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Other than Massachusetts' Fire in the Valley, there is no other musical gathering of free jazz musicians in North America to rival New York's annual Vision Festival. Now in its eighth year, the event, originally held in a gloriously deteriorated church, and now housed in the gym of a public school, has become something of a legend-in-progress. While Europe has a long tradition of giving jazz the red carpet treatment, in the States it gets the back alley, if that. It's only been traditionalists like the occasionally benign Wynton Marsalis, or pop crossovers like Norah Jones, the Bad Plus, Christopher O'Reily and Medeski, Martin & Wood that have been able to thrive. Jazz festivals are usually corporate-sponsored affairs (i.e. JVC) that haul out old favorites for a good, safe, and often tepid time.

Back in 1994 Choreographer Patricia Nicholson assumed a mandate to present an organized demonstration of the outer limits of music. She soon brought together musicians, record labels, painters, and multi-media artists - and thus the Vision Festival was born. Everyone involved pitched in beyond the call of duty. Musicians sold tickets, arranged chairs, and helped clean up after each show. When a bass player wasn't needed on stage, you could find him making and distributing sandwiches. Performers and groups would freely recombine in varied duos and ensembles, sometimes accompanied by improvised onstage dance. Clearly, the "family" was determined not only to survive, but thrive.

While the Vision crew compiles audio recordings from each festival, 2002's installment represents the first with a planned visual document. Two weeks of concerts were distilled into one selection from eight ensembles - plus one solo. The footage is inter-cut with images of Jeff Schlanger's Pollock-esque large-scale watercolors (which are made while the artists play), and the music, recorded in high-tech Surround-Sound, is close to perfect. (The second disc is a regular CD of the same performances.) Snobs may fume at the limited selection of camera angles, and admittedly the sometimes glaring lights hamper the presentation, but ultimately the performances surpass any tech quibbles.

Highlights include Billy Bangs's and Hamiett Bluiett's violin/sax battle, the flights of aural fancy navigated by Douglas Ewart's sweet horn section, Matthew Shipp's intense classical-tinged string trio (with piano, bass, viola), Rob Brown's galvanizing sax solos in Karen Borca's ensemble, Ellen Christi's vocal gymnastics, Kidd Jordan's swinging free jazz, and Peter Kowald's solo bass meditations (done shortly before his untimely death last year).

A case could be made that the ubiquitous bassist William Parker, who grounds almost every group that appears here, is at the heart of the proceedings. But it's really the totality, the day by day collective sense that embodies the work, goals and aspirations of this unique event. It's a musical laboratory where legends and young lions comingle to explore and experiment in front of an avid audience - an audience, by the way, whose Vision fest recidivism rate makes many of them familiar faces - at least to one another. What other musical genre dares to do such a thing, and do it so well?

© 2003 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center

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