Steve Swell Quartet & Michael Foster / Chuck Roth Duo at P.I.T.

Steve Swell, Michael Foster, Chuck Roth
P.I.T. 
Brooklyn, NY
June 14, 2026

In the microcosm of the Greater New York Improvised Musics scene, Arts for Arts' Vision Festival, kicking off June 22nd at the Abrams Art Center in the Lower East Side, dominates the attention of artist and dilettante alike. While unlikely to rival the World Cup games or eclipse the citywide high of the Knicks' win, there is a coalescing enthusiasm that cannot be ignored. Case in point: trombonist Steve Swell, during his quartet's spot at P.I.T., called his set a "dress rehearsal" for the same group's performance at Abrams on the 27th. But in Swell's field, there is no such thing as a dress rehearsal. A warm-up is often just as lofty and revealing a project as the main course.

The night opens with an intense, loping duet: Michael Foster on woodwinds and Chuck Roth on electric guitar. Foster begins as an atmospheric baseline for Roth's eclectic licks. His signature airy, percussive style slowly rears its head, interrogating Roth's arachnid strumming. The result is a delicate balance: the oneiric, broad strokes of the sax awakened through pointed jabs. But instead of erupting into battle, the opposing sensibilities probe the inner logics of their improvisations. Roth deepens and expands his blistering reverberations into an almost raga-like labyrinth, a tremorous combination of complicated fingering and swelling ambience. All the while, Foster's drone grabs at the sharp squawks in the margins of his sounds, erupting into high-pitched screeches between dithering notes. When he switches for his soprano sax, though the pitch and quality of the sounds have changed drastically, the piece retains its inner contentions. He whirls the head from one side to the next, the multidirectional blaring given a sitar-esque quality by Roth's revolving drone. It's rare for two such disparate voices to be so in-tune to each other's sounds, but Foster and Roth are prodigious listeners. They lay their sound bare as a communal alloy, no interpretation too blasphemous. Whatever structure comes about at the close, there is the touch of master craftsmen evident in every texture.

Swell's band is equally open-minded, though the material may be more composed. The trombonist leads veteran bassist and Vision Fest co-founder William Parker, revolutionary reedsman Rob Brown and expert drummer Jeremy Carlstedt through a labyrinthine, poetic rumination. Swell provides the poetry, words from his new chapbook Songs from the Poetry Box (The Bodily Press, 2026) with Ellen Christi, and puts the rest of the artists to task interpreting the soundscape.

Parker lays a boisterous, athletic pizzicato for Carlstedt, whose rapid cymbal work leads right into Brown's quick fingering. The compositions are quick-fingered, loud, and profoundly vocal: Swell's brass is deep and athletic like an opera baritone, mimicked and agitated by Brown. Operatic, too, is the rage implicit in Swell's lyric:

Oh what a condition
This continuous perdition
This unrelenting schism
This American edition.

As belted from the trombonist's equally deep and perilous voice, the words are quickly enveloped in Parker's own rhythm. He lays a counterpoint to the percussive consonance with full-range humming. The words, then, melt into pure sound, the meaning reverberated through Brown's always off-beat crooning, into a mass eruption of musical frustration. Even as the music must dampen in order to accommodate another poetry interlude, there is no hierarchy of comprehension: Swell's words are no more or less conducive to the piece than any of its musical accompaniment. The writing is an extension of the brass, the brass the writing's most literal representation. Though the poetry is pre-composed, there is no question that the words take on a new, sonic meaning when poised against the band.

 Even as the Vision Fest may include a "truer" representation of Swell's vision, such a performance is much more than a dress rehearsal, but a unique and potent piece. The occasion suggests a communal aspect beyond just the performance, represented just as ably again, in Swell's lyric:

Hearing the music, reading the books, igniting the soul
So that we may know that there are options
And breath, and space, and time
And each other.