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As a profitable business, the jazz world mostly collapsed around the dawn of the millennium, when major record labels (mostly) abandoned the music, and old heads and critics warned that the Jazz at Lincoln Center approach to tradition and education would staunch the creative development of young players. Simply put, this city that’s so inhospitable to art that’s tough to monetize is currently home to an epochal flowering of what people call “free jazz” or “fire music” or any other reductive designation. We live in this world right now, and we have to be present.” “Bad times make, sometimes, for good art. “There’s a new energy that’s reflective of this time of trouble,” Patricia Nicholson, the festival’s founder, artistic director, and a noted choreographer, tells the Voice. I am telling you now that you can and should be there now, this week, at the latest iteration of a festival that hosts performances the people of the future will think you were a simp for missing.
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Here’s another thing people say a lot when talking about great eras in this city’s musical history, whether the heyday of 52nd Street, the ’70s loft scene, the Knitting Factory in the ’90s, or whatever: I wish I’d have been there then. Seriously, without you there, something’s missing. When you arrive at a venue like the Stone or the Downtown Music Gallery or Ibeam Brooklyn to hear the world’s best players create sounds nobody will ever create again, everyone-from performers to proprietors to the head-bobbing faithful in the seats-usually seems legit glad you showed up. That binary defines a creative music scene whose audiences often get to feel something that’s far too rare in money-mad New York. It’s utterly uncompromising but also entirely inviting-neighborly, even. It celebrates its legacy and champions new blood. As always at this (mostly) annual blowout of free/avant jazz and other noncommercial arts, that spirit hollers, squeals, parties, and protests.
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And, of course, being no dummy, you know those days aren’t coming back anytime soon.īut it’s worth celebrating that at this year’s 22nd Vision Festival, the creative, communitarian spirit of what we idealize about those days doesn’t just live-it thrives. You know that sentiment you often hear-or maybe sometimes spout yourself-about how much more glorious this city was in decades past, when the streets weren’t boiling in capital, when the rent wasn’t an obscenity, when artists could afford to live and experiment and (maybe) flourish? Of course you do. (I’m assuming that you are not a dedicated follower of what, for the sake of convenience, we’ll call “free jazz,” though that term is contested.) Listen, before we get to how badass and soul-stirring the lineup at his year’s Vision Festival is, let me try to sell you on why you should care. Indomitable musician/composer/poet/artist Oliver Lake with his sax musician/composer/artist/wise man Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet: Two lifetimes of achievement.