During his youth, the New Orleans tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan worked with some of the brightest lights of soul and R&B, like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. And that's just for starters. “You name the genre, I've done it," Mr. Jordan, 73, said this week from Baton Rouge, La., his temporary home since shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. “But when I was playing in all those other genres, I wasn't satisfied with what I was doing. I always was one of them who would search, and keep searching."
Next week Mr. Jordan will reap some recognition for his searching: a lifetime achievement honor at the Vision Festival, widely recognized as this country's premier gathering for free jazz and improvised music. Now in its 13th year, the festival runs from Tuesday through June 15 at the Clemente Soto Vlez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a longtime nexus of experimentation and a site of much recent transition.
With its devotion to the jazz avant-garde, the Vision Festival serves as a gravitational center, pulling musicians in from the margins. Not surprisingly it has often been cast as an eccentrically gritty rejoinder to the JVC Jazz Festival, which starts on June 15 this year. (In seasons past, David and Goliath have more directly overlapped.) This year the Vision Festival has its own competition, the New Languages Festival, being held a couple of blocks away at the Living Theater.
Increasingly, though, the Vision Festival has developed a stand-alone reputation. Its programming, which mixes old-timers like Mr. Jordan with newer arrivals like the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, confirms the continuing vigor of experimental improvised music, a current of the New York underground through much of the last 50 years. Owing to the influence of Patricia Nicholson Parker, a founder and the chairwoman, who has a background in modern dance, the Vision Festival also presents related arts, including dance, poetry and, this year, two site-specific installations.
The festival draws an audience impressive not only for its actual existence -- hardly a given in this particular field -- but also for its heterogeneity. One survey conducted at the event in 2006 found that nearly half the attendees lived outside the New York area.
Next week Mr. Jordan will reap some recognition for his searching: a lifetime achievement honor at the Vision Festival, widely recognized as this country's premier gathering for free jazz and improvised music. Now in its 13th year, the festival runs from Tuesday through June 15 at the Clemente Soto Vlez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side, a longtime nexus of experimentation and a site of much recent transition.
With its devotion to the jazz avant-garde, the Vision Festival serves as a gravitational center, pulling musicians in from the margins. Not surprisingly it has often been cast as an eccentrically gritty rejoinder to the JVC Jazz Festival, which starts on June 15 this year. (In seasons past, David and Goliath have more directly overlapped.) This year the Vision Festival has its own competition, the New Languages Festival, being held a couple of blocks away at the Living Theater.
Increasingly, though, the Vision Festival has developed a stand-alone reputation. Its programming, which mixes old-timers like Mr. Jordan with newer arrivals like the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, confirms the continuing vigor of experimental improvised music, a current of the New York underground through much of the last 50 years. Owing to the influence of Patricia Nicholson Parker, a founder and the chairwoman, who has a background in modern dance, the Vision Festival also presents related arts, including dance, poetry and, this year, two site-specific installations.
The festival draws an audience impressive not only for its actual existence -- hardly a given in this particular field -- but also for its heterogeneity. One survey conducted at the event in 2006 found that nearly half the attendees lived outside the New York area.
