Vision Festival 17

The 17th Arts for Art Vision Festival kicked off this week, sadly without me in attendance. Lucky for us, they are streaming the entire festival at Ustream.tv. The Vision Festival channel can be found here. Yesterday's line-up was particularly impressive, and I stayed up late last night and caught the last part of the Farmers By Nature (Gerald Cleaver, William Parker & Craig Taborn) set, as well as the entire Darius Jones Quartet set. The latter played material solely from his latest album, Book of Mæ'Bul (Another Kind of Sunrise), but both sets were strong.

William Parker's In Order to Survive (Parker plus Cooper-Moore, Rob Brown, Roy Lewis Barnes and Hamid Drake), one of the best jazz ensembles of the past 15 or so years, were up next, but I fell asleep (they were due on stage around 4 or 5 AM over here). Lucky for us, yet again, they have put up the recorded shows on Ustream as well. You can watch the In Order to Survive set here, or on the embedded video below.

EDIT: the recorded video of In Order to Survive seems to have been removed. Live streaming from the festival should continue throughout the festival, though. Just click on the channel link above.

Listening Booth, week 33, 2011: Planetary Unknown

First installment this fall. Taking things step by step, but I am hoping to step it up a bit from now on.

• David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, William Parker & Muhammad Ali: Planetary Unknown (AUM Fidelity, 2011) - I initially struggled to write about this. While I found it intriguing from first listen, I had some trouble finding something to hook on to. Even the most raucous of Ware's music tends to build from themes or melodic launch pads, but this sounded tentative at first. Until I realized, that is part of the point. This is exploratory music, and suddenly you notice small patterns emerging within each composition, and the conversation that develops from there: from the hushed to the rowdy, and the sections in between, never staying in the same place for too long. These four wonderful musicians - by now all legends in their own right - have played with each other in various constellations before, but never together as a quartet, to my knowledge. Their understanding of each other's musical language, how they react to what is being "said" by the others and the ideas they develop from there, is part of what makes this a wonderful and very interesting record. 8 *
  

* Grades are tentative, based on three or four listens, though quite often a few more. Much of the writing is done during listens, and should be considered notes rather than final reviews.

PS: Check out the recent Jazz Session interview with the guys in Planetary Unknown.