The Vision Festival, which ran this year from June 12-18, is exhausting and invigorating in equal measure. This is a left-of-center music marathon concentrated in one venue, the Angel Orensanz Foundation on the Lower East Side. It just happens to take place around the same time as the more mainstream, multi-venue JVC Jazz Festival. The theme for 2006, Vision’s 11th year, was Lifetime Recognition for the great Sam Rivers, who turns 83 this September.
I attended only a fraction of the festival’s 33 sets of music (plus three panel discussions and four nearby film presentations). Tuesday I arrived in time to hear the end of the Raphe Malik Tribute septet, just before the Rotterdam-based Klaas Hekman took the stage with a trio. Hekman plays bass saxophone — just the sort of oddity that makes the Vision Festival what it is. With cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and pianist Veryan Weston, Hekman played a warm and variegated type of chamber music, his instrument sounding something like a bassoon. The music was both written and improvised, structured but nebulous.
Pianist Borah Bergman, bassist William Parker and drummer Rashied Ali were billed as a trio, but they ended up playing with saxophonist Louis Belogenis. Standing at the rear balcony of the hall, I had the ideal view of Bergman’s unrelenting digits. His left and right hands are equally prodigious and fully independent. Traditionally, the left hand accompanies and the right hand solos, but when Bergman plays, anything can happen. As good as Belogenis is, one longed to hear Bergman in full trio mode (at one point the pianist even seemed to wave Belogenis off).
Sam Rivers opened the Wednesday session with his Rivbea Orchestra, and closed it with his trio (Doug Mathews, bass and reeds; Anthony Cole, drums and reeds). Rivers lives in Florida and works extensively with local musicians, which explains the orchestra’s largely unknown but highly skilled personnel. The set was dominated by hard-hitting brass and obliquely funky rhythms, with Mathews and Cole laying the foundations and Rivers playing occasional soprano sax. Trombonist Grachan Moncur had the unenviable task of following Rivers, with a sextet that included Bruce Edwards on guitar and Khan Jamal on vibes. They opened with Jackie McLean’s modal “Saturday and Sunday” and continued with rote and uninspired readings of “Footprints” and “So What.” From Moncur, one of the most adventurous artists of the ’60s, this was really playing it safe. But the lethargy lifted when percussionist/drummer Warren Smith took the stage, with an ensemble featuring Roy Campbell, Jr. on trumpet, Mark Taylor on French horn, Jack Jeffers on bass trombone, Andrew Lamb on tenor sax and Jaribu Shahid on bass. Here was the Vision aesthetic at its unconventional best, an inviting ebb and flow of tempo and texture.
Among the things I had to miss: duo sets by guitarist Joe Morris and expatriate bassist Barre Phillips; trumpeter Bill Dixon and trombonist George Lewis (both doubling on electronics); bassist Henry Grimes and poet Sekou Sundiata; pianist Lafayette Gilchrist and drummer Hamid Drake; and percussionist Yusuke Yamamoto and guitarist Ben Monder. Also, Steve Swell’s Slammin’ the Infinite, Roscoe Mitchell’s Chicago Quartet, Matana Roberts’s Mississippi Moonchile, Ras Moshe’s Music Now Unit, Jason Kao Hwang’s EDGE (liner notes by yours truly), and the William Parker/Charles Gayle/Rashied Ali trio.
The final day (Sunday 6/18) led off with Miya Masaoka on koto and “laser koto” (a complex theremin-type instrument), Peggy Lee on cello and Sylvie Courvoisier on piano — three important women, one captivating arc of sound. Tenorist Kidd Jordan followed with no-holds-barred free blowing, in a quartet with Joel Futterman on piano, William Parker on bass and Alvin Fiedler on drums. Patricia Nicholson-Parker, Vision’s chairperson of the board, performed a dance and chant interlude and then yielded the floor to drummer Whit Dickey and his trio, with Daniel Levin on cello and the impressive Matt Moran on vibraphone.
And for the grand finale, “the final U.S. performance” of tenorist David S. Ware’s quartet with pianist Matthew Shipp, William Parker and drummer Guillermo E. Brown. Was it really the final U.S. performance? There were conflicting reports. One thing was certain: This band, a working unit (with a few different drummers) since the early ’90s, has raised the bar on free-jazz ensemble work. Ware’s sound, as Gary Giddins once remarked, could tear phone books in half, but there’s more than sheer force in a typical Ware set. Shipp and Parker threaded an oddly timed unison figure through the entirety of the first piece, giving it structural backbone. Another involved spirited trading between an unaccompanied Ware and the rest of the band. Ware drew on full lung power; Shipp guided the trio reponses with a darkly compelling harmonic logic.
For my writeup of last year’s Vision Festival, go here.
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