The “Vision” of William Parker

Myriad festivals seek to to aim the spotlight on the avant-garde but when it comes to community as a central foundation, the annual Vision Festival occupies its own universe. 

The pre-eminent left-field summit where jazz, experimental music, dance, poetry and visual art all converge in spiritually uplifting ways is celebrating its 28th year this year and the lineup assembled is not only jaw-dropping but is underscored by the invaluable creative music alliances and deep bonds that have long been its trademarks. That is manifest in its stunning program over its six-day stint. 

But as the monumentally prolific William Parker tells it, Vision wouldn’t exist without the festival’s driving force, Vision’s chief architect, ace booker, Arts for Art founder and his wife, Patricia Nicholson. As a downtown NYC anchor and multidisciplinary vanguard with a CV that includes dancer, poet and organizer of movement, music and causes, Nicholson’s tireless mission of building community amongst artists and audience has been front and center since 1996, the year she launched Arts for Art and Vision. 

Parker, the bassist, composer and poet, does have a starring role in this year’s edition of Vision Fest: he’s being honored for a Lifetime of Achievement, a well-deserved honor for an extraordinary career that continues to evolve and grow. On June 18th, Parker will inaugurate night one of the festival with a host of his projects celebrating his lifetime achievement honor. Then, hot on the heels of Vision, AUM Fidelity, the revered imprint and longtime label home of Parker, will release two albums on June 28th that showcase his wide-ranging, ingenious repertoire: Heart Trio which finds him joining forces with oft-cohorts Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake and Cereal Music, a collaboration with sound artist, producer and singer Ellen Christi, which also happens to be Parker’s debut spoken word recording. If that’s not enough Parker for you, on June 21st Black Editions Archive will release WEBO, a crucial document of free jazz recorded live in concert in 1991 by the trio of Parker with the late great visionaries, Charles Gayle and Milford Graves. 

The Rock & Roll Globe had the honor of phoning up Parker at his East Village home for an illuminating chat about Vision Festival. 

 

Vision Festival kicks off on Tuesday June 18th and runs through Sunday June 23rd. Buy tickets here. 

 

I wanted to kick it off with the Lifetime Achievement honor that you’re being given at this year’s edition of Vision Festival. What does it mean to you in the context of the festival’s history and the many luminaries who’ve received the honor preceding you? 

The awards were at first being given to people who had passed away like Jimmy Lyons. I don’t know if it was an actual award or just an honor or a  mention in the history of music…Jimmy Lyons, Frank Wright. And then at a certain point, it was changed to honor people who were still alive and not just people who had passed away. We have a tradition in the jazz world of always gathering at funerals and that’s sometimes the only time people see each other, talk and reminisce. So, it was flipped over to “Let’s do it for people who are still alive if we can.” I don’t know who the first person was but we did it with Bill Dixon, Sam Rivers, Muhal Richard Abrams–quite a few people up until now.

So, it’s a great honor to be mentioned in that passing of celebrated musicians. And then for every musician you celebrate, there’s a musician, of course, who is not celebrated, who should be celebrated. It’s hard to get to everybody. But, the Vision Festival should not be the only festival that does this, or the only festival that presents cutting-edge music in 2024.

 

Vision Festival does seem to be a cut above other festivals in what they present, creative musically speaking. 

If you look at the other jazz festivals in America or the booking, they have maybe four or five times the money that the Vision Festival has. They are mostly mainstream and the idea of cutting-edge, the bar has been lowered on that because the idea is a lot different than the 60’s and 70’s because all the musicians have a stamp of a music school. You go to music school for eight years or four years and you’re being told “This is right. This is wrong.” You’re being told, “Don’t actually look at some of the method books, don’t solo too long, don’t put this note with that note. Don’t do this and don’t do that.” A lot of don’ts in there. Then if you take all those dont’s and add them up, you say, “Well, all the great musicians, historically, have done the don’ts.” You know what I mean (laughs)? Like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong. If you really examine Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman…all the innovators have created their own rules, which was basically, the voice inside of you.

If it’s telling you to play this, to move in that direction, you follow it. You wouldn’t necessarily follow a jazz book that’s telling you don’t solo too long. It really just stops progress. It’s like, “If you’re a slave and once you get your freedom, it says, okay, well, now you gotta put on a suit and become a banker.” And it’s just not who you are, whether you’re a slave, whether you’re just a free human being, you have to follow what you feel is correct in music. And, therefore, the lineage of what jazz is supposed to be, which is, a music of protest, a music of joy, a music of celebration, a music of freedom. This tends to be the trend nowadays, to be rather conservative. I’ve heard several celebrated funded orchestras step into the music and play Thelonious Monk’s music and Ornette Coleman’s music and they really cut the wings off the music when they play it and they don’t realize the wings they’re cutting off – that’s the individuality of the music. That’s what makes it fly. And that includes Ellington and Mingus…very grassroots. Ellington didn’t have no music school telling him what to do; he followed his ear and his feeling. And Mingus certainly didn’t have a music school telling him what to do. Nowadays, we try to codify everything and lock it in. So, it’s wonderful that the Vision Festival is honoring people who they call rebels but rebels are just human beings who are living their lives the way that they should be lived.

We see that in the world of politics. You want books without crayon marks and torn pages, you must be a liberal. You want to have school lunches with vegetables, you’re a communist. Things that should be natural and normal have been put to this left wing thing of being out there and being sort of rocking the boat but the boat, in order to move, has gotta rock.  

As far as the Vision Festival is concerned, rules are broken and that’s a positive thing. 

Well, yeah, you make your own rules and the Vision Festival is very political in its notions and intent. It has a spiritual in the outcome of why we play music. If you study Ornette Coleman and not study the notes he’s playing but study his philosophy, where he thought music was just something that everybody did, like laughing or talking, and he developed his own theory off of what he could figure out on his own. A lot of that is going because people are becoming more conservative, even the ones who were supposed to be cutting-edge, the edge is not that sharp  and they’re really not cutting too much. It just doesn’t push forward any barriers. I’m not mentioning any names or calling anybody out but there’s a lot of conservatism in the music now. I don’t know why…you have war in Ukraine, you have war in the Mideast, you had four years of Donald Trump, four years of the way this government is set up and of conservatism and non-progressive human function. We’re trying to replace people with robots. It’s kind of strange because the progenitors of the music all came out of the civil rights movement and they just haven’t made that much progress in it. We’ve gotten used to things being the way they are, rather than realizing that they just haven’t changed that much. 

 

Linking this with the ethos of Vision Festival, what struck me is each year the festival has a slogan and this year is “Building Bridges.” There’s a lot of interpretations that can come out of that. Where does that fit in under the Vision Festival umbrella?

All the titles and the underlying connections are created by Patricia Nicholson who started the Vision Festival. But my opinion for the one we have this year is that we are here and we have to include everybody…in the talks, include everybody in the dialogue and the music because the music must move forward, we can’t stay. Coltrane is gone, David S. Ware is gone, Billy Bang is gone, Roy Campbell is gone, Albert Ayler is gone. There’s a certain energy and vibration when Cecil Taylor played and I believe that that same vibration can come again with a totally different music where it sounds totally different. The sound of freedom is the sound of those who want to be free and that sound will be different with each and every individual musician. I guess when Louis Armstrong and those guys were jamming, you could see the connection between Louis Armstrong and Albert Ayler collective improvisation; it wasn’t like so tight. And I think those qualities should always be in the music. If you listen carefully, you can see– who’s not just doing it scientifically or technically different–but they’ve tapped into this magnetic, kinetic force and the music flows. It doesn’t sound the same but it flows and it has this energy and it could be in any style. It could be from gospel to folk to all kinds of rock, punk rock, bop, new bop, space bop, cosmic bop. You can call it whatever you want but the same feeling. 

And that’s why, coming up and talking to musicians, hanging out with musicians, all the musicians love James Brown that I knew. Most of them love James Brown and Marvin Gaye and they love Tito Puente, they love Leontine Price, they love the music of Africa and there wasn’t any separations about, “Well, because I play the blues that doesn’t mean I can’t dig opera?” Now, the other thing is “Well, if I’m an opera singer, I can’t dig the blues.” That’s a bridge between human beings. It’s like, “Man, we just dropped a bomb and killed thousands of people.” That’s not a bridge. So it’s like the idea is that every time you kill somebody, you’re killing yourself. To really think and the time has come for unity and to repair the roads, repair the bridges. And I don’t mean physical bridges; I mean the bridges that sort of separate people that are broken at one point but can be repaired and the roads to each other’s heart can be connected. And once that happens, it’s like, “All soldiers drop your guns, drop your weapons, I’m not killing anybody, Mr. Government. If you want somebody killed, you do it yourself. I’m not killing. Those people are my brothers and sisters.” And again, the separation that you don’t know that we’re all brothers and sisters, not theoretically, but on a real level. And so it’s like killing somebody, it’s like killing myself. 

All of these bridges have to be patched up and repaired on so many different levels. Then the life is kind of short and people’s memories, they forget things. They forget things that they don’t know anything and you say, “Okay, I’ve been doing this music since 1972. Have you heard of me? Have you heard of the music?” Says, “No, I never heard you.” But once the music touches somebody, they remember that music their whole life. It’s like
“Wayne Shorter, Alan Shorter. Do you know Wayne? I know Wayne but I don’t know Alan. Yeah, Alan is Wayne’s older brother. Trumpet player. Check him out. And why don’t you know about Alan? Why don’t you know about Donald Ayler? Or Albert Ayler?”  Because certain things are really systematically being cut off. We have to just repair the lines and all the cut wires have to be patched up again so we can begin to communicate on a deeper level. But we got to do it…like yesterday. 

 

I wanted to talk about Patricia Nicholson, your wife, who is the founder of Arts for Art and Vision Festival. On more than one occasion, I’ve read  William Parker getting credit for it and not Patricia. Can you talk about those slights that seem consistent and unfortunate? And can you talk about how you work together to put on the festival?

Okay (laughing). I’m going to be clear: It’s no “We work together”; it’s that she does it. She does it and I get the credit for it. It’s really ridiculous. I call that sexism, just thinking that a woman can’t do this. I mean, you really should, at a point, interview her about it; she can tell you the whole story. But, that’s all it is. And I tell people and they say, “Well, he must do something William.” (Laughing) 

I mean, I do something. I play with the musicians, I do music workshops, I’m part of the community. But, basically putting on the festival and with the amount of funds that we have, raising the funds…that’s all on her. She does it all and I just support. I’m like a father figure sometimes in the community where as I try to inspire people, the younger musicians–not saying, like, “Come’ere, get inspired.” I just am doing a peripheral thing that happens and to hire some of the younger musicians who are very, very, very creative, have a voice of their own, have their own bands and their own music. So by that I am supporting and doing what I can for the music community. I visit people in the hospital, I take care of some older musicians when they’re in need of help. So I do things and, again, that  trickles down to helping the community in a positive way.

In other words, you support Patricia and you do your thing in the community. 

But it’s just the way people think. It’s the same way, like, if you’re the leader of the band but they’ll put the saxophone player first because bass players or drummers have a thing. Traditionally, they’re not supposed to lead bands and they don’t lead bands but it’s just something… it’s a big fight that has to be corrected so hopefully slowly people will get the idea that it’s Patricia Nicholson who started, organizes, runs and and does many, many things on the list of things that have to be done to put the festival together. And also the year long programs from Arts for Art is something that she does–it’s just so important. The problem is that it’s hard to get funding and it’s hard to really get people out of the bars and into the concert halls.

 

Is there a method to Patricia’s genius of curating the festival’s lineups for each night? I’ve always been curious how that works and the way Patricia is the one juggling everything.

Yeah. She spends a lot of time in booking each night, trying to get someone who maybe we’ll draw a few more people and maybe someone who no one’s ever heard of and sort of get a balance and then pick the nights. It’s carefully planned over the years of experiencing what works and what doesn’t work. This world is a tough cookie. That’s the only thing I can say… it’s really tough. 

 

Is there a moment, performance or write-up over the last near-three decades that you can point to that made you think that Vision Festival arrived or made an indelible mark in the landscape?

Well, when the Vision Festival started, it was post-loft scene. A lot of places were closed, most of the musician-owned places like Studio Rivbea was closed, that was run by Sam Rivers, Ali’s Alley, which was run by Rashied Ali, Studio We, which was run by James DuBoise. They were all closed up so using them as an inspiration of musicians’s self-determination, the Vision Festival shot out. I think that the first year of the festival, we had Milford Graves and we had John Zorn, we had a whole bunch of people playing for what we could pay them and it grew from there.

I think the greatest times for me were when we brought Fred Anderson in and we were playing with myself, Hamid Drake, Fred Anderson, Kidd Jordan and maybe Billy Bang was on this one and the reviewer of the New York Times said that “it was a throwback to Woodstock, these people in the audience were tapping their feet and dancing.” And he did this as a negative, though, it wasn’t like a positive. I won’t tell you the critic but he did this as a negative. Like, “it’s supposed to be art music and people were dancing.” Now, first of all, what is art music? And what’s wrong with dancing? (Laughs) 

So, anyway, but every time I played with Milford and Charles (Gayle) and Kidd, these were always some of the highlights in the festival…with   Hamiet Bluiett and Billy Bang…It was always great, there was always something on the festival that just lifted it right up because you had all your  real masters at their zenith of when they were playing. Fred Anderson would pick up his horn and he’d go down in a crouch and Kidd Jordan would hold his horn up in an arch and it was like they were off to the races. It’s like heaven, heaven just opened up.

 

Many of your peers you’ve named have passed on. Does the experience of Vision Festival each year get more heavy and reflective knowing these masters and friends are no longer with us?

It’s sad. It’s very sad because the Vision Festival is just one of the things. The [other] thing was like going on the road with Rashied Ali and Charles Gayle. It was like going to the airport, getting to the airport, getting on the plane, off the plane, playing the gigs, going on the train from cities to cities. It’s big fun because most musicians have this joy and when they step on stage, it’s part of a big, big, big celebration. We’re not trying to make an artistic statement; we’re trying to celebrate life. When you’re downtrodden and you don’t have anything except life, that’s what you have to celebrate. I don’t have anything except my life and what’s around me and even within bombs dropping and people being killed, there’s still the sky, there’s still life, there’s still the sun. And that’s what we try to bring into the music.