The Old And New Gospel Of Vision Festival

For the 14th straight year, the Vision Festival is up and running on the Lower East Side of New York City. The artist-run "avantjazz" (their term) and related arts (dance, visual art, poetry, film) celebration just presented a lifetime achievement tribute to Marshall Allen (of the Sun Ra Arkestra) last night, and four more days of music are in store. For anyone with any interest in the continued existence of progressive improvised music in its original laboratory, this is clearly a Good Thing.

In the light of the recent collapse of traditional jazz industry stanchions — JVC Jazz Festival New York, JazzTimes, etc. — it seems as if there are lessons to be learned in the model of Vision Fest and its non-profit governing body, Arts For Art. But along with being an exemplar for the rest of the jazz arena, I think Vision could stand to learn a few lessons too.

Now, full disclosure: I have previously volunteered for the Vision Festival, setting up and taking down nearly every night for two years. So some of this is probably filtered through the joys and frustrations with that experience. But there's mounting evidence for some of the things I mention.

 

To start, look at some of the other highlights of New York's upcoming jazz calendar, now that JVC is out of the picture, just in the month of June:

—The Festival of New Trumpet Music's first 2009 installment, directed by great trumpet players like Dave Douglas, Taylor Ho Bynum and John McNeil;
—The Brooklyn Jazz Underground Festival at The Jazz Gallery, a series of performances organized by a collective of bandleaders;
—The Bloom Festival mentioned previously on ABS, curated by a journalist and a musician (who is a member of BJU)

The common thread, in case you didn't notice: innovative musicians banding together to present innovative musicians in concert. Now, the idea of artists getting together to curate their own performances is nothing new in jazz. Like the AACM, or the Black Artists Group of St. Louis, or any number of musicians' collectives over time, Arts For Art probably began in part as a way of ensuring opportunities for uncompromising artists to present their work unmediated by the usual pressures of the marketplace.

But with technological advances which make publicity outreach much easier — and a declining commercial market for jazz to deal with — the presence and reach of a jazz artists' collective must be becoming much more appealing. How else could a relatively tiny organization dedicated to a type of music not widely appreciated, one which literally passed around hats at the Vision Festivals I've attended, manage to stay afloat for 14 years in this age of jazz and today's current economic climate?

A corollary of musicians' collectives is community — the families, the associated businesses, the cross-discipline collaborators, the hardcore fans. Go to Vision Fest two years in a row, and you'll recognize a lot of familiar faces, from the group who comes from overseas (France, I want to say?) to cater the event to the folks who simply show up to bliss out every night.

But with such a tight-knit and interdependent community also comes one of the odd juxtapositions of Vision Festival: that one of the most joyfully outre jazz events also features one of the oldest lineups.

I surveyed all the music, dance and poetry acts in this year's Vision Fest lineup, noting the age of every bandleader or co-leader of a collaborative effort. (If I didn't know for sure, or couldn't look it up, I gave the person the benefit of the doubt as being under 50.) Out of 40 different acts (excluding the middle and high school jazz bands performing on Sunday), only 30.5%, or 12.2* acts, were led or co-led by someone under 50 years old. The "young" crowd are no spring chickens, either. There were plenty of musicians who were also pushing 50: Matthew Shipp, 48; Rob Brown, around 47; Zim Ngqawana, who was born in 1959 and may already be 50; etc. And if you take out the Saturday daytime showcase, dedicated exclusively to younger artists, the primetime total stands at 8.2 acts, or 20.5% of the festival, led or co-led by musicians under 50. It's even fewer if you consider groups like Trio X or Full Blast to be fully led by older musicians like Joe McPhee and Peter Brotzmann, respectively.

I can understand the various motivations to put on older artists: respecting their increased musical wisdom, billing known quantities vs. unknown newcomers, honoring living greats of the art form. And it is true that when you're a jazz musician, surviving gig to gig, it's not easy to save up for retirement if you aren't a superstar — so you have to keep playing into old age. Plus, older bandleaders often hire younger musicians under them, in the great mentorship tradition of jazz. These things are important to consider.

But just as a comparison, I did the same number crunching with the planned lineup of this year's Newport Jazz FestivalGeorge Wein's Jazz Festival 55. There, a whopping 17.5 of the 26 acts, or 67.3% of the festival — not counting the college ensemble invited to perform — are led or co-led by players under the age of 50. Now, George Wein and Arts for Art have clearly different aims in presenting their respective festivals, but any way you slice it, it's a pretty stunning difference. And with Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa and the Vandermark 5 on this year's docket, Wein isn't exactly shying away from the avant either.

[As an aside, I should point out that George Wein's checkered history aside, he and the Vision Fest don't currently appear to be at odds, as some would have it. Wein sits on the advisory board of Arts for Art, and he also booked bassist William Parker, an Arts for Art board member, to play with fellow Vision Fest regulars Charles Gayle and Rashied Ali at Newport.]

Personally, I find it somewhat disheartening to find so few younger acts on tap at Vision Fest 14. Not that Arts for Art doesn't have its ear to the street: I know the Rise Up Creative Music and Arts organization, a close affiliate of Arts for Art, presents relatively more young musicians in its regular concert series throughout the year. But when a collective purporting to represent "avantjazz" is so clearly geared to primarily favor its elder practitioners at its biggest and most visible event, it comes perilously close to suggesting something terrible about the health of this reputedly endangered art form: namely, that young people don't care for it anymore.

Which, as everyone involved knows, is not true. Rather than make a list of such performers, I present photographer Peter Gannushkin's DOWNTOWNMUSIC.net, where he chronicles much of what goes on in the out-jazz scene in New York. Many artists in their twenties and thirties (the age when out-jazz pioneers Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, the AACM founders, Albert Ayler, etc were already making classic work, I might add), some of whose recordings are already stunningly mature, are thoroughly documented there.

It also ought to be mentioned that many of today's younger musicians who could be classified as "avantjazz" come from different backgrounds than their predecessors. Unlike many of the older generation, many of today's younger free jazz artists didn't go through the shared crucible of the 1970s New York loft scene, or predecessor festivals like Sound Unity; a significantly greater percentage of the young American crowd is white, conservatory- or even grad-school-trained, literate in both straight-ahead jazz and rock, and possessing an innate rather than philosophical disregard for traditional jazz boundaries. Perhaps that generational gap has been a stumbling block into fully integrating the younger bunch into Vision Festival.

Still, I would be in attendance at Vision Festival 14 were I still in New York, whether taking tickets or paying for one. It seems as if the primary ideas behind the enterprise are worthy of highlighting as an example of how to manage a marginalized music in today's climate. And I'm confident that the talent of today's young progressive jazz musicians will eventually assert itself in one way or another. But if those younger musicians are not represented along with the older standbys, I'm naturally given to wonder if there are underlying issues yet to be resolved in the community engendered by the music.

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*The reason you see decimal points is that I divided each collectively-led act up by who was or was not over 50 years old. If such an ensemble had, say, five members, and two were 50 or younger, I counted that as 2/5 of an act. Tallying up those fractions resulted in the non-whole numbers you see.