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.

The 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.

It 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.

On 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.

"It has a lot to do with the ups and downs of living here, not knowing how I'm going to pay my rent, but knowing somehow…" she said. She remembers the lessons learned from "watching my parents hustle -- the refrigerator would be empty and my mother would always come up with something."

elling the story of the label that more than any other brought the new, high-energy jazz of the 1960s to the listening public was a logical next step for author Ashley Kahn. His 2002 book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album is a remarkable and highly readable piece of jazz history. To follow it up, Kahn dove deep into the label that made the album, and arguably the careers of Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders possible.

The biodome has evolved here in America, expanding itself, encasing all in our society. This time, instead of using plastic to protect the interior environment from inclement weather, the media blithely plasters up billboards for the next unoriginal Hollywood remake, blinding the masses with bling to protect the status quo. Within this bubble, American dream obsessions with wealth makes it difficult for the individual to comprehend that stupendous amounts of wealth can only be accumulated and maintained by carefully subjugating another individual to extreme poverty and anguish.

The most remarkable section of the book, which maybe shouldn't be a surprise, concerns van Gelder, a producer and engineer so significant in the 1960s that there is now a reissue series in his name. Van Gelder talks about the construction of his studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, about decorating it based on the temperament of who he'd be recording, and even about scheduling photo shoots separate from the recording session so he could switch equipment around rather than reveal what brand of microphone he had used. It's a story of a time and place, and of the lengths to which people went when jazz topped the charts.

There's something to be said for overcoming a color scheme. Red-and-green means Christmas, yellow-and-black looks like a bumblebee, and orange-and-black more often than not means Halloween. But in the 1960s -- and still today for a cadre of jazz faithful -- the combination of orange and black means something very different: Impulse! records and, by association, the great John Coltrane. The orange and black spines of the label's releases stood out on the record shelves and became such an enigma that fans began wearing the colors like avant garde mascots.

This is the way to love ... This is the way to love ...

Melanie is looking for a sign. She sees a woman in a huge white dress with mirrors all over it and a mirror on her forehead. She sees a woman wrapped from head to toe in gauze and wearing a helmet. She sees a man throwing boomerang aluminum dishes and tying his sculpture to fences. Everywhere she goes, Melanie is looking for a sign.

If you ever for a minute think addiction is not a disease, read this book right now. If you ever for a minute think( and don't we writers do this more now than again) that writing is a waste of time, read this book right now. If you ever think your life is meaningless, read this book.

What a gift it seems at first to be traveling to DIA Beacon, to be flying along in the air conditioning under the trees, to be so free, so expansive. No longer in the shadows, seeing just the rectangle of sky, but now the entirety, the all around of light and, oh, wow, the shock, of mountains on mountains. Next, the zip over the bridge, the up and down of cute little hills with mansions nestled in dappled light. Look, a riding academy! Isn't everything just so lovely, so perfect?

When England was "christianized" they rejected the Anglo-Saxon epic poetry that had been all the rage because it was "heroic" and heroic is antithetical to the Christian theology. How, then, did America, founded by the errant Protestant Christians, become a land of Pick-Yourself-Up-By-The-Bootstraps individualism and heroism?

NEGAR-Support of Women of Afghanistan was invited to attend the transfer of power ceremonies in Kabul on December 22, 2001. Shoukria Haidar, the President of Negar and Nasrine Gross, Negar representative in Washington (and President of Kabultec) made it there just in time: Shoukria one day before and Nasrine as the ceremonies were getting underway!

Below is a report from Nasrine who returned to the United States after staying in Kabul for forty days:

Since the early 60s, Richter has been taking found art to new heights of evasiveness and contradiction. Richter's works from tourist snapshots, family photo albums, newspaper clippings, and a daunting array of other images, all sourced from his seminal scrapbook "Atlas," to create both the first and last photo-realist paintings. Although Richter's primary concern in these works seems to be exploring his relationship with reality through a camera, slide-projector, and canvas, he might take it the wrong way if you called him a realist, in fact, he might take it the wrong way if you called him anything but Mr. Richter.

In an age in which liberal churches and synagogues see membership declining and fundamentalist ones grow as they fan hostility to science, it is refreshing to find an artist who uses historical genetics as the basis for a new concept of holiness. Chris Twomey combines her skills as painter and photographer to reinvent and democratize the Madonna ideal by combining joyous photographs of very particular mothers with their naked babies on one hand with graphic evocations of cell structure and mapped intercontinental migrations of mitochondrial DNA on the other.