Sam Rivers @ the Vision fest

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June 17, 2006

Music Review

The Vision Festival: On the Fringe and Reveling in Rhythm

By NATE CHINEN

In 1970, the saxophonist Sam Rivers and his wife, Beatrice, opened Studio Rivbea in a loft on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Rivers was already an accomplished musician at the time — he had toured with Miles Davis, made albums for Blue Note and taught at Wesleyan — so this act of self-determination had more than a casual resonance. For nearly a decade, Studio Rivbea served the city's avant-garde jazz community as a performance space committed to an ethos of independence.

The same principles, and much the same aesthetic, govern the Vision Festival, an annual summit of experimental music, art and dance being held this week at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts on the Lower East Side. Founded in 1996 by Patricia Nicholson Parker, a dancer whose husband, the bassist William Parker, is a Studio Rivbea alumnus, the Vision Festival has evolved into an impressively vibrant and well-organized affair. Fittingly, this year's edition bears a dedication to Mr. Rivers. Wednesday's program was billed as "Lifetime Recognition: Sam Rivers Day."

Mr. Rivers presided over the occasion with grace and good humor. At 82, he is irrefutably an elder statesman, but he wears that distinction lightly. In an evening bracketed by two of his working bands, he conveyed a sense of mischievous, ageless wonder.

That's not to say that his music lacked gravity or focus. His Rivbea Orchestra, the big band that kicked off the festivities, had both qualities in abundance. Its opening tune, "Monsoon," employed a syncopated rhythmic tattoo played by the full company of saxophones, trumpets and trombones (and a lone tuba). It sounded like a Morse code distress signal overlaid with a blaring, polytonal dissonance.

Another piece in the set, "Mélange," featured a climbing melodic line that casually evoked the 12-tone language of Arnold Schoenberg. "Flair" and "Spunk" — two words, by the way, that could be said to describe Mr. Rivers — were more elastic and contrapuntal, with flashes of calypso and rhythm and blues.

Mr. Rivers has lived in Orlando, Fla., for the past 15 years, and he has stocked his ensembles with musicians from that area. They were markedly at ease with Mr. Rivers's heaving arrangements, and a handful of them — including the trumpeter Tom Parmenter, the trombonist Andrea Rowlinson and the tenor saxophonist David Pate — made an impression during their brief solo openings.

But the most dynamic part of the orchestra was the rhythm section, composed of the bassist Doug Mathews and the drummer Anthony Cole. Both are members of Mr. Rivers's trio, which closed the evening — after sets by the trombonist Grachan Moncur III and the drummer Warren Smith, each with a sextet — on a decidedly high note.

Partly this was because Mr. Rivers had a chance to stretch out as an instrumentalist. His tenor saxophone style was gruff but nimble, obliquely rooted in blues feeling. On soprano, he went for scrambled flurries. His phrasing on both instruments — and, in a tantalizing stretch, on flute — was fitful but masterful.

Mr. Cole has become adept at anticipating the peaks and pauses of Mr. Rivers's solos, and his drumming provided an uncannily intuitive punctuation. It also bonded tightly to Mr. Mathews's elastic bass lines; together the two musicians produced a rhythmic slipstream.

All three musicians make a virtue of versatility. Mr. Cole and Mr. Rivers took turns sitting at the piano, each with a strikingly different style. One haunting ballad featured Mr. Rivers on soprano, Mr. Cole on tenor and Mr. Mathews on bass clarinet. What could have felt like dilettantism was instead a moving expression of exploratory ambition.

During each of Mr. Rivers's sets, a painter stood at the back of the stage, swiping at a canvas in loose accord with the music. (Jeff Schlanger, the event's informal artist in residence, had his own easel set up in the front row.) The festival, which runs through Sunday, encourages its audiences to perform similar acts of imaginative translation.