The jazz club, with its dim lighting and closely packed tables, looms large in our collective imagination. But today, the music is thriving in a host of different spaces.
Multi-instrumentalist and composer William Parker
Few musicians on the planet can convey a sense of physicality more effectively than William Parker the multi-instrumentalist and composer best recognized as a titan on upright bass, especially in the flowing continuum of experimental jazz.
So it comes as welcome news that the Vision Festival, over which he always presides as a benevolent guide, will return in person this summer, beginning July 22 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. (He will it kick off himself, in an Opening Healing Ceremony that also includes his wife, Arts For Art founder / artistic director Patricia Nicholson Parker.)
But well before that milestone, Parker will perform a special concert in celebration of
A tangle of connections fosters the bounty of William Parker’s career. The bassist who’s released a 10-album set called
Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World that features more than a dozen musicians is New York’s free-jazz caretaker, a performer who frequently forges symbiosis on and off the bandstand. And he’s been doing it for almost 50 years. “It’s the sound community of William Parker,” said vocalist Lisa Sokolov, who first met the bassist in the mid-1970s and appears on the Aum Fidelity box set. “If it wasn’t for William, a whole lot of us would be in really sad shape.