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In Memoriam: John Hammond Jr., 1942–2026
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
Roscoe Mitchell will receive a Lifetime Achievement award at this year’s Vision Festival.
(Photo: Courtesy Arts for Art)Arts for Art has announced the full lineup for the 2025 Vision Festival, which will run June 2–7 at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. The six-day event will feature more than 100 musicians performing under a theme of “Heart to Resist” — in protest of the federal government’s recent rescinding of the organization’s NEA grant.
Vision 2025 opens June 2 with a celebration of Roscoe Mitchell, honoring the multi-instrumentalist and composer with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his career-long devotion to pushing creative boundaries in music and art. The visual artwork of Roscoe Mitchell will be projected onto video screens throughout the evening, which will include a set by the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, a Metropolis Ensemble production titled “Roscoe Mitchell, Metropolis Trilogy” and a performances by Space Ensemble featuring Mitchell on woodwinds and percussion, Thomas Buckner on baritone, Scott Robinson on Woodwinds and Robert Dick on flute.
Mitchell has served as a professor at the University of Wisconsin and CalArts, and has served as the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College. His virtuosic resurrection of overlooked woodwind instruments spanning extreme registers, visionary solo performances and assertion of a hybrid compositional/improvisational paradigm have placed him at the forefront of contemporary music.
“I did have one notion while I was at Mills — when the students would show me their portfolios, and I would see how much work they were getting done, you know, and it dawned on me there that perhaps I should be a student and then that way I could get some work done,” Mitchell said. “In 2018 that happened. And I’ve been having that opportunity to be a student since then and have been totally enjoying it.”
The evening of June 3 at Vision 2025 begins with a show by dancer Miriam Parker and video artist Warren Trae Crudup, followed by gabby fluke-mogul’s “Thread,” Amirtha Kidambi Elder Ones, Ellen Christi’s “Flux in Chaos” and Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble: “Portraits of Sonic Freedom.”
On June 4, performances will include The School of Hard Knocks’ Unfinished Symphony, Suite New York, In Four Movements, conducted and composed by Yoshiko Chuma; Mendoza/ McPhee/ Taylor “Rayos”; Radical Reversal; Hamid Drake’s “Indigenous Mind”; and Pheeroan akLaff’s “Robeson Rise.”
Performers on June 5 will include Davalois Fearon Dance “Up/Lift,” Ivo Perelman & Matthew Shipp String Trio, Oliver Lake poet & DJ Jahi Sundance Lake, Michael Wimberly “SpiritWorld” and Mary Halvorson’s “Canis Major.”
On June 6, the program kicks off with a conference on The Heart to Resist: Art & Activism, followed by music from The Fringe, Patricia Nicholson’s “Shamanic Principle,” DoYeon Kim Quartet and David Murray “Birdley Serenade.”
The final night of Vision 2025, June 7, starts with a solo piano performance by Marilyn Crispell and continues with “How the Dust Falls”: Gerry Hemingway, Fay Victor Tree Trini Collective and Rob Brown Trio “Walk About.” The festival will close with William Parker’s “Healing Message from Time & Space” featuring an all-star band in a celebration of hope, creativity and community of multicultural and Black creative artists.
In 1996 Patricia Nicholson Parker put on the inaugural Vision Festival. The idea was to bring together luminaries from the different creative music scenes and celebrate the important African American leaders of the music. Featuring artist Milford Graves, that first Vision Festival was unique in its multi-arts focus featuring poets such as Amiri Baraka, dancers such as Rod Rogers and visual artists such as Jeff Schlanger, in collaboration with the music. Each year the Vision Festival also brought attention to issues of social justice by curating panel discussions. Heralded as an essential arts event, the Vision Festival has created and guaranteed a space for improvisation as a leading creative language. It continues to honor and amplify the careers of legendary artists that are often under-appreciated.
To view the full lineup and schedule for the 2025 Vision Festival, CLICK HERE. DB
Hammond came to the blues through the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he experienced firsthand in New York’s Greenwich Village.
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