The History of Music according to the Compact Disc
where a solitary listener reaches uncharted depths of his collection
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1. One's Own Library – The New Year's Sound
2. More Jazz Masterpieces, More Discography Confusion
3. Organizing Your Jazz Listening with Cook and Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz
4. Keep It All Unsunken – Summer Stasis
5. Numbered Ratings, Horrorshow
6. Prioritizing Obsessive Listmaking
7. A Visit to Vision
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A Visit to Vision
Toward the end of June, I took a road trip that was mostly not a road trip. I did drive a long distance, from Georgia to Pennsylvania one day, and from there to the Catskills region of New York the next, to visit the book village of Hobart, a reliable favorite destination. The day after that: a quick visit to the temporary location of the Archive of Contemporary Music, a few stone's throws from the Hudson River; then down to Morristown, New Jersey, from which I took a train to the City, where I spent the rest of this vacation, except for the drive back to Georgia.
Though I only lived there for a brief period more than a decade ago, I think of the New York area (more exactly, the City plus north and central Jersey) as a former home. Not so much because of the time living there, but because of annual visits to the City in the years before and after, 2005-2019. I am not a tourist, as I have been in cities that I visited in recent years like Vienna and Florence. I go to familiar spots (Westsider Books, Caffè Reggio); seek out places that I meant to visit years ago but failed to do so (Ess-a-Bagel, Argosy); and experience a few things new to me: a neighborhood here, a museum there... an historic site, a long-standing restaurant.
But the reason I went on this trip was to attend the Vision Festival. A major attraction was Marshall Allen, who has appeared at least twice at past Visions, leading Sun Ra's Arkestra; this year appearing with a group named the Cosmic Future All Stars. And doing so at the tender age of 102; his performances thus being extraordinary feats that any given spectator is likely never to witness again. For me, his prescence was reason enough to—finally, after so long—attend this festival that I first heard about, and listened to excerpts of, when I was a teenager beginning to learn about the kind of music pioneered by persons like Allen. In the late Nineties, I purchased Vision One, a two-disc compilation of performances from the first Vision Festival in 1996. Recordings from the subsequent festivals have been released over the years, but never a various-artists record like that documentation of the first festival, capturing as it does a goodly sampling of (mostly) New York-based musicians working in the genre commonly called Free Jazz or Improvised Music. Some of these musicians would become regulars of the Vision Festival: William Parker, Matthew Shipp, David S. Ware, Cooper-Moore, Roy Campbell, Daniel Carter, Rob Brown.
Except for Ware and Campbell, who have passed away, these musicians played at the 2026 festival. Also appearing this year were other regulars of the New York avant-garde scene, including Joe Morris, this year's recipient of the Lifetime of Achievement award, William Hooker, Whit Dickey, Dave Burrell, Steve Swell, Taylor Ho Bynum, and Jason Kao Hwang; in addition to those who have rarely or never graced Vision's stages, veterans and newcomers alike, such as Alan Braufman and DoYoen Kim. But it is for those New York regulars that one attends the festival, especially bassist Parker, in many ways the center around which a great deal of musical creativity has flowered, and his frequent collaborator, pianist Shipp, a younger, prolific artist who has proven adept over the years in drawing the attention of audiences larger than expected for this kind of music.
Again, I had not attended the festival before (except a brief, pre-festival outdoor performance by Campbell back in 2010), and so I cannot but think of missed opportunities to attend it in the past. Many of Vision's stars over the years have been elderly, veterans of a scene that dates back to the Nineteen-Sixties (at the latest) and many of them besides Ware and Campbell have passed away in the years since: Charles Gayle, Milford Graves, Kidd Jordan, James Blood Ulmer, Henry Gimes. Some of these, I've seen perform, others not. Either way, I find myself wondering why I have not come before. The gross New York City summers? Financial constraints? Definitely. And, in recent years, I have focused on traveling overseas (I had not been to New York since 2019). Also, my interest in the particular New York style of Free Jazz has waxed and waned, coming and going even within short spans. I went through a few years, roughly 1998-2003, of listening to Free Jazz and Improvised Music very closely, learning all about its varied histories and cultures; and never again devoted such a significant amount of time and effort to it. Overall one finds so much to listen to, so much to do; in our consumerism-overload culture, even cultural elites are gluttons. Anyway.... The sense of time having passed, of having run out of time, for me hung over the experience.
Then again, with Allen still playing, why let such thoughts get in the way? The Vision Festival is a somewhat relaxed setting. One does not move constantly between different venues like at the Big Ears Festival, for example. You stay put in one place. One performance follows another, roughly four per evening, six days in a row. It is both a lot and yet, given that the performances are not long and tread similar territory musically, not too much for the audience to ingest. I focus, for one, on artists whom I've not seen in action before: Swell, Hooker, Burrell, Braufman, a few others; or for a long time: for example, Morris, whom I heard one evening at the second Knitting Factory location way back in 1998 (you know... the "before times," before the 2000 election and September 11th and "smart phones" turned this country into a miserable bizarro version of itself). He was featured in five different groupings on the festival's first night, and perhaps unsurprisingly the last group, when the guitarist was joined by former students of his at the New England Conservatory, all relative newcomers/ unknowns, had a level of intensity and more of a spark of inspiration to it compared to the night's earlier "all star" sets.
I have long been biased in favor of regular groupings in Jazz music. While the current Matthew Shipp Trio that features bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker was not present at this festival, a trio of Shipp, drummer Dickey, and bassist Brandon Lopez performed on the final day. Shipp and Dickey have played together in several trios: with Bisio, Parker, Nate Wooley, and Joe Morris. This new trio was as compelling as any of these past line-ups. Braufman's quartet was also revealing; I had never heard of him, and being exposed to music that is "new to me" in a live setting is always welcome. Having not seen Hamid Drake perform live in some time, at Vision I heard him in two groups, both led by Parker, a frequent collaborator; and, as had always been the case in the past, hearing Drake play with Ken Vandermark or Peter Brötzmann or whomever, I marvel at how effortless his virtuousity seems.
The downside of the festival is that, again, the performances tend to be similar in their approach to collective improvisation in a Jazz setting. With Parker and Drake being such strong presences, unsurprisingly the rhythms are free, but not too free; they flow steadily, if loosely. The music commonly called "Free Improvisation," more prevalent in Europe but also in some American circles, is not a strong presence here. This rhythmic tendency shared by many of the artists for me distracted from appreciating what was unique about each performance. One cannot but conclude too that the "sameness" of the sets contributed to an occasional audience member spending too much time looking at his portable device; one can hope that at such rare performances that this behavior would not manifest itself excessively; hope in vain.
Of course I bought C. D.s on this trip, both at the festival's merch tables and during visits to the Jazz Record Center, Academy Records, and the Downtown Music Gallery; the last of these being an apt stop during this trip, as this little store, hidden away in Chinatown, specializing in all sorts of Jazz and Improvised music, also features live music and is a sort of gathering spot for musicians and listeners. My purchases, I found upon my return (and on the trip back down, listening in the car), were a mixed bag. In short, a couple titles documenting larger-scale projects led by Parker only reaffirmed for me that I prefer his regular groupings, especially the quartert In Order to Survive and the large Little Huey orchestra. The Shipp albums that I picked up have commanded my attention but have also been vaguely disappointing. Shipp, as he has stated in interviews, differs from many Jazz/ Improvised Music artists in making sure that the contents of his albums are paced well and given unifying themes. Given this trait, though, one may expect him to make the themes clearer and approach his recorded projects with greater ambition and pretense. The trio albums are generally rewarding but even they are hampered by shoddy packaging—granted, a minor concern, especially as Jazz music broadly has suffered from a perfunctory approach to such things, especially album covers—and, more importantly, a tendency to include shorter, digressive pieces. Thankfully, one album that I picked up, Armageddon Flower, featuring Shipp's "string" trio (Shipp on piano, Mat Maneri on viola, and Parker on bass) joined by saxophonist Ivo Perelman, a frequent Shipp collaborator, is ideal for me. Something new, added to something old; like the Vision Festival.
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As this post covers several months, let me review what I am doing with these lists. The "albums of the month" are those C. D.s from my collection that I have not already listened-to during 2026 or 2025. I continue to listen to the discs that have already been picked out and listed for previous months' posts. The goal is to work my way through my entire collection. I have selected nearly 500 titles through August, 2026, approximately one-sixth of the 3000-plus items. A good amount, but that toal includes a few large box sets that I did not listen-to entirely.
Online: Black Dice; The Chameleons; Sky Ferreira; Tord Gustavsen; Helium; Bill Nelson; Willie Nelson; Neon Indian; Pell Mell; Teenage Fanclub; Throwing Muses; Tom Verlaine; and more Excepter.
Online: The Art Ensemble of Chicago; Belle and Sebastian; Paul Bley; The Davis Redford Triad; Jan Gabarek; Gang Starr; Half Man Half Biscuit; Justine; Roscoe Mitchell; Joe Morris; Bill Nelson; Stevie Nicks; Evan Parker; Annette Peacock; Ivo Perelman; The Saints; Stereolab; A Tribe Called Quest; Tuxedomoon; Minako Yoshida.
Online: John Luther Adams; American Football; Bauhaus; Nuno Canavarro; Cap'n Jazz; Jesu; Joan of Arc; Sinéad O'Connor; The Sea and Cake; Shrimp Boat; John Sebastian; Igor Stravinsky; Suede; The Tears; more Paul Bley and Annette Peacock, more Art Ensemble and Roscoe Mitchell.
Online: The Cardiacs; Cerberus Shoal; Minako Yoshida; even more Roscoe.
Online: At the Gates; The Band; Big Black; Black Flag; Frank Black; Black Sabbath; Dire Straits; Heavenly; Martin Newell; Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; Screaming Trees; Soundgarden; The Traveling Wilburys; Widespread Panic; Steve Winwood.
Online: Atheist; Alien Sex Fiend; Belle and Sebastian; Cymande; Darkthrone; Floyd Dixon; Doris Duke; Dumptruck; The Flaming Lips; Flash and the Pan; Art Garfunkel; Gong; Marcia Griffiths; Goblin; Steve Hillage; The Lazy Cowgirls; Lubomyr Melnyk; The Mighty Diamonds; Joe Morris; John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett; Charlemagne Palestine; Ride; Sarah Louise; Swans; Thin Lizzy; Hiroshi Yoshimura; Ween; Wire; Z. Z. Top.
–Justin J. Kaw, August 2026