By
Martin Schray
After the well-attended focus on Andrew Cyrille on the opening day the
“normal“ program started with Marc Ribot’s new band, which emerged from his
last project Songs of Resistance, and also referred to his Spiritual Unity
group which included Chad Taylor (drums), the late Roy Campbell (trumpet)
and Henry Grimes (bass). Grimes was in the audience as well and lots of
people said hello to great 83-year-old bass player. Ribot's new quartet
features old and new musical partners like Jay Rodriguez on sax and flute,
Nick Dunston on bass and Chad Taylor, the aforementioned drummer of the
Spiritual Unity band. With his short solo introduction, Ribot created a link
to the evening before by making a reference to Caribbean and Latin American
rhythms and melodies. Ribot's style is based on heavy rock rhythms and
distorted chords, which in combination with the Latin melodies of the
saxophone and the driving grooves of the rhythm section makes up an
exciting, intense contrast. You might fathom a Latin version of Last Exit.
Ribot's guitar runs are deeply steeped in blues rock and always get out of
hand in the right places. His music is rich with references: Hendrix,
Captain Beefheart, Zappa, James Blood Ulmer. A great start into the
evening.
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| Marc Ribot, Jay Rodriguez, Nick Dunston and Chad Taylor ,sound checking |
What followed was drummer Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio, a band he put
together for the first time during his Stone residency last year and in
which he brought the ubiquitous Tomeka Reid (cello) and Patricia Brennan
(vibraphone) together for the first time. Again, there was a percussive
approach to the compositions, however the set was more chamber-music-like.
Basically, everything was very textural, like a wave that builds up
constantly and shifts slowly. This sounds hard to digest but the music had
something very light about it, it was swinging loosely. Brennan used a
similar warp effect as Mary Halvorson, which gave the music very special,
alienating timbres, reminding me of electronic music. There were subtle
dynamic differences that sometimes pushed the music towards atmospheric
soundscapes, especially when vibraphone and cello were bowed. Brennan is a
musician people should look out for.
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| Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio |
After that the evening’s program focused on spoken word. Lyric poets Edwin
Torres and Fred Moten met a rhythm group consisting of Brandon Lopez (bass)
and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Torres and Moten presented something one might
call “screwball poetry“. While Torres had a certain intellectual and
self-reflective appearance, Moten seemed more grounded and story-telling.
Torres, on the one hand, created a movement which he called "Interactive
Eclectrcism" combining movement, audience participation, music and songs.
Moten, on the other hand, usually used a stream-of-consciousness approach
in his poetry transforming it into something musical which was propelled by
the material of language itself. His style was in the tradition of Amiri
Baraka, at the end he drew a line from liberalism to neo-liberalism and
fascism. Torres’s and Moten’s “dialogue of existence“, as they called it,
was supported by Cleaver and Lopez pulling all the stops from polyrhythmic,
organic grooves to free sound exploration.
The next show was a project created by dancer and choreographer Davalois
Fearon and musical director Mike McGinnis (woodwinds). This mixture of
improvised and composed music and dance was combined with a spoken word
performance by Patricia Smith. Actually this project was everything in a
nutshell the Vision Festival represents: a collaboration of improvised
music, dance, visual arts and poetry. Smith delivered some kind of feminist
poem in which she referred to an image of a house without windows which
seemed to symbolize the situation of women. But the house’s “roof was on
fire“ and the woman who was confined to it had no interest in extinguishing
the flames because she wanted to see the man burn. In the end, the house
with no window also became a deadly trap for the man. Unfortunately, the
music only had a serving function, one could have imagined the trio -
Gerald Cleaver on drums again, Peter Apfelbaum (piano, woodwinds) and Mike
McGinnis - as an independent program item.
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| Kidd Jordan's tribute to Alvin Fielder |
The evening was closed with Kidd Jordan’s tribute to Alvin Fielder, the
legendary drummer and founding AACM member who passed away earlier this
year. Jordan’s connection with Fielder goes back to the Improvisational
Arts Quintet which they both established in the early 1970s. He also had a
quartet with pianist Joel Futterman and bassist William Parker (Creative
Collective) for more than twenty years. For this tribute performance, Hamid
Drake joined Jordan, Futterman, and Parker, on the drums. As you can imagine,
the quartet offered classical free jazz. Jordan played more wildly and
freely than the evening before, perhaps also because his comrades-in-arms
provided a background that made this possible. Nevertheless, he
occasionally added small melodies and overblown passages here and there
that strongly reminded me of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. The set was very
spiritual and built up tight atmospheres which were held as long as
possible. Futterman often worked with clusters, which reinforced the
already very pulsating character of the music. Jordan was so moved by the
band's performance that he dropped out and threw in spontaneous chants. And
in fact, when you closed your eyes, you could think you were listening to a
mid-thirties guy playing. The end was standing ovations for the man and his
band, something he enjoyed extensively.
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