When I spoke to Patricia Nicholson Parker this week, she was sitting in a car outside the Abrons Arts Center, preparing for the 30th Vision Festival.
"It's a lot of manual labor," she told me.
Thirty years in, she was still loading in.
The Vision Festival has become one of New York's most important homes for creative improvised music. Running a festival is a complicated business, but Patricia says the reason it exists is simple.
"There was nowhere in New York to get together and just play. There was nowhere to jam free jazz, creative improv. It didn't exist. And there was hardly anywhere to play."
So in the mid-1990s she started the Improvisers Collective, bringing together musicians, dancers, poets and visual artists. The audience wasn't growing. The music wasn't getting reviewed. As she puts it, the project was "dying on the vine."
Then Patricia, a dancer, poet, and organizer, tried something different: A festival.
"I guaranteed everyone money," she told me. "Which I didn't have."
But she believed in it.
"There was so much excitement around it that I just knew it was going to succeed."
It did succeed. And thirty years later, maybe the greatest success is that what began as an experiment has become a community.
Patricia told me that a few years ago Arts for Art asked people to describe the organization in a few words.
The answers that came back were: improvisation, community, and boundless.
"Boundless is how I like to be," she said.
"I don't want to be in a boat. I want to be in the sea."
For Patricia, the festival was never just about music.
"Creativity doesn't really know bounds," she told me. "The creative instinct just is. It's not about these narrow distinctions that people put on things."
That philosophy has shaped Vision from the beginning: musicians, dancers, poets and visual artists sharing the same space. Different disciplines. Different generations. Different voices.
Now, thirty years after the first festival, Patricia sees another challenge ahead.
"We have to find ways to support each other," she says. "We can actually get stronger as organizations, but even more importantly, as an environment for artists."
In fact, she says the challenge facing creative improvised music today is very different from the one she faced in 1996. Back then, there was nowhere for the music to be. Today, there are more artists than any one organization can serve.
"The community is bigger than I can serve, which is a good thing. That means that there are more and more artists."
Which means the future isn't about preserving a scene. It's about building an ecosystem.
"We've come to the place, I think, that in order for this art to prosper and serve people properly, we're going to have to figure out how to partner without subsuming each other."
The Vision Festival 30 runs June 23–28 at the Abrons Arts Center in New York.
