By Andrey Henkin
Before anyone asks, the Vision Festival is neither a conference of eye doctors nor a summit for palm readers. It is an annual music event, just under a week long every June, which mixes equal parts avant garde musings, cultural awareness and social activism into a distinctive reminder of what the New York jazz scene was like before artists were priced out of Manhattan.
“The way that I do everything is responding to needs that need responding to,” says festival organizer Patricia Nicholson Parker. “How can I have the most impact on what I present and to whom I present it? How can I make the biggest impact for the artists and for the audience? That’s the challenge every year.”
Now in its 12th year, the festival, somewhat itinerant location-wise — it has taken place in recent years at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center and The Knitting Factory — is committed to presenting a cross section of New York and international improvising artists, performers who increasingly have fewer and fewer places to play. “The Vision Festival is good because there is no one else is booking the people that I book,” says Nicholson Parker. Indeed, when the Lower East Side music venue Tonic closed this past spring, Nicholson Parker and her organization, Arts for Art, Inc., rebooked weeks of then-gigless performers with remarkably short notice.
Summer in New York brings numerous festivals to town, including the much higher-profile and establishmentarian JVC Jazz Festival, but Vision is different in that it seeks to promote musicians and a musical aesthetic that exists in a community during the whole year. A brief glance at this year’s schedule paints a broad picture of several overlapping scenes, ones from New York, Chicago and even overseas: poets Barry Wallenstein and Amiri Baraka (who performs with wife Amina in their collaborative poetry project Blue Ark), bassists William Parker and Henry Grimes, guitarist Marc Ribot, trumpeters Bill Dixon and Eddie Gale, saxophonists Joe McPhee, Tim Berne and Fred Anderson, pianists Matthew Shipp and Vyacheslav Ganelin, drummers Hamid Drake and Louis Moholo. A recent addition to the programming structure — four to five bands playing consecutively from the early evening to well after midnight for a mere $35 per night — is a Saturday afternoon concert featuring bands led by younger but similarly-minded artists, a sort of preview of Vision Festivals to come.
Bill Dixon, the principal architect of the 1964 October Revolution in Jazz concert that laid the musical groundwork that would spawn the Vision Festival 31 years later, performs as the recipient of this year’s Lifetime Recognition Award, another innovation central to the Vision mission. (“Why not celebrate people … while they get a chance to enjoy celebrating?” muses Nicholson Parker.)
The change in New York’s cultural landscape is undeniable as neighborhoods that were once havens for artists are getting bulldozed for luxury condominiums and the boroughs, particularly Brooklyn, have turned into artistic ghettoes. Nicholson Parker sees the Vision Festival as being part of the larger dialogue, thus far one-sided, “to get the government to understand the importance of making art venues not subject to the market economy.” Bruce Gallanter, proprietor of Downtown Music Gallery, a music shop cut from the same cloth as the Vision Festival, echoes her sentiment: “It’s called Vision for a good reason. It shows that all these people who play, all these people who listen, are all connected. It’s like an oasis. I think the vibe of the Vision Festival is about freedom and having a variety of different arts in the same space so people understand that these arts are interrelated in our lives; they help people feel like they are part of a community.”
Discouraging developments aside, the Vision Festival, and its accompanying poetry readings, dance recitals and walls of art, is a weeklong bulwark against commercialism and fragmented communities. Attendees, both local stalwarts and out-of-town visitors drawn by the Vision Fest’s increasing profile, are often there for the entire week. For a dozen years, Nicholson Parker and her staff of devoted, overworked volunteers have created a vision that tries to reconcile the past with the future. “It’s different every single year…. And if I don’t make it different, I can’t do it,” says Nicholson Parker. “What I have now is commitment. I have a real commitment to doing what I do. It’s like it’s grown into my whole life.”
