Vision Festival: NYC North Star

Last night, I caught an extraordinary set by the Darius Jones Quartet at Vision Festival 17, which runs through Sunday at Roulette. (I very much enjoyed what I saw of the Farmers by Nature trio—with Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver—and Parker's own In Order to Survive quintet, but the Jones band hit me the hardest.) The performance centered on a series of heart-rending ballads. Jones sounded as precise and openhearted as I've ever heard him. Every time I go see him, I'm struck by the care and gravity he puts into each phrase; even if the passage is a delicate one, he gears up, bears down, applies enormous psychic pressure. The notes have a vocal cry—smooth, yet with rasp always threatening to creep in around the edges, like peppered honey—but they're sculpted and purposeful.

The same goes for Jones's suitelike compositions. By "free jazz" standards, they're compact and accessible; they have movement and narrative drive. (The episodic, busy-to-sparse "You Have Me Seeing Red" and the tender "The Enjoli Moon" are two that stuck in my head.) When they work up to a screaming peak, that peak is earned, contextualized. The rest of the band—pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Ches Smith—sounded really alert and attuned, but each time Jones entered, I felt a different kind of grip on my brain and heart. He's entered a new phase of maturity with this project. Its emotional spectrum is total. (Hear for yourself on Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise), out now on Aum Fidelity, which celebrated its 15th anniversary at last night's Vision gig.)

As I listened I thought about my history with the Vision Festival, and how I might not have appreciate a set this nuanced and straightforwardly beautiful had I seen it back in 2000, when I first attended the event. (I volunteered at the fest that year, via my DJ-ing gig at WKCR, and I remember a fun afternoon spent folding programs in the company of heavy players like Alan Silva and Mat Maneri.) At that time, I had a real stake in the idea of avant-garde-ness in music. I was looking for a kind of assault, the freer, longer, more difficult and abstract—and often, louder—the better. I remember countless variations on this idea from various Vision Fests: a set by Peter Kowald's trio with drummer Gunter Sommer and a monster of a David S. Ware solo performance at a space above St. Marks Place; the 2 Days in April band with Fred Anderson, Kidd Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake at a cavernous venue in Soho (and a variant of that band minus Anderson, plus Henry Grimes many years later); mammoth Bill Dixon and Sam Rivers ensembles at Angel Orensanz; Peter Brötzmann in various settings at Abrons Arts Center last year.

Though my tastes—i.e., exactly what it is I'm looking for when I attend a jazz performance—might have changed somewhat, I treasure all those memories, not to mention the longevity/consistency of the Vision Festival, which has been something like a personal North Star in my NYC concertgoing life. I may have been guilty of taking the fest for granted the past few years. (Talking between sets last night, a friend and I were struck anew by the fact that many people travel from out of town for the event, which has come to seem to us like an everyday neighborhood hang.) Last night, I did my best to appreciate the awesome bounty of this event—for one thing, Roulette might be the ideal Vision venue; the sight lines and sound were about as good as I've ever found them to be at any previous edition—especially the fact that after so many years, it still had new joys to offer. Sure, there was an element of old-guard free-jazz stampede to be found in the In Order to Survive set, but the Jones performance (and in a very different way, the Farmers by Nature set) gave me hope that younger practitioners of what is often called "this music" are looking for ways to shatter the wall of impenetrability that surrounds the subgenre, to retain the gut-busting passion while at the same time putting on a warm, relatable show, one that avoids improvisational bombast, that places a premium on sensitivity and experiment (not just a pat idea of what's "experimental"). On the latter tip, I think of the drowsy impressionist blues that ended the Farmers set—a major surprise to me and, I think, the musicians themselves, and a definite highlight of the evening.

There's little more to say other than this: Check out the Vision Festival over the next few days if you can. (Joe McPhee and Sonny Simmons play tonight, Wednesday.) Go back next year and the year after, even if you think you've got this territory fully mapped. Like any great cultural institution, Vision can grow with you, and you with it.

Studio visit: Milford Graves on record

In a March post, I attempted to make the point that free jazz ought to be documented in the studio from time to time. The only problem was that the Peter Brötzmann albums I chose as examples were actually live recordings. I stand by my argument, however, and it's because of albums like Real Deal and Beyond Quantum, sessions from, respectively, 1991 and 2008 featuring the drummer Milford Graves.

I've been on a Milford Graves kick over the past few days, incited by an interview subject who named Graves's 1976 LP Babi as an all-time favorite. Checking out that record, it was easy to see the appeal: It is as unhinged and raw a free-jazz document as you will find. Like Graves's many ESP-Disk recordings (I happened to catch some great material from 1964's The Giuseppi Logan Quartet on WKCR the other day as part of a Don Pullen profile), it sounds DIY, punk. There's something romantic about that. The legend of free jazz hinges on ideas of subversion and underground-ness. We like to think of these sorts of recordings as having been made hastily and cheaply—or in the case of Babi, a live album, almost incidentally, i.e., the music would have raged on whether or not the tape recorder was rolling. Graves's ESP sessions were mostly (all?) recorded in the studio in NYC, but there's nothing meticulous about them. The resulting documents are more or less the polar opposite of the kinds of gorgeously warm and balanced albums being made for Blue Note nearby at Rudy Van Gelder's New Jersey studio.

Despite all the financial shadiness surrounding ESP, fans of this music—myself included—tend to be glad that those mid-’60s records exist. We should also be happy, though, that many of the artists in question, e.g., Mr. Graves, have survived/thrived long enough to take advantage of more sophisticated recording technology. Just like with old, scratchy blues recordings sourced from 78s, we fetishize the thin, sometimes borderline crappy sound on those old ESPs, hold it up as a badge of authenticity, forgetting that no free jazz actually sounded like that in the flesh. You want to hear a Milford Graves album? Get Real Deal, a duet recording with David Murray recorded in the decidedly non–historically sexy year of 1991, or Beyond Quantum, a 2008 trio album with Anthony Braxton and William Parker. (Both are available as Amazon downloads via the links above.)

I can't express to you the sheer beauty of these recordings—not just the performances, but the SOUND. On Real Deal, Milford Graves sounds like the wind and the rain. He sounds like he's worshiping the drum kit, its glorious range of timbres. I'm listening to the first track right now, and it sounds heartbreakingly alive. The recording is wonderfully three-dimensional: You have the ride cymbal over in the left channel, the toms and bass drum closer to the center along with Murray's tenor, the hi-hat slightly to the right of those. I don't think I've ever heard another drummer paint with his kit the way Graves does, coax as much nuance out, and a musician like that deserves to be heard in a warm and resonant document like this, without that obfuscating aspect of rawness—obfuscating not just in the sense that detail is lost, but in the sense that it invites you to impose upon it a kind of punk romanticism. The romanticism is all there in the drums, though—you don't need an invitation to heap on your own baggage.

In short, free jazz deserves the studio treatment just as much as any other music. Sure it's a style built on rawness and spontaneity, but with the truly great musicians like Graves, you're going to get that no matter what. Why not hear him in glorious hi-fi? Here is a sample of Beyond Quantum—skip to around 1:50 for a taste of what I'm talking about:



I love that the ESP records exist (The New York Art Quartet is a particular fave), that Babi survives. But in terms of what I would take to a desert island, it's the pro-shot stuff, so to speak, where the music brings the heat and the recording soaks up the whole range of frequencies. Interstellar Space, anyone? Recorded at the aforementioned Van Gelder facility, not at some no-name Times Square facility or at a gig with a room mic. These Graves records are part of that illustrious tradition. Like many of the recordings in, say, the Aum Fidelity catalog—I've been very impressed recently by the new Planetary Unknown, with David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, the aforementioned William Parker and Muhammad Ali—they're about museum-quality preservation, not DIY mythmaking. Artists of this caliber deserve such treatment. It is, I would venture to say, the real deal.

P.S. ECM is another label that has long understood the value of superior sound quality and studio documentation. You won't hear the full range of a Paul Motian performance on any other label. (See I Have the Room Above Her.) Speaking of which, I wrote about a handsome new studio-recorded Craig Taborn solo disc on ECM in this week's Time Out New York.

Earthbound: Goodbye, Fred Anderson

Photo: Fred Anderson, right, with Robert Barry—by Nathan Mandell

I realized last night that I did not say a proper goodbye to Fred Anderson. I wrote a brief, hasty obituary for the Volume, but there's more to say.

Like Bill Dixon, a contemporary whose death preceded Anderson's by just eight days, Anderson was an artist whose work I returned to obsessively. And as in the case of Dixon, what I kept searching out over and over was a sound. In Anderson's case, a very ripe, robust, steely thing that reminded me of liquid metal.

I also admired the no-nonsense-ness of Anderson's approach. He was a saxophonist who favored freeform improvisation but who was always careful to plot his own architecture as he went. When I listen to Anderson, I don't hear the quasi-religious questing evident in Coltrane and many of his acolytes. I simply hear a man working through some lines on his horn—spiraling off from metric time but always rooted in hard, hard swing and soul. It was as though he were saying to his capital-F, capital-J Free Jazz contemporaries and billmates (frequent partner Kidd Jordan among them): "I respect what you're doing up there in the stratosphere, but I have plenty of material to hash out right here on Earth."

That notion fits almost too conveniently with Anderson's status as a kind of blue-collar stalwart of the scene—staying rooted in Chicago, installing carpet or tending bar to keep his family going while his cohorts in the AACM (with whom, again, he shared very little in terms of style) brought their music to the world. But I think you can hear the humility in the playing. Anderson never doubled on another horn, never experimented much with bandbuilding or compositional form or extended techniques. He was content to write a few stark lines ("Dark Day," "Within," etc.), let those be the guideposts of his career, and just play and play.

My favorite Anderson context is the sax-drum duet. No disrespect to Interstellar Space, which I adore, but since that album has given way to so many carbon copies, it's amazing to hear an artist who approached the form in an entirely different way. And no disrespect to the Anderson's constant collaborator, Hamid Drake, but I feel that Anderson was at his best alongside two other percussionists: Steve McCall and Robert Barry. Vintage Duets, a 1980 duo session with McCall that came out 14 years later on Okka Disk, is a fine release, though the document that really gets me is an unreleased recording of the pair playing at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 1986, passed to me by a friend, who got it from a friend. The music is tougher, bolder than the earlier date, yet still with this deep sense of calm. The opening 25-minute version of "Within" might be the finest single Anderson performance I've heard. I love how Anderson doesn't feel the need to ratchet up in intensity as he plays. In other words, there's no sense of that hackneyed free-jazz climax, which inevitably comes too soon and leaves the performance with nowhere to go. McCall cruises, Anderson cooks, and those are the simple revelations of the gig.

(Re: the recording mentioned above, I could easily share it online, but I'm wary of the ethics involved, especially so soon after Anderson's passing. Anyone have any thoughts on that?)

The other towering Anderson masterwork, for me, is Duets 2001, a Thrill Jockey disc featuring Robert Barry. I have pretty much zero awareness of Barry before or after this session. (I know he's worked with Ken Vandermark, but I haven't heard those records; here's a 2008 interview, which I'm going to check out as soon as I'm done with this post.) I can't even tell you how much I used to play this album. Haven't heard it for several years, but it's on now as I type. To me, this is the Truth. A center of calm. Barry heats it up at times, but the greatest moments are the sublimely laid-back tracks, like the opening "bouncing." This is go-where-it-may music, unfolding infinitely. Could stop now, could go on forever. Always swinging. It gives a feeling of air, of buoyancy—quiet, unassuming creativity that is its own reward.

Now I think I'm the one listing toward post-Coltrane-y mumbo jumbo, so I'll stop. If you haven't heard Duets 2001, though, please obtain it. It is jazz of *no school* whatsoever and yet it is most assuredly jazz. That was Anderson's gift to his musical sphere, to exist outside of stream and current and trend and yet not to deprive you of what you loved about bebop and free jazz alike. Taking the lessons he learned from Charlie Parker (seemingly his No. 1 muse), freeing them up and meditating on the results. For a long, long time.

P.S. If you like Duets 2001: Another underrated record that partakes of a similar buoyant, unhurried vibe is William Parker's Bob's Pink Cadillac, also recorded in 2001, and featuring clarinetist Perry Robinson and drummer Walter Perkins. I can't recommend this highly enough.