Already in his late 30s, Bill Dixon seems to have suddenly appeared in 1962, stretching jazz modernism in distinctively new ways with Archie Shepp – Bill Dixon Quartet for Savoy. However, the trumpeter had been on the margins of the New York jazz scene for over a decade, encountering the likes of Cecil Taylor, Tina Brooks, and Earl Griffiths, often in informal settings. There were dead ends and diversions – he spent much of 1954 in a band that played clubs and a US Air Force base in Alaska. Like many jazz musicians, Dixon’s activities were hampered by day jobs, though working at the UN from 1956 to 1962 allowed him to form the United Nations Jazz Society, and afforded him his first interdisciplinary performance opportunity in 1959, playing his notated music – and improvising – with a guitarist for a production of “No Exit” in a small theater in the Secretariat library.