cats.’ Guys got upset that I would be audacious enough not to sit in, pay my dues, and pay homage to them. But I was very insistent on playing my own music, and their attitude made me stronger,”

Gonzalez put out the first daagnim LP-Air Light (Sleep Sailor), recorded in his living room in 1979-on which he played trumpet, piano, sitar, bass, bongos, sleigh bells, a glockenspiel, and a slew of other instruments. He played them all by himself, because no one was interested in recording with him.

Gonzalez became impossible to ignore only as musicians of unquestioned merit started participating in daagnim projects and recordings. Word got around that with Gonzalez, a musician could take an idea that was too “outside” for the lounge crowd, and play it, experiment with it, and maybe even make art with it. An imporMUSIC tant ally was reedman Bob Ackerman, who did straight-ahead gigs all over town but was known to have been in on the “loft jazz” sessions in New York in the Seventies. For a veteran of that scene to grant Dennis credence meant a lot locally.

Gradually Gonzalez gained ground, conducting workshops with such stars as Max Roach, Cecil Taylor, and Anthony Braxton. He hired on with KERA, hosting such shows as “Miles Out” and pioneering the multinational music format that station is so lauded for nowadays. Finally came what Americans respect most-imprimatur from elsewhere. Daagnim records were wending their way to Europe, so Gonzalez found himself booked for shows in Yugoslavia, Italy, Finland, Poland, West Germany, and other countries. In Yugoslavia, he teamed with synth star Lado Jaksa on interpretations of Southern Baptist hymns. How’s that for cross-culturalism?

The recent Gonzalez agenda has included producing records for Silk Heart, a Swedish label run by a Brit, Keith Knox. It’s rare for nonconformist jazz in America to be recorded anywhere but on the coasts, but to have access to Dennis’s organizational skills, Knox (a seasoned producer himself) stages Silk Heart sessions in Dallas.

Music isn’t Dennis Gonzalez’s only talent. Hung among the exotic instruments that festoon the walls of his home are always examples of whatever visual art he’s currently involved with. Last year it was his Xero-graphs (photocopied images altered with colored charcoal and arranged to assert movement), but they’re now in North London, on exhibit at the Jazz Cafe performance center. Now, it’s his Archetypal Objects, representations of tribal staffs or primitive musical instruments. This month, the Archetypal Objects will be exhibited at the Guadalupe Art Center in San Antonio.

Unpretentious and a little beatific, Gonzalez practices his arcane creativity while comfortably couched in the real world. A paragon of domesticity, he has a normal wife, two assertively normal sons, and lives in Oak Cliff. He teaches mariachi music and French at Spence Middle School and North Dallas High.

Like many icons of alternative music- notably saxophonists John Coltrane and Pharaoh Sanders-Dennis Gonzalez believes that spirituality and creativity inform each other-indeed, are each other.

“We are a creation, and in order to stay alive you must keep creating” Gonzalez says. ’’Whether through an art form, through your worship, or just through your everyday living. I think that the reason a lot of people are crazy-and I mean clinically insane-is that they didn’t continue creation. Your body continues to re-create itself, and unless your mind and spirit do so as well, you’re basically living a living death.

’’People are beginning to understand that you need to be creative,” he continues. “People are more accepting now of the fact that I’m Mexican. That I’m Texan. That I have long hair. But here in Dallas is still where people are most surprised that I do what I do. There was an article in the paper, had my picture in it, teaching guitar to my mariachi students. Some people recognized me and said, “gee, you teach! In DISD!’ They came just short of saying they’d thought I was just a bum. I used to get it a lot more. People would ask me, ’why would a Mexican want to major in French?’ I thought, wow, I didn’t know 1 was supposed to limit myself!”