Today's the day NYC goes beyond jazz

Today -- tonight! -- at the Stone, pianist Connie Crother's curation of 24 little-if-not-unknown artists begins with guitarist Andy Fife (coming in from Sweden) and Ms.Crothers (best known as a long-ago student of Lennie Tristano, currently spearheading a proposal to establish affordable housing for musicians) improvising freely with clarinetist Bill Payne at 10. At Roulette with rhythmist Adam Rudolph premieres three works, including a concerto for chamber orchestra by Yusef Lateef, At McCarren Hall in Greenpoint, the two-weekend long New Languages festival kicks off with Darcy James Argue's Secret Society big band, which plays tomorrow -- Sept. 18 -- at Manhattan's Jazz Gallery where on the next night (Sept. 19) cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum's SpiderMonkey Strings octet performs. The multifarious Bynum is in Brooklyn at New Languages next weekend -- Sept. 25 -- co-leading  the 10 piece Positive Catastrophe ensemble, which has a new cd out (as does SpiderMonkey Strings) with Peruvian Abraham Gomez-Delgado. 

The number and quality of players assembled to perform in all these formats -- as well as the September 20th afternoon-long free  "In Gardens" concerts at community gardens on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn (produced by the folks who bring us the Vision Festival) and specific gigs elsewhere would seem enough to change (at least influence) the musical world. Also -- in the clubs right now:

Then there's October 1 - 16: Evan Parker, saxophonist extraordinaire, in 28 concerts, different collaborators from across the musical spectrum for each one. With such as Ornette and Evan and Crothers & Co, Argue and Bynum and the rest (I haven't mentioned half of them) waving the flag for deeply, determinedly individualistic and humanely sociable improvised music and all these others upholding that same initiative each in their own way, New York will take a bold step to reform its culture, to embrace greater freedom from constraining conventions, more faith in the imagination, better energy for collaboration and a vision of true jazz as exciting and essential beyond the term "jazz" that gets reduced to clichés. An autumn of musical renewal?