That binary defines a creative music scene whose audiences often get to feel something that’s far too rare in money-mad New York. When you arrive at a venue like the Stone or the Downtown Music Gallery or Ibeam Brooklyn to hear the world’s best players create sounds nobody will ever create again, everyone-from performers to proprietors to the head-bobbing faithful in the seats-usually seems legit glad you showed up. Seriously, without you there, something’s missing. Here’s another thing people say a lot when talking about great eras in this city’s musical history, whether the heyday of 52nd Street, the ’70s loft scene, the Knitting Factory in the ’90s, or whatever: I wish I’d have been there then. I am telling you now that you can and should be there now, this week, at the latest iteration of a festival that hosts performances the people of the future will think you were a simp for missing. “There’s a new energy that’s reflective of this time of trouble,” Patricia Nicholson, the festival’s founder, artistic director, and a noted choreographer, tells the Voice. We live in this world right now, and we have to be present.” “Bad times make, sometimes, for good art. Simply put, this city that’s so inhospitable to art that’s tough to monetize is currently home to an epochal flowering of what people call “free jazz” or “fire music” or any other reductive designation. As a profitable business, the jazz world mostly collapsed around the dawn of the millennium, when major record labels (mostly) abandoned the music, and old heads and critics warned that the Jazz at Lincoln Center approach to tradition and education would staunch the creative development of young players.
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