There are two kinds of festivals within the six nights (and one day) of the Vision Festival. There's the festival for people who travel to get there and the festival of people who travel to play. Vision is the highest concentration of New York energy jazz in the world, a fact that year after year seems to eclipse its "world class" (if there's reason to use such a phrase) nature. It is at once a chance to hear within a tight schedule (this year sticking closer to advertised times than ever) the cream of NYC's hard improv: Sabir Matteen, Roy Campbell Jr., William Parker, Borah Bergman, Daniel Carter, Rob Brown, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Grimes and (for the last time as such) the David S. Ware Quartet. But their presence, and that of such perennial associates as Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, Bill Dixon and Joe Morris, shouldn't overshadow the sweet surprises each year brings.
Read MoreThe oldest and simplest of families of instruments is also the largest and most diverse. From Charlie Parker to The Sex Pistols, percussion has been the common element to and the driving force behind most forms of music in the last hundred years. The instruments can be metal or wood, outfitted with leather or strings; they can be carried, sat behind or worn. They can be simple and homemade or complex and expensive. Watch tourists gather around a guy beating on plastic buckets on a New York subway platform and you'll get the idea: Drums are everywhere, and are made from just about anything.
Read MoreIt makes a certain amount of sense that the first survey to be written about Gypsy musicians across Europe would come from an outsider (although given that there's no real "inside" to the Roma diaspora, it's almost an inevitability). Garth Cartwright, a New Zealander living in London, describes himself as a "refugee from Auckland's disembodied suburbs" -- not exactly a political exile, but still a scribe with a feeling of separation from the motherland and a clear empathy for the generations of Gypsy homelessness. He's shamelessly a stranger in a strange land, devoted to his subject.
Read MoreOn June 13, when the doors of the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts open for Vision Festival XI, Arts for Art -- the organization that organizes and presents the annual jazz fest -- will also be opening the door to the adoration and criticism they've faced every year for a decade. The praise and complaints are largely for the same thing, namely for hosting hours and hours of high energy jazz. Horns blaring, basses booming and drums being beaten, it's a tradition carried on for some forty years, in the wake of the great John Coltrane.
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