William Parker and Patricia Nicholson Parker, organizers and founders of the Vision Festival.
By NATE CHINEN
During his youth, the New Orleans tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan worked with some of the brightest lights of soul and R&B, like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. And that’s just for starters. “You name the genre, I’ve done it,” Mr. Jordan, 73, said this week from Baton Rouge, La., his temporary home since shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. “But when I was playing in all those other genres, I wasn’t satisfied with what I was doing. I always was one of them who would search, and keep searching.”
Next week Mr. Jordan will reap some recognition for his searching: a lifetime achievement honor at the Vision Festival, widely recognized as this country’s premier gathering for free jazz and improvised music. Now in its 13th year, the festival runs from Tuesday through June 15 at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a longtime nexus of experimentation and a site of much recent transition.
With its devotion to the jazz avant-garde, the Vision Festival serves as a gravitational center, pulling musicians in from the margins. Not surprisingly it has often been cast as an eccentrically gritty rejoinder to the JVC Jazz Festival, which starts on June 15 this year. (In seasons past, David and Goliath have more directly overlapped.) This year the Vision Festival has its own competition, the New Languages Festival, being held a couple of blocks away at the Living Theater.
Increasingly, though, the Vision Festival has developed a stand-alone reputation. Its programming, which mixes old-timers like Mr. Jordan with newer arrivals like the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, confirms the continuing vigor of experimental improvised music, a current of the New York underground through much of the last 50 years. Owing to the influence of Patricia Nicholson Parker, a founder and the chairwoman, who has a background in modern dance, the Vision Festival also presents related arts, including dance, poetry and, this year, two site-specific installations.
The festival draws an audience impressive not only for its actual existence — hardly a given in this particular field — but also for its heterogeneity. One survey conducted at the event in 2006 found that nearly half the attendees lived outside the New York area.
“People come from France, Japan, England, Germany,” said the bassist William Parker, Ms. Nicholson Parker’s husband. “There’s a following all over the world.” To some extent, this internationalism is echoed in the lineup, which this year includes the English tenor saxophonist Paul Dunmall and the French bassist Joëlle Léandre, influential figures on the European new-music scene.
But there’s also something deeply local about the Vision Festival and its constituency, which reeled after the April 2007 closing of Tonic, an important performance space in the area. Last year’s edition of the festival was held down the street from that club’s shuttered site, and at times it conveyed the feeling of a wake.
For avant-gardists and their supporters, the gentrification that squeezed out Tonic was a sharp spur to action. The guitarist Marc Ribot, whose part in a protest at the ill-fated club led to his arrest, brought much attention to the cause through word as well as deed. One of his arguments centered on the need for civic support in the face of market pressures.
“It’s not a question of not having a space,” Mr. Ribot reiterated this week. “It’s a question of spaces that pay.” With precious few exceptions, the post-Tonic avant-garde landscape in the city involves smaller rooms in relatively more remote locations; tip jars are often the means of collection.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Mr. Ribot said. “There are still great musicians in New York. But marginal differences over time can have big effects.”
Last fall Ms. Nicholson Parker announced the formationof the advocacy group Rise Up Creative Music and Arts. Along with Mr. Parker, she articulated the organization’s goals at a town hall meeting in April. (Mr. Ribot was among those present, though he says he has not been directly involved with the group since.)
“This music, all the really innovative music, has been marginalized and pushed aside,” Ms. Nicholson Parker said recently. “A lot of this is urban planning, or the lack thereof.”
The most visible result of Rise Up Creative Music and Arts, so far, is the Vision/Rucma Series, held most weekends this year at the Living Theater on the Lower East Side. In addition to raising awareness for a cause, the series has supported the Vision Festival brand; after a brief hiatus, the series will resume on June 19 with a concert by the trumpeter Roy Campbell.
Next week, meanwhile, the Living Theater serves as home to the New Languages Festival (newlanguages.org). Now in its fourth season, that event is musician-run and progressive-minded, like its more established counterpart.
The alto saxophonist Jackson Moore, one of the founders of the upstart event, said the timing was an accident. But, he added in an e-mail message, “It’s a bit of cosmic good fortune that the Vision Festival and the New Languages Festival are down the street from each other.” He suggested that the adjacent festivals “might just reach a combined critical mass that will bring new listeners into the fold.”
Self-sufficiency and an undercurrent of service are ideals evident in both festivals; Mr. Jordan, a self-starter throughout his career, is also being heralded for his important contribution to music education in New Orleans. In this sense the Vision Festival has been consistent: previous lifetime achievement honors went to the saxophonist Fred Anderson, the multireedist Sam Rivers and the trumpeter Bill Dixon. Each of these artists has been a social organizer, rallying his peers around a place and a cause.
Of course each has also been a searcher. “I’ve been playing ‘out’ since the ’50s,” Mr. Jordan said, and laughed. “I was experimenting then, and I’m still experimenting. Maybe next week I’ll have something new.”
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