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Extra-musical
The Vision Festival’s holistic agenda
BY ED HAZELL
Related Links

+ The Vision Festival's Web site

+ William Parker's official Web site

+ Matthew Shipp's official Web site

+ Roy Campbell's official Web site

Previously in the Phoenix

+ Two sides of William Parker

+ William Parker and Amiri Baraka play the ICA

+ A review of Matthew Shipp's release, Nu Bop

No single event in the past decade has done more for New York free jazz than the annual Vision Festival. Dozens of CDs have been recorded at festival concerts. Besides raising the profile of musicians who’ve been marginalized by the mainstream media, the artist-run event has provided a forum for allied artists in various media in which to explore the common political-æsthetic-spiritual underpinnings of their art directly with their audience.

Boasting an ambitious agenda brought off on a shoestring budget, the Vision Festival has survived longer than all but a handful of artist-run events in improvised music. And it’s celebrating its 10th anniversary with Vision Volume 3 (Arts for Art), a CD/DVD package primarily of music from the 2003 festival. The set features New Yorkers like bassist William Parker, pianist Matthew Shipp, and trumpeter Roy Campbell, like-minded Midwesterners including tenor-saxophonist Fred Anderson (Chicago) and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell (Madison), New Orleans tenor Kidd Jordan, and more than 30 others. Interviews with some of the participating artists make it clear that the art’s liberating qualities — its moral thrust — is as important to its creators as the created object.

The extra-musical aspects are more explicit in some pieces than others, but liberation, the impulse to shock the audience into awareness, or lead it to a higher spiritual consciousness, is implicit in the music’s vibrancy, its urgency, and its energized complexity. Although the bands and the dancers have a lot in common, the music is quite varied from group to group. Tenor-saxophonist Anderson and bassist Harrison Bankhead improvise an intricate counterpoint of knotty phrases and gruff blues sounds that sweeps you along with its logic and its momentum. Vocalist Thomas Buckner makes more explicit use of Western classical influences in improvisations with saxophonist Mitchell and percussionist Jerome Cooper. Both the Roy Campbell–Joe McPhee Quartet and the Andrew Cyrille Trio with Parker and Jordan offer strong soloing but also exceptional group interplay. In its sprawling and unruly joy, Parker’s tribute to the late singer Jeanne Lee — featuring a large group of men and women of different ages and ethnicities — comes closest to realizing the musical and social spirit of the festival.

Most of the same bands appear on the DVD, though all the music is different. Appearing only on the DVD, Jin Hi Kim’s trio, with Kim on komungo (a Korean stringed instrument), Parker on doso’ngoni (an African harp) and Billy Bang on violin, mixes world-music elements. The DVD also shows how improvising dancers Patricia Nicholson and Maria Mitchell use three-dimensional space and movement to interact with the music. Interviews with festival organizer Nicholson as well as musicians, visual artists, and poets provide context.

Vision also published Peace, a book of statements, poetry, photographs, and essays by participants in this year’s event. And here the indefatigable Parker gets close to the festival’s motivating idea: "The first compulsion of the musician is the music itself. The bigger question is: Are we cared for and loved as human beings? Cared for regardless if we are artists or not? . . . If one is really getting the music then one should be getting the concept of human being. In this is the strongest reason for the music to live, for it to be heard, from every rooftop of every house in the world."

Vision Volume 3 and Peace are both available at the AUM Fidelity Web site, http://www.aumfidelity.com/.


Issue Date: December 2 - 8, 2005
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