Who What Jazz When Where

Chicagoan tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson's far-reaching and soul-scowering phrases started like a boxer's uppercut, way down near the floor and from the pit of his belly, erupting as if to try to fill the once-sanctified apse of the Orensanz Foundation. Kidd Jordan, his friend and counterpart from New Orleans, simultaneously worried flurries of higher-register tenor notes, his jaw clenched and his back bent to the task, like John Henry smashing a railroad spike or like Anderson himself, who was for many years a carpet-tacker. Bassist William Parker, mainstay of New York's downtown out-jazz free improv world-a man with a bulldog work ethic and righteous but utterly self-effacing community ethos-thrummed an unrelenting pulse, and Chicagoan drummer Hamid Drake, who uses tom-toms as if pounding out reggae, snare and cymbals like a bebopper in hard swing, shifted gears to carry the long, dissonant, multi-strand crescendo upon sweeping waves of blues shuffle.

It was Fred Anderson Lifetime Achievement Day at the Vision Festival-and the not-for-profit, art-for-life's-sake crowd was in the house.

Imagine a place where new music is its own reward; where instrumentalists are urged to become composers, encouraged to develop unique, personal voices through solo endeavors and with like-minded colleagues in small groups and large ones; where local venues host weekly gigs that cost audience members a very few bucks, and let them sit close; where dancers, painters and poets collaborate with less ego than is typical in Manhattan-because (in part) there is less competition as there are few (if any) well-paying outlets, and prestige is more earned than conferred, with no expectations of making a living, much less making it big. That was the situation of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in mid-60s-80s Chi-town, and Fred Anderson at Vision Fest was old home night for me.

Here were AACM driving force Muhal Richard Abrams, reedsmen Joseph Jarman of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Douglas Ewart, passing around a handmade book for the inscription of messages celebrating the AACM's 40th anniversary. Here was drummer Thurman Barker, leading a percussion ensemble more tasteful than bashing. Later-generation AACMers filled the hall, including flutist Nicole Mitchell and Harrison Bankhead, the Midwest's William Parker. They had escaped the Second City syndrum, proving it possible to become internationally active, and even known in small but pertinent ways, while remaining amateurs in the best sense, loving what they do, with or without financial gain. That's not a popular position in the U.S., though. Art, if it's good, should support the artist. An artist, if he/she is good, makes art that supports them. Otherwise, how to buy health insurance?

There were, in the 60s and 70s, organizations like the AACM in St. Louis (Black Artists Group), in Los Angeles (pianist Horace Tapscott's Pan-Afrikan Peoples' Arkestra), and in contentious, entrepreneurial New York (the Jazz Composers Orchestra, overlapping into Woodstock's Creative Music Studio). As jazz boomers may recall, communitarianism was part of the programs of reigning jazz people such as John Coltrane. Even before Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea, a free-jazz open house in what's now Noho, there were less ballyhoo'd lofts where musicians gathered to jam, woodshed and workshop, often open to the public for the proceeds from the door or some modest government funding. It's almost inconceivable today that an institutionally unaffiliated jazz player residing in Manhattan could afford to run such a place, or spare the energy to participate in an artists' collective.

If Vision Festites are an aging avant garde, it's because they found rent-controlled homes a decade or two ago, hunkered in and kept playing what they and a dedicated coterie hear as beautiful and necessary. Jazz is split between strivers who aim to touch up canon and conventions at Jazz@Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, and the underemployed who keep esthetic fires burning with hopes of occasional European jaunts and the odd special event. Small record labels help them, but that's to stay in the game, maybe break even-not rack up profit.

New York's major media takes major notice when events like the JVC Jazz Festival?New York get to town. JVC sponsors a respectable top-market affair, meant to present jazz's name touring acts and sell tickets in central halls at the start of the off-season. But does it speak to the hardcore jazzer? With all good intentions I dozed through the Wayne Shorter-Dave Holland double bill at Carnegie Hall last week, still exhausted from staging the Jazz Awards gala, for sure, but also alienated from those musicians onstage, so distant as to be in another room. Or another culture. Fred Anderson, 75, returned to Chicago after his celebratory turn; his soft-spoken example, shrugging at the disconnects of art and business, gives heart to us here, still.