INTERNATIONAL AF FFAIR Ken Vandermark brings home jazz from around the globe

The Chicago Jazz Festival is one of the most inclusive in the world. There has always been a staunch support for progressive improvised music by the programming committee. Traditionally that support has been for members of the distinguished Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, but this year non-AACM standard bearer, Ken Vandermark, is the festival’s honoree as Artist in Residence.

Often budgetary constraints make the inclusion of a mass of foreign musicians prohibitive, after all the basic programming budget is a mere $175,000. But with increased help from the Chicago Jazz Partnership, the festival is getting stronger and stronger, even sponsoring a series of pre-festival “Neighborhood Night” events throughout August. (This year Jerry Gonzalez y El Commando De La Clave flew in from Madrid and Pierre Dorge’s New Jungle Orchestra were imports from Denmark.)

Vandermark’s workflow increasingly takes him to Europe, working with musicians in the places he visits, and it was important to him to share these associations with his local audience. He travels far and wide — Vandermark is back to Japan in September, was in Addis Ababa not too long ago with Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya, and little more than a week before his hometown jazz fest obligations in Chicago, he was in Mulhouse in Eastern France performing with iTi and Fire Room, then in Austria with Side A at the Saalfelden Festival. Despite all his exotic sounding adventures, the multi woodwind musician/composer/bandleader/ improviser has no interest in tourism.

Nevertheless in email exchanges he signs off buoyantly from his current location with, “my best from Vienna” or Italy, or wherever it might be. And at each destination, he aspires to achieve a more lasting relationship, a deeper understanding, of those he encounters.

“The way we get treated for sharing something is extraordinary and allows you — I don’t know if access is the right word — but it gets you to see parts of the world in a light that you never would as an American tourist,” stresses Vandermark, “and that’s an amazing gift.”

It’s a particular privilege of improvised or experimental music with open structure and sensibility, that associations can be made faster, with immediate intensity — ideally with a completely egalitarian outlook. For all his prolific output of recordings and assembled bands and now the honor bestowed of artist-in-residence at the Chicago Jazz Festival, Vandermark is the most unassuming geezer you could meet. Quietly spoken, saving flames for the bandstand. As interested in the artistic pursuit of others as his own, bookshelves in his spacious house on Chicago’s North Side are as full of monographs on artists like Franz Kline, Donald Judd and DeKooning as they are of CDs. A large black Brotzmann painting dominates the living room, and another by the father of one of his closest collaborators, Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, hangs above the stairs. The nature of the “Artist”

Ken Vandermark in front of a painting by Terry Nilssen-Love, the father of Paal Nilssen-Love, Vandermark’s drummer

and purified artistic pursuit has traction with Vandermark, but not Ivory Tower-style; for him the term is freighted with the responsibility to fight for legitimacy as a seeker in frequently provincial, myopic society-atlarge.

The “Marco Polo of Improv,” he keeps pushing east to find new attitudes to his central area of interest — sound generation — which reflects further, perhaps, into the psyche of local populations.

The Jazz Festival granted Vandermark unusual cart blanche to invite whoever he needed to make the music he wants. Given this opportunity, visa hustles notwithstanding, he has imported favorite out-oftowners. Poughkeepsie-based multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee is one of Vandermark’s formative domestic influences, but collaborators from further afield include Swedish trumpeter Magnus Broo from Stockholm, clarinetist Waclaw Zimpel from Warsaw and his compatriot from Gdansk, powerhouse saxophonist Mikolaj Trzaska, not to forget Oslo’s Nilssen-Love.

Here is what they have to say about Vandermark and their own cultural exchange:

Joe McPhee: “I first learned about Ken Vandermark back in 1992/93 from an interview in Option Magazine; he mentioned how his father suggested if he intended to play tenor saxophone, he should listen to a solo recording of mine called ‘Tenor.’ I was surprised to read such a thing in a U.S. publication and honored the recording was so highly regarded. … In 1996, I received an invitation from Ken to join him … for a performance at the Empty Bottle, the first time I got to play in Chicago. … Ken kicked open the door for me with his invit tation. been to Chicago participated in Ken’sK Project,’ based on ments of my com excited to … join during the Chica ago another first for

Magnus Broo o: Ken on Swedish with Aaly trio 10 0 was knocked out t Then I met him ini started to play to ogether like Atomic/Scho ool Corners, Resona ance and on Atomic/VandermarkV tours. … Last yea