Downtown, a Durable Vision of Jazz
William Parker and Patricia Nicholson sit at the kitchen table of their East Village apartment, surrounded by musical instruments of far-flung provenance—drums, gongs, an eight-stringed Malian kamele ngoni. Husband and wife, they recall how, with neighbors and the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, they worked in the 1980s to restore nearly everything but the facade and foundation of their home. Through sweat equity and shared purpose, residents ended up with something sturdy, lasting, even beautiful.
He, a bassist and bandleader, and she, a dancer and choreographer, have devoted equal dedication to the Vision Festival, which begins its 15th season in downtown Manhattan on Sunday. It's a parallel story.
This year, through 75 events at seven venues (none above Houston Street), the festival reaffirms its status as this country's essential gathering of avant-garde improvising musicians—yet that description is neither entirely accurate nor complete. Any given four hours at the Abrons Arts Center, the festival's primary venue from June 23 to 29, ranges wildly in sound and texture.
"The aesthetic isn't so easy to define," says Mr. Parker. "Nobody does notated pieces. There is improvisation in each band, which sometimes comes out of jazz, sometimes blues or world music or European music or just what I call the X-factor."
Central to that aesthetic are dance, poetry and visual art. "That's always been true of our scene," says Ms. Nicholson, who directed two of this year's dance-piece premieres. Sunday's opening event features a dozen poets. Hanging above the Abrons Center stage will be woodcut silhouettes created by Raymond A. King, who also plays piano in saxophonist Sabir Mateen's daring septet. What you won't see anywhere is a corporate logo.
"This is an artist-run, people-sponsored festival," says Mr. Parker. "The artists make the decisions, and it's supported by the people that come through the door or who make donations."
The festival's themes reference cultural history, not marketing hooks. Mr. Parker's free concert at Campos Plaza Playground (June 21), within a public-housing complex and featuring children in performance, recalls his childhood in the Melrose projects of the Bronx, as well as the nonprofit Jazzmobile program, which once provided him an instrument and a sense of purpose. The June 28 lineup nods to transatlantic connections and the festival's origins: It features Touch the Earth II, the two surviving members of a trio that had included the German bassist Peter Kowald. Mr. Kowald, who died in 2002, helped Mr. Parker and Ms. Nicholson apply the strategy of the German free-jazz collective, FMP, in downtown Manhattan when they created the Sound Unity Festival in 1984. After a brief effort to build a year-round collective, they returned to the festival idea. "We felt overlooked," said Ms. Nicholson. "So we wanted to create an event with too important a range of characters to be overlooked."
The Vision Festival, inaugurated in 1996 with a $25,000 budget, was—and remains—just that. In 1997, an umbrella nonprofit organization, Art for Arts, was formed with Ms. Nicholson as director. The current festival budget, roughly $300,000, remains low for an endeavor of such quality and scale. The performers on June 23—including Mr. Parker, pianist Matthew Shipp and trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr.—will forgo artist fees. Such is the sense of mission among a community that feels marginalized within, or priced out of its own neighborhood.
"I love the West Village jazz-club scene," says Mr. Shipp, "but this is a different culture, and its context has changed so much that it could just go away. The Vision Festival proves how vital it is, and how much it belongs where it is."
George Wein, whose storied Newport and New York Jazz festivals rose again via a new sponsor, CareFusion, has told me that he pines for the days when mainstream "giants," such as Miles Davis, "walked the earth." The Vision Festival still has exalted elders to place front and center. One, Muhal Richard Abrams (who performs June 24), is a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. But Billy Bang (June 27), the freest and best improvising violinist, and tenor saxophonists Kidd Jordan and Fred Anderson, trailblazers both (June 23 and 24, respectively), are received as conquering heroes only in this context.
There may no longer be anything experimental about playing freely improvised music, yet these continuing musical experiments yield fresh satisfactions. And the festival's sense of community matches the music's dynamism. "Just waiting to get in," says Mr. Parker, "you have a clump of musicians talking. You get a certain vibration, a glow right away. You know you can come inside and get a kind of enlightenment you cannot get anywhere else."
www.visionfestival.org
by Larry Blumenfeld, image by Ken Weiss
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