Guy Le Querrec/Magnum Photos
Up close and personal
Read MoreThere are two kinds of festivals within the six nights (and one day) of the Vision Festival. There's the festival for people who travel to get there and the festival of people who travel to play. Vision is the highest concentration of New York energy jazz in the world, a fact that year after year seems to eclipse its "world class" (if there's reason to use such a phrase) nature. It is at once a chance to hear within a tight schedule (this year sticking closer to advertised times than ever) the cream of NYC's hard improv: Sabir Matteen, Roy Campbell Jr., William Parker, Borah Bergman, Daniel Carter, Rob Brown, Steve Swell, Billy Bang, Henry Grimes and (for the last time as such) the David S. Ware Quartet. But their presence, and that of such perennial associates as Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, Bill Dixon and Joe Morris, shouldn't overshadow the sweet surprises each year brings.
Read More"It has a lot to do with the ups and downs of living here, not knowing how I'm going to pay my rent, but knowing somehow…" she said. She remembers the lessons learned from "watching my parents hustle -- the refrigerator would be empty and my mother would always come up with something."
Read Moreelling the story of the label that more than any other brought the new, high-energy jazz of the 1960s to the listening public was a logical next step for author Ashley Kahn. His 2002 book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album is a remarkable and highly readable piece of jazz history. To follow it up, Kahn dove deep into the label that made the album, and arguably the careers of Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders possible.
Read MoreThere's something to be said for overcoming a color scheme. Red-and-green means Christmas, yellow-and-black looks like a bumblebee, and orange-and-black more often than not means Halloween. But in the 1960s -- and still today for a cadre of jazz faithful -- the combination of orange and black means something very different: Impulse! records and, by association, the great John Coltrane. The orange and black spines of the label's releases stood out on the record shelves and became such an enigma that fans began wearing the colors like avant garde mascots.
Read MoreSince its humble beginnings in New Orleans at the turn of the last century, Jazz music had always implied certain release--the abandon of unfettered expression free of the constraints of a social construct that strictly controlled the movement of the black people with whom it originated. Prohibited from the drawing room couture of the white population, it would wind its raucous, syncopated way from the burial plots of the recently deceased to the brothels and blind pigs of the red light district known as Storyville. Taking with it the infectious appeal of the forbidden, the cachet of the demimonde, a smoky, boozy, and ribald license that promised itself to all who would go this route.
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