One of Cairo’s only jazz saxophonists is a 22-year-old American guy with shaggy brown hair and a toothy smile. But don’t be fooled by John Dikeman’s innocent looks and tender age — he has taken a strong stand on the importance of his craft and cites the gospel of the 100-year-old American jazz tradition to support his art.

Dikeman has been in the spotlight of the Cairo jazz scene since moving to Egypt one year ago. Aside from playing with acts including Bang Bang Quartet, The Riff Band, Karizma, pop star Mohamed Mounir and various underground electronica DJs, Dikeman has distinguished himself by bringing something uncommon to Cairo: post-bop and free-jazz-style improvisation.

Dikeman moved away from home at the age of 15, house-squatting with friends in Utah, New York and Philadelphia, essentially traveling wherever his music took him. When his long-term girlfriend landed a good job in Cairo last year, Dikeman had no reservations about making the move.

“What I do is non-existent here,” Dikeman says. “Even in Beirut, where there is a really good improvised-music scene, it’s small and there is no money, but at least there are players. Here, the only guys are Darren Pickering [Dikeman’s piano partner] and me. There aren’t many venues where we can play — but I’m working on that.”

For Dikeman and Pickering, a New Zealand native, modern improv is about exploring their instruments and experimenting with what they call different energy levels of sound.

“You’ll never hear many saxophonists play [only notes],” Dikeman says about contemporary improvisation. “There will be a lot of multi-phonics and breath sounds. Or a balloon attached to a tube that attaches to a trumpet with a metal plate on top so it ends up sounding like a percussion instrument. For some people, the goal is to make their instrument sound as little as itself as possible.”

Anne Combaz Cairo is gaining in sax appeal.

One of the things Pickering often does, says Dikeman, is get inside his piano to play the strings and do muting effects.

Dikeman says some of the best feedback he has gotten has been from the shows they have done at Downtown Cairo’s Townhouse Gallery, despite fears of local musicians that anything too avant-garde risks alienating their already small audiences.

“They say, ‘This is Egypt and no one wants that’,” claims Dikeman. The truth, he says, is that “I’ve had the opposite response [people] don’t [necessarily] know what jazz is, so they don’t care. They get into it and are just like ‘What is this?’”

Eclecticism and experimentation in jazz improvisation, what Dikeman embraces as a “reductionist aesthetic,” has been growing in popularity in Europe over the past two decades even as the United States has seen a strong movement towards more traditional forms of music. The style, which is seeing greater play locally because of the continuing strength of Europe’s artistic influence compared to the United States, draws on two bases: free jazz and classical music.

Free jazz can be characterized by its diminished dependence on traditional harmonic and rhythmic structures. John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman felt that the post-bebop small groups, already stripped down from the arranged excess of the Swing era, were still overly limited by sets of chord changes and turned to focus on impressionistic improvisation that followed no predetermined harmony.

In Europe, free jazz diverged from the American jazz tradition. According to Dikeman, artists fused it with contemporary minimalist classical styles to concentrate on the sonic effects they could produce. Like John Cage, who subjected audiences to extended silences and cacophonous noise, musicians often used homemade instruments and created static textures sustained for hours in an attempt to separate themselves from the music. (Among Cage’s most famous pieces is “4 minutes and 33 seconds,” which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of pure silence).

“It opened up the palettes,” says Dikeman. “No longer were you not allowed to play certain sounds, certain, notes, certain rhythms — it became an open field that you use to express yourself.”

Born in Nebraska, Dikeman grew up in an isolated Wyoming town where he spent most of his free time studying and practicing music. He quickly discovered the music of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn and Albert Ayler, and instantly connected to the unmatched expressive power of free jazz.

At the age of 16, Dikeman met New Mexican guitarist Stefan Dill, who became his mentor. They performed together in Wyoming and Utah throughout the next couple of years until Dill introduced Dikeman to the legendary improviser Jack Wright. Wright became one of the biggest influences on Dikeman’s music, bringing him away from his overt jazz mindset and opening him up to many different approaches to improvisation including the reductionist aesthetics (a form of improvisation that comes from classical music) that Wright had been exploring at the time.

After living and studying in New York, Dikeman moved into Wright’s house in Philadelphia, where he met violist Jonathan Fretheim and bassist Michael Barker. At the time, Dikeman worked regularly with his housemates and local musicians and was an occasional guest with Philly based avant-rock group, Sharks Without Fins. In his spare time, he installed security alarms for Action Alarm Specialists.

In Cairo, Dikeman is teaching flute, saxophone, clarinet and piano at the Cairo British School and Modern English School by day and playing nightly jazz gigs.

“This is sort of interesting for me [playing jazz again] because I’m not really a jazz player,” says Dikeman. “I want to improvise, that’s my niche, but I’m surprised because now I am much more interested in jazz. Initially, I wasn’t. It was just a gig, something for practice, whatever. But now I’m interested in pursuing it possibly as a permanent thing. I want to start doing original compositions.”

Dikeman says the main obstacle with Cairo’s jazz scene, which he says only consists of 20 or so musicians, is the reluctance to experiment.

“There is a tendency to try to play music as accurately as possible since it isn’t theirs,” he explains. “They are very intense on whose solo is first and are very paranoid about screwing up and not getting it right. I would be the same way if I was trying to play Oriental music. But the fine thing about jazz is that it’s been a music that is about taking risks. A lot of people make mistakes all the time. Miles Davis, in all respect, wasn’t a great player technically, but it was about the music: he was a great risk-taker in that regard.”

Dikeman adds that another reason why jazz musicians in Cairo play “straight-ahead jazz” is because of a lack of emphasis on listening to other music and studying different periods and traditions.

“In the States, we go back to the ‘20s and ‘30s,” he says. “You have to know this stuff, any jazz musician does. Even if you don’t play it, you should listen to it, but most people here listen to the ‘70s and that’s about it. There are some musicians here who are from abroad or have traveled abroad and they come back with a lot of info and music that they shared with everyone. Then suddenly, you have ten keyboard players with all the same influences because they had the same teacher.”

Dikeman says that although some local musicians avoid innovation, everyone he has played with is interested in trying different things. Karizma, for example, is still considered pretty standard but is one of the few bands in Cairo that tries to take standard jazz repertoire and re-arrange it for a more modern, unique sound.

“We’re into taking a basic thing and looking at how to extend it and move past it,” says Dikeman.

Karizma plays everything from long, elegant ballads with heart-wrenching sax solos such as “In a Sentimental Mood” by Duke Ellington, to fun, creative covers like “My Favorite Things” from the movie Sound of Music and fast jazz pieces spiced with Latin beats such as “Armando’s Rhumba” by Chick Corea.

The goal for Bang Bang Quartet is roughly similar, but more focused on trying to move beyond the post-bop 60s and play original composition and tunes that most people wouldn’t know. “It’s still jazz and it’s still the tradition, but it’s more advanced,” says Dikeman.

Obstacles aside, Dikeman says that he has noticed things loosening up since he first arrived. “When I first got here you heard “Blue Bossa” every time, you heard “Autumn Leaves” every time and that’s silly,” he adds. “But not anymore, so it’s growing.” et

Dikeman’s first CD, entitled A Combination of Things, will be released in Cairo on December 26. Produced under the independent New Jersey label Archives CD, the album is a compilation of Dikeman’s live improvisation shows with various other artists. The CD will be available for purchase from Dikeman himself at any one of his weekly shows for LE 110. See www.johndikeman.com for more information as well as upcoming performances in Cairo.