{"id":5204,"date":"2015-07-15T16:32:56","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T16:32:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5204"},"modified":"2015-07-15T16:32:56","modified_gmt":"2015-07-15T16:32:56","slug":"twenty-years-on-the-vision-festivals-enduring-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2015\/07\/15\/twenty-years-on-the-vision-festivals-enduring-vision\/","title":{"rendered":"Twenty Years On, The Vision Festival's Enduring Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"20150720_Larry1\"<\/a>
David Murray performing at the 20th annual Vision Festival with his Class Struggle band (bassist Burniss Earl Travis shown here). Photo by Enid Farber<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nOn Friday, July 10, as tenor saxophonist David Murray<\/strong> reached the last of several emotional peaks during a blissful yet intense version of \u201cFlowers For Albert,\u201d audience members both young and old whooped and raised hands as if they were at a church revival.
\nHere was the annual Vision Festival<\/strong> in full swing, asserting its spiritual heft, sounding echoes of deep legacies and a displaying its power as in-the-moment entertainment of an exalted sort.
\nIn fact, this was a church: After two decades of shifting venues, owing to the vagaries of New York City real estate, this year\u2019s event, marking the event\u2019s 20th<\/sup> anniversary, was held from July 7-12 at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.
\nMurray first recorded \u201cFlowers for Albert\u201d nearly 40 years ago, in dedication to the pioneering saxophonist Albert Ayler, who is one of this community\u2019s dear departed masters. At Judson Church, Murray performed it with his \u201cClass Struggle\u201d band, which includes his son, Mingus Murray, whose electric guitar solos leaned forward stylistically while also honoring his father\u2019s personal history.
\nThe Vision Festival has long stood as this country’s essential gathering of avant-garde improvising musicians\u2014yet that description is neither entirely accurate nor complete. First off, the festival involves dancers, poets and visual artists. Also, even the sloppy signifier \u201cavant garde\u201d fails to sum up even a single night of the event. Any given five hours at the Judson Church\u2014each night presented a half-dozen or more performances\u2014ranged wildly in sound and texture.
\n“The aesthetic isn’t so easy to define,” said William Parker<\/strong>, the bassist and composer who is a Vision fest founder and leading light, during an interview for a Wall Street Journal piece<\/a> I wrote a few years back. “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.\u201d
\n“This is an artist-run, people-sponsored festival,” he explained. “The artists make the decisions, and it’s supported by the people that come through the door or who make donations.”
\nOne highlight of each Vision Festival is Parker\u2019s own presentation, usually a large-ensemble work. Immediately following Murray\u2019s set, Parker performed his \u201cMartin Luther King Project: Part 5,\u201d with an all-star group that included saxophonists Kidd Jordan<\/strong> and Jemeel Moondoc<\/strong>, and multi-instrumentalist Cooper Moore<\/strong>, and a bevy of first-rate singers.
\nThis year’s four-night event celebrated not just Vision\u2019s 20-year history but also the legacy of Chicago\u2019s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which celebrates its 50th<\/sup> anniversary this year. (The AACM is a clear model for the Vision Festival, and for its umbrella nonprofit, Arts for Art, in terms of self-determination and a larger social and political consciousness that surrounds the music.)
\nThis year, several Vision Festival sets related to the AACM, the best of which was a Tuesday night performance, during which saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell<\/strong> led two different trios, and then combined all the musicians in a quintet.
\nThe Vision Festival has always focused on a sense of community that spans styles, generations and geography (this is now a global scene; besides, this crowd has mostly been priced out of its former Lower Manhattan environs).
\nThose facts are well reflected through a brilliant 3-CD set from William Parker, \u201cFor Those Who Are, Still,\u201d due August 21 on Aum Fidelity<\/a>. The recordings were made in Brooklyn and Paris, and the program includes four long-form works, each of a distinct character and instrumentation, and including a symphony orchestra. (I\u2019ll write more on this recording soon.)
\nThe Vision fest\u2019s 20th<\/sup> anniversary highlights questions: What binds this culture? Does all that talk of social justice have an impact beyond the stage? Twenty years on, has the impulse and audience and meaning changed?
\nWe got answers, of sorts, as well as other questions to consider, through a related symposium<\/a>, “Improvising Agency for Change: Celebrating 20 Years of the Vision Festival,” held July 6, and co-presented\u00a0by Columbia University\u2019s Center for Jazz Studies <\/strong>and its Division of Arts & Sciences.<\/strong>
\nTo begin the daylong event, Michael Heller<\/strong> (University of Pittsburgh) spoke of the Vision Festival in terms of a long tradition of self-determination in jazz\u201d and an expression of \u201ccollaborative resistance.\u201d What has propelled the festival even through tough times, he said, was \u201can unwavering belief in principles.\u201d
\nScott Currie<\/strong> (University of Minnesota) took issue with the perception, promoted, he argued by much of the press generated by the event in its earliest years, as \u201cand anachronism\u201d or an \u201catavistic throwback.\u201d He talked about a more general \u201cerasure of jazz\u2019s avant-garde from mainstream history.\u201d He cited an interview he did with pianist Matthew Shipp<\/strong>, a leading light of the Vision fest scene, in which Shipp reacted to the idea that the Vision fest crowd was \u201ca bunch of hippies from the Sixties\u201d: \u201cEvery aspect of society,\u201d Currie recalled Shipp as saying, \u201cis geared toward making sure the Sixties never happens again.\u201d
\nPianist Vijay Iyer<\/strong> (Harvard University) celebrated the Vision fest\u2019s achievements but also used the symposium as a challenge to his colleagues. He brought up the litany of incidents that have highlighted racial divides in this country. \u201cStories of transformation through improvisation,\u201d he said, provide \u201cconvenient narratives for the project of jazz studies.\u201d
\n\u201cThe desire to focus on a microtopia of racial harmony might feel ineffective or even inappropriate or even unethical in face of a stupefying pattern of violence against blacks\u2026. As we study, are we fantasizing about the melting away of difference?\u201d
\nIn a panel discussion among Vision Festival principal figures, dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson Parker<\/strong>, the festival\u2019s primary organizer these days and William Parker\u2019s wife, recalled how today\u2019s festival grew organically from a need.
\n\u201cWe had nowhere to gather and play,\u201d she said. \u201cThere was no place for it in New York City. There had been many places when I was younger. We knew many people. All this great energy, and then there was\u2026 nothing.\u201d
\n\u201cWe were still on the self-reliance program,\u201d William Parker said of the festival\u2019s earliest days. \u201cWe had to do a lot of things for ourselves. The whole world knew the AACM. But no one knew who we were and what we did. We wanted people to hear our music and to understand our values.\u201d
\nMatthew Shipp pointed out that among the scores of festivals listed each year in Down Beat and other magazines, \u201cNot many artists from this community are at any of them. There are no other American festivals centered around this area of music.\u201d
\nMulti-instrumentalist Joe McPhee<\/strong> recalled the power of experiencing the very first Vision Fest\u2014\u201cnot as a performer, but just sitting in the audience and taking it in. (He has since played riveting sets at Vision fests through the years.) And McPhee referred to the Vision fest\u2019s independence from outside programming pressures. \u201cWhen you sell your should to the devil,\u201d he said, \u201cthe price drops.\u201d
\nBradford K. Smith<\/strong>, who is president of The Foundation Center and is a former member of the Vision Festival\u2019s board, offered a telling anecdote:
\n\u201cThe board had been thinking about how to get more funding. We thought that we needed to get more young people involved. \u201cWilliam [Parker] looked at me with a slight frown: \u2018You want us to be something we\u2019re not?\u2019 he said. These artists are protagonists, not commodities.\u201d
\nTwenty years on, the Vision Festival represents a community that can no longer be called \u201cdowntown\u201d (if that name ever fit): The physical downtown no longer exists\u2014it\u2019s all condos, coops, and brand-name establishments. The community it binds is international anyway. The festival is gloriously unbought and unsold. Yet it accepts and deserves financial support without strings attached.
\nIt is a sound and a purpose and a feeling that may reflect on past struggles and triumphs but is not stuck in the past nor trying to seed a future out of vague aspiration or market manipulation. Twenty years on, the Vision Festival lives in the present. Its invigorating presence may well be a statement against triviality and complacency and narrow-mindedness and conformity.
\nOr maybe it\u2019s simply a demonstration of what\u2019s really going on.
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday, July 10, as tenor saxophonist David Murray reached the last of several emotional peaks during a blissful yet intense version of \u201cFlowers For Albert,\u201d audience members both young and old whooped and raised hands as if they were at a church revival. Here was the annual Vision Festival in full swing, asserting its … <\/p>\n

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