Michelle Mercer

The tendency of art-meets-politics projects to play out like shotgun weddings put this year's Vision Festival in a tight spot. For all the poetry, art, film, and dance, the event's "Vision Against Violence" theme seemed premised on the political nature of free jazz, which, catalyzed by the black power movement in the '60s, took issue with jazz's formal rules. Divorced from its emergent context, the music today can be more escapist than activist, and retrofitting ideals to its abstraction can be a coercive undertaking.

Of all the acts in the ambitious affair—which included 10 nights at the Knitting Factory, three nights of indie-rock-free jazz summits at Angel Orensanz, and a film series at Anthology—the June 2 performance by Jane Cortez and the Firespitters was the most bona fide statement against violence. Her soul-feminist poetics took issue with all manner of injustices, and her band's sound was barrelhouse harmolodics, a setting for Cortez's blues tunes within the peculiar harmonic and melodic theory that her musicians—all alumni of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time group—studied under the free-jazz pioneer. Drummer Denardo Coleman directed the sound with guileless, floating rhythms, while electric bassist Charnett Moffett plucked funk out of speedy 32nd-note runs.

Often the form and content of Cortez's poems evolved in dialogue with the music. She sang-chanted her pieces, picking up phrases on the ending notes of her musicians' solos. "Jazz is an African heart transplant keeping Western music alive," she intoned, and the band's polyrhythmic throb sounded a living example. Other times the music undermined her lyrics. In an elegy for Amadou Diallo, the band's sleepy, "Oh, what a drag" shuffle was an ironic commentary on her vengeful delivery of lines like "41 bullets" and "I'm eating his teeth in my sleep." A kind of secular seer, Cortez used words and music to jab at culture, and dared it to punch back so she could show you her bruises.