A Night Out

Despite the fact that I’m ridiculously busy, I would have felt awful had I not made it to at least a night or two of the Vision Festival. This year’s lineup is strong, too; when I got the schedule in the mail, I ran my highlighter pen through performances on four nights that I thought would be well worth seeing/hearing. Then I signed up for night classes, to learn audio engineering, and wound up only able to attend on Wednesday night, June 15. I’d planned to hit Thursday’s show as well, but stuff got in the way.

So, last night I caught the first three performances. The show opened with poet Steve Dalachinsky reading to musical accompaniment. Said accompaniment was supposed to be Matt Shipp on piano, but he didn’t turn up, so instead it was violinist Mat Maneri and a guitarist whose name I didn’t catch. Steve’s a really nice guy, a good writer and a good friend, but live poetry was no substitute for the dinner I hadn’t yet eaten. So I wandered down the block to Subway and came back for the next performance.

This was the fourth time I’d seen Charles Gayle, but the first time I’d seen him play alto sax. I’d seen a tenor-drums show at the Cooler a half-dozen years ago or more, with Borbetomagus; another tenor-drums set at an earlier Vision Festival; and a solo piano gig at Tonic in 2002 or thereabouts. This performance was the best of the four, with the Cooler show right behind.

Gayle’s set was a perfect example of how the player is as important as the instrument. I’ve never heard an alto sax sound quite the way it did in his hands. Between the high-end screams and the bubbling roars from the bottom of the horn’s range, he found notes I wasn’t aware existed. More importantly, to my ears anyway, the trio was swinging pretty hard throughout. In the liner notes to Gayle’s recent disc Shout! (Clean Feed), he’s quoted as saying, “By constantly playing energy music, I found myself becoming a victim of the music, and, ironically, even less free.” Here, he was supported by bassist Hillard Greene and drummer Jay Rosen, each of whom had quite a bit to contribute. Greene took a couple of excellent solos, bowing furiously and releasing low, throbbing tones that earned appreciative hoots ‘n’ hollers from the audience. Rosen was a little too cymbal-happy, but when he wasn’t crashing away like Alex Van Halen, he was keeping excellent time, following Gayle’s hand signals and spoken instructions and bringing the improvised pieces to satisfying, never-haphazard conclusions. At two different points, Gayle moved from sax to piano; on the latter occasion, he played alto with one hand, scourging the keyboard with brutal block chords from the other. But it was the long passages when he stood at center stage in his porkpie hat and almost too-tight suit jacket, shredding the air with long rippling screams, that were the main attraction. The set never lost momentum, and it didn’t run too long, as improvised performances of all genres frequently do. It was a concentrated, measured dose of free jazz power, exactly what I’d been hoping to hear.

He was followed by Roy Campbell’s Pyramid Trio, featuring William Parker on bass and Hamid Drake on drums. They were playing to dance accompaniment from Patricia Nicholson, and a slide show, neither of which were super-appealing propositions to me, at first. But it turned out to work very well, in large part because the rhythm section built such a powerful trance groove that I’m surprised more people weren’t dancing. Campbell, as he’s wont to do, played everything he had with him, starting on flugelhorn before moving to flute, cornet, and finally trumpet. The extended piece the trio performed wasn’t totally improvised; Campbell and Parker were working from sheet music at the start, before disappearing entirely into the collective energy. And the dancing worked better than I thought it would. The slides were fine, some nice landscapes or whatever. Roy Campbell’s shirt had brighter colors than the backdrop, though.

I always meet someone interesting at the VF. This year, it was the two guys who run Clean Feed – they were helping sell merch upstairs, and had a whole tablefull of their releases. I talked one of them, Pedro, into giving me copies of Shout! and two Whit Dickey albums, Coalescence with Roy Campbell, Joe Morris (on bass) and Rob Brown and In A Heartbeat with those three, plus Chris Lightcap on bass (thus freeing Morris to play guitar). Review on the latter two sometime soon.

I wish I could have seen Fred Anderson play. He’s probably onstage with Joseph Jarman, Tatsu Aoki and Alvin Fielder as I type these words. The whole festival is dedicated to him, and he’s doing a second set around 11 PM with Kidd Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake. Since I’ve listened to 2 Days In April about a hundred times since first getting it several years ago, that’s a show I really wish I could be there for. Oh, well. Maybe next year I’ll have a few more free evenings.