The Vision Festival and Ornette Coleman
New York City, June 13-19, 2006
By John Litweiler
It’s interesting that George Wein’s two-week JVC Festival, the successor to Newport, began at the same time as this year’s six-night Vision Festival, the major exploratory-music festival in the U.S. No doubt the JVC concerts was a fair cross-section of today’s jazz scene, with serious, hard-core musicians, from a handful of senior avant-garde artists to young hard-bop lions and late-blooming swing players; and with pop-jazz players and veritable hordes of jazz and pop singers, too. By contrast, Vision Festival XI concentrated on free jazz, free improvisation, the stream of underground music born in the jazz tradition with Ornette Coleman nearly a half-century ago. Right now it’s the most vital stream of jazz.
In contrast to the JVC’s big concert halls, the Vision fest was again held in a smaller, beautiful setting, the Angel Orensanz Center. It is a former synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a four-story vault, with wonderfully peeling blue paint, that looked like it might have survived the sack of Constantinople. As twilight, then night peeped through the high, narrow windows, 33 acts performed in front of an ornately decorated wall, the remnant of a tall old, maybe ancient, altar.
There were paintings and photos on the walls, including Jacques Bisceglia shots of Malachi Favors on a motorcycle and some of Sun Ra’s Arkestra playing basketball. Now and then during the fest some poets read (to improvised accompaniment), dancers danced, visuals (including Bill Dixon’s paintings) were screened, and panels discussed the New York and post-hurricane New Orleans arts communities. As the music roared and soared, a few painters painted and, on the mezzanine, folks hawked records and food, including salads, a curry, and on one night, chicken fried by William Parker himself. Partly it was the inviting scene and the sense, shared by artists and audience, that we’re all in this together that made the Vision Festival more than the sum of its parts.
It was right and proper that the second day of the fest was designated Sam Rivers Day. Sam and Bea Rivers, who ran Studio Rivbea, best-known of New York’s 1970s jazz lofts, were spiritual ancestors of this festival and the handful of Vision concert series that occur throughout the year. Dancer Patricia Nicholson, her associates, of whom the most prominent is her husband William Parker, and volunteers run the Vision Festival. Some of the New Yorkers at the festival – for instance, trumpeter Roy Campbell, saxophonists Rob Brown and Sabir Mateen, pianist Matthew Shipp, bassists Parker, Reggie Workman, and Henry Grimes – return each year, and some of the pleasure is in hearing them in new settings.
Nicholson and friends also cast a wide net, and about a third of the performers came from around North America, Europe, England. It’s not easy for a homemade festival like this to offer such a varied musical menu. For one thing, the U.S. government raises formidable obstacles to keep non-U.S. musicians from performing here.
Along with the underground-music orientation, this festival was distinguished by its musicians’ earnestness. Even though the quality of the music varied during each night, nobody seemed to play down for the crowd, nobody simplified their music, trying to be “accessible.” The absence of bullshit was notable even in the weakest set, a queasy duet by pianist Dave Burrell and jazz-rock drummer Billy Martin.
Burrell was more purposeful during a septet tribute to trumpeter Raphe Malik, who died earlier this year. Malik’s multi-theme pieces and Warren Smith’s “A Toast to Raphe” unfolded elaborately, with moods divided between bright, thorny, and ponderous. In fact, the players, including trumpeters Lewis “Flip” Barnes and Roy Campbell, offered warm interpretations, none more so than altoist Jemeel Moondoc, who in Malik’s “FMP” pursued a melodic line, here tenuous, there stately, then held a note that splintered into many notes – a dogged, triumphant solo.
It was one of the festival’s few sets with compositions that were more than songs to frame soloists. In fact, about half the sets I heard were wholly improvised. Something about the festival atmosphere pumped up musicians’ adrenalin, for there was plenty of intense, fast-tempo, post-Ayler music. Thirty-some years ago this energy music sounded angry to a lot of listeners. By now, though, energy bands like trombonist Steve Swell’s Slammin’ the Infinite and New Orleans tenorist Edward “Kidd” Jordan’s exciting quartet (with swooping, crashing pianist Joel Futterman; powerful bassist Parker; colorful, complex drummer Alvin Fielder) hit hard and sounded exhilarated, full of high spirits.
Most intense of all was the very together Chicago quartet of Roscoe Mitchell, who played ferocious soprano and alto sax, torturing a generating idea into an obsessive phantasmagoria of sound, with incredible stamina – a familiar Mitchell mode. His trumpeter Corey Wilkes has distinctive personal sounds, extended fierce trills, and long bent tones. Drummer Vincent Davis was supercharged and Harrison Bankhead pursued a motive with Mitchell-like doggedness into a dense, terrific bass solo.
All this high energy was great fun to hear. Yet fairly recently I’ve heard Swell, Jordan, and especially Mitchell play some beautifully lyrical music, and I’d certainly like to hear more of their less-violent musics. For a contrast, Charles Gayle interrupted his own high-energy set to play a spectacular slow exhibition of tones, with many subtle gradations, edges, and bends to his basically hard, true alto sax sound. And tenorman David S. Ware, along with apocalyptic screaming and quartet freakouts, featured a long piece in which a series of extended sax salvoes were each answered by quiet interludes – straightahead melodic line or ballad or impressionism or abstraction – by Parker, pianist Matthew Shipp, and drummer Guillermo Brown. Both Ware and Gayle, I think, were as satisfying as the much-praised Mitchell.
Actually, most of the festival was far from fast and furious. English trombonist Paul Rutherford, who is one of the liberated wonders of the world, began a calm yet intense set by creating a melodic line so flowing that, even as it speeded, slowed, or veered into passages of growls and chattering, it sounded inevitable. In another piece he began making distorted sounds then, as German bassist Torsten Müller and Canadian drummer Dylan van der Schyff set a fast pace, he played a graceful, unhurried trombone line. Rutherford seldom gets to America, so he’s only modestly well known here, and I hope his set opened some ears (his Emanem solo CDs encompass the range of human possibility on trombone).
His fellow trombonist George Lewis was in an imaginative trio with trumpeter Bill Dixon and Lewis’s computer, which echoed, amplified, distorted, and made chords of the brass sounds. In a different trio, it was fascinating to hear Miya Masaoka strum, pluck, and bow a huge koto in deep, shimmering, harplike lines. Then as pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and cellist Peggy Lee played a dissonant duet, Masaoka waved her hands mysteriously, theremin-like, between two red lights to make more koto sounds – she called it her laser koto. In contrast to the mutually supportive Masaoka trio were free drummer Whit Dickey, flowing classical cellist Daniel Levin, and spacey jazz vibist Matt Moran. Contrary directions, yet this odd trio stimulated each other and the Monk-like Moran was especially ingenious.
For the Sam Rivers tribute, drummer-composer Warren Smith led a sextet, which featured startling French horn work by Mark Taylor, and trombonist Grachan Moncur led another sextet. Moncur sounded hesitant in his familiar ‘60s modal pieces, but his vibist Khan Jamal rescued the set by ringing in sustained showers of notes. The night concluded with a happy set by Rivers himself. He’s aptly named, for high-spirited invention seemed to stream from him endlessly, as he stretched out on tenor and soprano saxes, flute, and piano. It was much like the first time I heard him, over 30 years ago, except that now he was joined by fellow multi-instrumentalists Doug Mathews and Anthony Cole.
I see this survey of the festival is turning into a veritable catalogue. The Swiss trio Day & Taxi (soprano sax, bass, drums) was a medium for bright original songs; electric violinist Jason Kao Hwang composed especially colorful pieces for his quartet (trumpet, bass, drums); we’ll no doubt hear more from these groups. And there were pianist Borah Bergman, guitarist Joe Morris, and airy dancer Patricia Nicholson herself among the other delights. Finally, one of the freest of all drummers, Rashied Ali, played off-center, polyrhythmic lines that provided gravity to three disparate bands, holding them together with his own compelling tension and flowing complexity.
In conflict with Vision’s fourth night, Friday, Ornette Coleman played at Carnegie Hall for the JVC Festival. This concert was not to be missed – Coleman, age 76, who rarely chooses to play in public any more, is still the most melodic, imaginative, and, yes, exciting artist in jazz.. His quintet had three bassists, one bowing, one plucking the tempo, one strumming an electric bass, and drummer Denardo Coleman. In recent years Denardo had been an accompanist of rare sensitivity, but this time he sounded reckless, especially when he imposed 12/8 meters on ballads. Together this band was freer than Prime Time, but still hardly more than a gray backdrop for Ornette himself.
His 12 selections alternated fast songs and ballads, and emotional turmoil and sadness dominated the ballads, emphasized by his crying alto sound and sorrowing phrasing. The compassion of his 1959 Lonely Woman became pain in this 2006 version, while his other fast pieces conveyed not the anger of his youth, but instead exultant melodism. Several times he played passages on the trumpet, and once on the violin, before returning to his alto. Even long, detailed phrases had a singing quality, both in his melodies and in his big, clear sound – and some of his ideas were stunning in their beauty. Here, more than anywhere else in 2006, was the joy of creating music.
Of course, Coleman was the visionary who made the most vital jazz developments of the last half-century possible. “The Revolution Continues” was the slogan for Vision Festival XI. More accurately, the free-music revolutions, plural, have evolved from 1960s creative explosions into today’s experiments and discoveries, and six nights of this music by a parade of adventurers again was a delight to the spirit.