A city that prides itself on being both outside of the status quo (“Keep It Weird”), and the Live Music Capital of the World, it should come as no surprise that Austin, Texas, has a fascinating avant-garde musical community. One central figure in that ecosystem has been Chris Cogburn. The percussionist – whose musical interests lie in the space between acoustics and electronics – has organized the No Idea Festival since 2003. No Ideas is an improvisation-focused event that emphasizes first-time collaborations, deepening existing artistic relationships, and creating new projects. True to these ideals, prior year Festivals have fostered the meetings of musicians from across the country and the globe – including “bigger names” (if there is such a thing in creative music) like Mat Maneri, Ingrid Laubrock, Wendy Eisenberg, James Fei, Ava Mendoza, and Cooper-Moore – with local artists. Be under no delusion that the mere proximity of the latter means a lesser musical skill or talent. After all, the Lone Star State birthed Ornette, Dewey Redman, Jimmy Giuffre, Julius Hemphill, John Carter, Amina Claudine Myers, and Ronald Shannon Jackson, among many others. Additionally, the definition of “local” has been taken liberally by the Festival over the years to include artists and venues beyond Austin and even Texas to parts of Louisiana and Mexico.  The 2025 edition builds upon the longstanding mission of the Festival to grow collaborations but with a twist. This year, it will present its first Artist in Residence: Ken Vandermark.

A fixture of Chicago’s improvisational music scene since the 1990s, Vandermark has been at the forefront of creative expression for several decades. His former quintet, the Vandermark 5, has carved a space between postbop, punk, and noise. Edition Redux – a band of keyboard, drums, electronics, tuba, and the leader’s tenor sax marries hues of European improvised music, Tropicalia, the AACM, dub, funk, and post-punk. The DKV Trio with Hamid Drake and Kent Kessler has toyed with song structure, even while dedicated to instant composition. Another three-member ensemble, Spaceways Inc., with Drake and Nate McBride, approached the Afrofuturist sounds of Sun Ra and Funkadelic through the lens of free jazz. The 1999 MacArthur Genius is also the mastermind behind one of this author’s all-time favorite projects, the fairly shortlived (((Powerhouse Sound))). Again joined by McBride, this band connected the funkiness of James Brown and electric Miles, the attitude of Public Enemy, and the deep dub of Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby. 

As these projects, and many others, attest, Vandermark is adroit at combining seemingly divided artistic ideas and cultures. That focus on intersectionality provides a great starting point for the saxophonist’s No Idea residency. Over two days – May 29th and 30th – at Monks Jazz Club, he will present a series of diverse offerings designed to minimize the differences between Chicago and Texas improvisation-based scenes, a division imposed more by commercialism than anything else.

First will be a showing of director Daniel Kraus’ Work Series #2: Musician (Facets, 2007), a film that uses Vandermark as a focal point to address the work every musician, regardless of their origins, needs to undertake to share their craft. Next is an inaugural duo performance between Vandermark and pianist Mabel Kwan – herself a metaphorical bridge between Waterloo and the Windy City, born in the former and operating largely in the latter. The first half of the Festival will conclude with a discussion between Vandermark, Kwan, University of Texas professor Eric Drott, and Austin Jazz Hero Pedro Moreno.

The second day will present a duo of Kwan with Austin bassist Juan García. But most of the offerings will emphasize Vandermark’s performances with Texas-based musicians. A two-hour open rehearsal will lead into a performance with local guitarist Jonathan Horne, Dentonians vibraphonist Stefan González and bassist  Matthew Frerck, and San Antonian drummer Kory Cook. For the closer, the ensemble will be reduced to Vandermark, González, and Frerck. This new trio will visit the music of two legendary artists deserving of greater recognition further from home: saxophonist and Velvet Lounge proprietor Fred Anderson who mentored many young Chicago musicians, and trumpeter Dennis González who founded the Dallas Association for Avant-Garde and Neo Impressionistic Music (daagnim), Dallas’ answer to the AACM.

We sat down with Vandermark to discuss how the No Idea residency came together and what audiences can expect from these two special evenings.

PostGenre: How did the No Idea Residency come together? 

Ken Vandermark: It was a collaboration between Chris Cogburn and myself. The first iteration was Chris suggesting that they would show the documentary film Work Series #2: Musician by Dan Kraus. I would come down and play solo and maybe have a panel discussion. The residency evolved from there. 

PG: You studied film in college. Do you feel that background has made you perceive Musician differently than another musician who may not have that background?

KV: I’m not sure. Maybe. I understood how Dan Kraus planned to approach the material because he was inspired by documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. I was familiar with Weisman’s work through film studies. Wiseman’s approach to documentaries was revolutionary. His work on Titicut Follies (Grove Press, 1967) changed perspectives on what a documentary could be. He moved away from talking heads and voiceovers and towards just showing, in that case, how a hospital was. Granted, his choice in editing and what footage to use was subjective – as was Dan’s – but it is stylistically very different from what people think of in terms of conventional documentaries. Knowing Dan’s inspiration made me realize that the quicker I ignored the camera while Dan was filming, the sooner he would get the material he needed. So, in that sense, maybe just the knowledge of Wiseman and his approach to documentary filmmaking was helpful. 

PG: So, the idea for the residency started with a showing of Musician and a performance and expanded from there.

KV: Chris broadened the possibilities through funding with his nonprofit connected to No Idea and asked if I would be interested in coming to Austin with a group. I suggested Mabel Kwan join me. Mabel is an amazing pianist. She is very unusual in that she’s both an incredible interpreter of through-composed music and a brilliant improviser. I’ve had a few occasions to work with her in both capacities. I first met her through her group, Ensemble Dal Niente, in Chicago. The group was commissioned to perform Roscoe Mitchell’s Last Trane to Clover Five, and I was a guest artist in the performance of that piece. I met Mabel from that performance, and she did incredible work on it. Chris was super excited about the idea of having Mabel play duo with me.

PG: Although you have performed with Mabel before, your No Idea residency will be the first time you play duo together. Do you feel the different setting will change how you approach music together?

KV: Ohh, absolutely. Definitely. This sounds kind of obvious, but for me, every concept is specific. So when I play with someone – even someone like Paal Nilssen-Love, who I’ve worked with for three decades – I play differently in the duo context than in a quartet or any other setting. The presence of other components and other musicians alters the kinds of material we play with as improvisers or the written pieces we use. 

That is also true with Mabel. One of the things I love about Mabel’s approach, after playing with her in many different lineups now, is that, in every single situation, she plays to the situation and does something different. She’s a real improviser. The range of what she does is incredibly broad from something more like Morton Feldman or freely improvised stuff to a full-on Cecil Taylor or [Alexander von] Schlippenbach-style approach of the piano as a percussion instrument with a lot of density, and everything in between. 

I don’t know what we will do as a duo, but I know that it’s going specific to that moment and the range of possibilities is huge. It’s going to be different from anything else I’ve done with Mabel. I’m very interested in seeing where the music will lead us and truly follow where improvisation takes us. 

PG: In addition to the film, panel discussion, and duo with Mabel, you have several other performances scheduled.

KV: Yes. Chris wanted a Texas interface, and our plans moved past the idea of having only a panel discussion to working with musicians based in Texas. I know a few of the Texas-based musicians I will be working with. I’ve met the guitarist Jonathan Horne before, and I know [the vibraphonist] Stefan González, but I have not met the other musicians I will be playing with. I haven’t played with any of them. So, I greatly relied on Chris to make some suggestions of Texas musicians. He sent me a list with links to their material, either video or recordings. From that, we came up with a list of people to work with. And from there, ultimately, who I’ll be playing with.

It will be cool to get a chance to work with these musicians on some of my newer compositions. We will have an open rehearsal workshop where people in the audience can ask questions. It all developed organically and will also allow Mabel to perform with [the bassist Juan García] from Houston. 

PG: What can you share about the original compositions you will be presenting?

KV: Well, the pieces we will perform are from two of my more recent projects. I chose pieces from these projects as the material from them would be easier to explain to the other musicians when we are performing than some of my other projects. 

Most of the pieces I initially wrote for a project with Mats Gustafsson, Tomeka Reid, and Chad Taylor. With that project, we had no rehearsal time when we put everything together and had to do everything in the studio. So, the pieces needed to be pretty straightforward yet open. They needed to provide a framework to get the music to an interesting place.

Some other pieces are from a group I have worked with from Macedonia called Svetlost, which also has Paal Nilsen-Love. With that group, I didn’t know the other musicians – other than Paal – so did not know their skill sets. I just listened to some of their music. There was also a language barrier. I can’t speak Macedonian, and two of the guys in the band weren’t very strong with English. They understood it, but there were still some language challenges. So, I again tried to make music that was straightforward and easy to communicate. 

I used pieces from those two projects as a source for this project because we have only that one rehearsal scheduled before we perform, and I haven’t met with the other musicians in the band. I wanted to make the music easy to get to and still produce something forward-thinking in terms of where we can go with the written components. So, that’s kind of where the music part came from. 

PG: It sounds like you may generally write more for specific musicians than the instruments themselves. 

KV: Yes. I mostly write music for specific musicians. For instance, with the group Edition Redux, I know the other musicians and have worked with them for a couple of years. I have ideas about how to challenge them to get them to do things they normally wouldn’t do. I don’t really write for instrumentation. I write for the individuals who play instruments. 

The other part of the compositional process is that I’m very interested in composing work that deals with different ways of approaching structure. Even now, most groups associated with jazz history tend to use a head-solo-head structure to pieces. Ornette Coleman often used that main type of architecture, and many groups still do. But I’m interested in asking questions about the other ways you can do things. Of course, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, for example, worked in different kinds of forms. So, it’s not like there is no precedent for moving beyond the head-solo-head structure. But ever since the Vandermark 5 began, I have been very interested in coming up with different forms for improvisers. With the Vandermark 5, we used a narrative structure based more on the way a novel is organized in terms of chapters. Very rarely do you start a novel, and have it conclude where you started. Why can’t music work the same way?

I realize now this may also go back to my film studies, but I am also interested in using film structural components as a way to organize compositions. So, I am interested in many things like crosscutting or jumpcutting a composition as if a montage played against another scene. 

I also like working with different kinds of aesthetics and putting them against each other, with the sequence not being determined until the time of performance, so people can’t figure out the road map through the material. I learned with the Vandermark 5 that a piece can have something like an ABCD form, and the band would figure out how to play it even with very open improvisations for moving between sections. In terms of how to get from A to B, the musicians will use the same solution because it’s human nature. I’m very curious and passionate about the idea of making improvisation as spontaneous as possible. So, I’ve become more interested in writing music that makes it impossible for people to know the route through the material, forcing them to discover a solution in real time to push the improvisation. I realized that as much of a fan as I am with Charles Mingus, I didn’t want to yell at people. [laughing]. I leave it up to the music itself to present the challenges of getting people to do things differently. 

Lately, I have also been drawing a lot of influence from Cecil Taylor’s early material. I think his work from that period is fascinating and hasn’t been investigated much. I try to write new compositions that use some of the aesthetics he was dealing with when Buell Neidlinger and Denis Charles were still in his band. The nature of each composition was pushed around by the edges by the improvisers. I’ll think of that as a reference and then start writing. And then the music takes its own course. 

PG: If you are typically writing specifically for particular musicians and leaving things open for the unknown in terms of improvisation, it seems something like your performance of original pieces for the No Idea residency – where your only rehearsal is a short one in front of an audience – would be particularly difficult to present music with these musicians. 

KV: It’s definitely a challenge, which is why I tried to simplify things with the material and picked the particular pieces I did. I generally don’t try to write complicated music. That’s not the point. But to expect other musicians to know the kind of systems I’m working with within two hours and to learn the material in that short time frame is too demanding for anyone. It takes time to learn the way I write. Sometimes, it can take months of rehearsal, and we don’t have an entire afternoon. So yeah, it’s a challenge. 

But I try to bring music that I think is open-ended enough that the other musicians can more readily access it. I know that the players are incredibly skilled and creative. So, it’s not as if they will be unable to understand the music or need it heavily explained to them. They just need to read their part to get the nature and character the pieces demand. It will be a challenge because I’m not as familiar with their playing and have not worked with them before. I’m trying to reduce the number of challenges by bringing in more straightforward material that I think should be easy to learn. Then we can play and work on the improvisation. 

PG: In addition to presenting your original material with the Texas-based musicians, you will also have a separate performance with them of the music of Fred Anderson and Dennis González.

KV: Yeah, I  came up with that idea. Chris had the option of doing a later show at Monks, and we wanted to do something very different from the performance I was doing earlier that evening of my own material. I thought about what we could do. We have Stefan González playing vibes and Matthew Frerck on bass in the Texas quintet. The two have a long history of playing together and I thought playing in a trio with the two of them, doing something completely different from the music with the quintet, would be a treat. The first thought was to do some classic “free jazz“ material like Ornette [Coleman compositions]. 

But then I thought, since I’m coming from Chicago, that maybe we should do the music of Fred Anderson. Very few people have heard Fred’s compositions outside of Chicago. And later in his life, when I was working with Fred, he very rarely played his tunes. It was a very free and open kind of playing. I explored his music with [Fred Anderson / DKV Trio (Okka, 1996)] and had a bunch of his charts. I have played them on different occasions, but playing them as part of the residency would be a chance for audiences in Austin to hear that material. And the way we would interpret it as a trio would be different than what we did with DKV.

And after we talked about that, Stefan or Chris came up with the idea of also doing some of Dennis González’s music. Since Stefan is Dennis’ son, he had some of the material and sent some of Dennis’ music to me. Not only were Dennis’ pieces interesting but presenting them alongside Fred’s seemed like a way to honor both Chicago and Texas through our collaboration. But it is a very organic collaboration and is incredibly exciting for me. 

PG: Were you familiar with Dennis’ work before Stefan sent you his music?

KV: Yeah, I had heard some of Dennis’ music a long time ago. Some of his albums were put out on Silkheart [Records], and I was familiar with those. So, I knew some of the material but not thoroughly. To work with Stefan on it will be great. 

PG: And, of course, you worked with Fred Anderson. Do you remember how you first met Fred?

KV: That’s a very good question. I do know I would see him play when I first moved [to Chicago]. From the beginning, his band was one of my favorite things to see in town. I would go see him whenever he was performing. At some point, I think I introduced myself and ended up playing with him. 

To make a longer history very compressed, I was doing weekly gigs at a place associated with improvised music and different kinds of traditional music called the Hot House. It was in a place called Lincoln Park, which, at the time, was a part of Chicago where many musicians and artists lived. Many musicians from the underground rock scene would come to see our quartet perform at Hot House because it was in their backyard. Noticing how many rock musicians would come to our shows, I decided that maybe we should try to organize a show at a rock club. So, I booked a gig with Fred Anderson’s band, the Vandermark Quartet, and the Energy Ensemble at a very important rock club. The gig was in the month of December. It was freezing cold, and there was a snowstorm. But the place was still sold out. From that, I thought about how we should do more music like this in rock venues. That was a big time shift in terms of presentation in town for a while. 

But those performances are how I got connected with Fred. It all escalated from booking a gig with Fred’s band to talking to him directly on the phone. From there, we recorded the DKV record of Fred’s compositions. I think that doing a record focused on his compositions scored some points for me with Fred. I started playing with him and rehearsing his tunes at the Velvet [Lounge]. After that, I started booking quartet gigs featuring Fred and Kent Kessler and did shows regionally outside of Chicago. Fred and I also played at a small festival out in California together. Fred was very warm and generous. He was also very open to new things. He was very willing to play with me and freely improvise. 

PG: Fred has a big following in the Chicago creative music scene, and Dennis in Texas. But it seems, even in an age where music is readily available online, they both go underrecognized outside their home regions. Do you have any sense of why their recognition seems to be more regionalized?

KV: Yeah, it is curious. I think something similar takes place in all art, not just music in terms of key figures in a scene and their presence in the discussion and the discourse around what is happening. Fred Anderson, when I first moved to Chicago, had not put out any records for a while. He was still running the Velvet Lounge and still performing in town semi-regularly. But he wasn’t as much of a presence outside of Chicago. The first recording he had released in several years was his duo with Steve McCall [Vintage Duets (Okka, 1994)], but that had been initially recorded much earlier. After that record, however, Fred had a career resurgence. He started doing some shows again overseas. But his commitment to the Velvet Lounge is so specific that he always wanted to be back every Sunday to run the jam session he had there, so his traveling was limited. But he did many more shows outside Chicago during the resurgence later in his career. 

But, as far as why some musicians don’t have a larger following outside of their home area, it is mysterious to me. I’ve had my questions about that too. If the access exists, why isn’t there more knowledge about a particular music? And part of that may be because the nature of communication today is so transitory. Even if a name comes up, people rush by it on social media -where so many people get their information now. Back when it was harder to get the music on a record, you made sure you listened to it. You looked out for it. And you checked out artists you didn’t know based on who they worked with, or the label they were on, that you did. That’s how you found someone like Dennis if you were outside Texas. 

The irony is that now there’s so much access to things that the amount of material becomes overwhelming. So, you’re guided by algorithms in terms of what you hear and look at. That is a big problem because algorithms are run by Payola. Spotify is a great example. The algorithm presents you with music based on other things that you said you liked or listened to. And labels are putting money into that system to make sure their records pop up first in your recommendations. The algorithms are not geared toward the interests of the individual, they’re geared towards the interests of corporations. Super helpful. 

The music business is the worst it’s ever been. It’s so challenging to sustain the work because, without economic resources, you can’t keep doing it. You are stuck fighting the algorithm. I’m not grousing and complaining about that, it’s just a fact. In the time I’ve been working on music, the way the landscape has changed so much from before we had the internet to the streaming services today. It has been such a radical change and all musicians have had to overcome things to find the time to continue to develop their work and develop as artists. It’s a huge challenge.

Ironically, that challenge is also why regionality kicks back in. If you look at the United States, when records were the norm, there was a lot of regional music, regional radio, regional bands, and regional recording studios. If you listened to the music of New Orleans and compared it to what was happening in San Francisco, they were very different from each other. There was not so much homogenization of everything for many reasons. Ironically, in the case of Dennis González and Fred Anderson, the people who know most about those artists are those who live around the areas they lived in because the mass market, even for more experimental music or creative music, is dominated by whatever sits in front of everybody’s face.

There’s also less writing about music. What you do for the music is fantastic because there are fewer music journalists. There are fewer newspapers or weekly art papers that come out as a reference point. People tend to find everything on the phone now. It’s more difficult for the writers too. And so, people in Austin know way more about the scene in Austin. I can find out about it, but it wouldn’t be the same because they’re encountering it on the ground. So, ironically, even with all the information and the resources for recordings, in some ways it still goes back to the scene you live in because that access has been manipulated in a way that isn’t conducive to finding things as easily as you would imagine.

PG: And that issue of regionalization is not limited to only Chicago, Austin, or a few other places. Your father [Stu Vandermark] is a music journalist in Boston and presumably, gave you more knowledge of the Boston scene growing up.

KV: Oh yeah, I knew a lot about the scene. I’d been to very many concerts with my father. He was very focused on what was going on in the Boston scene in the 80s. And what was going on was tremendous. There were groups like Shock Exchange that were working with harmolodic ideas. Joe Morris had his groups playing once a week. Joe also brought incredible musicians like Don Cherry and Jimmy Lyons to the Boston area all the time to add to the fruitful local scene. 

One difference with Chicago that I found when I moved here is that compared to most places, Chicago celebrates local artists. In Boston, if you were a local musician, most people shrugged their shoulders. The focus in newspapers was on what visiting artists were coming to town.  In Chicago, since I got here, and surely before, if you were a local artist, that was a bonus. There was interest in local musicians because Chicago is kind of in a cornfield by itself. If you live on the East Coast, the cities are so close together. Chicago is far away from other places. It’s like an island. Or when I moved here, it was. 

The number of people, particularly from Europe, that have been coming to join the Chicago improvised music scene skyrocketed when John Corbett got involved with programming here. He knew everybody coming in from his traveling and presenting stuff elsewhere, and they trusted him. So, we have had a large influx of outside artists coming to Chicago. However,  I think that the embracement of both local artists and visiting artists on the same scale is pretty unique to Chicago. I’m guessing that’s also true in Austin based on the vibrancy I can see of the city’s music scene in general. Even just the concept of hotels there paying a percentage of their taxes towards healthcare for musicians truly embraces the artists who live there. It’s incredible. 

I want to emphasize how much I appreciate Chris Cogburn inviting me to do this residency. It’s very rare to be invited to do something like this. And, so as he presented more options for things that could be done, I was jumping at every one. I want to go down to Austin and present many possibilities of what my music is about. But I’m also excited about the opportunities to work with the players. These kinds of collaborations – both in terms of the curation of the events and being on the ground playing with the players- are hugely impactful from a creative standpoint. You never know where things lead.  This one invitation may create further collaborations with some of these musicians, and that’s exciting. Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s living in Austin created the Young Mothers group. He didn’t move to Austin with that intention, but found the right people; the right artists to work with. You find that in situations like this upcoming residency.  I’m very excited and extremely grateful for the opportunity to do this.

Ken Vandermark’s residency at the No Idea Festival will take place from May 29, 2025 to May 30, 2025 at Monks Jazz Club in Austin, Texas. More information is available on the Festival’s website. You can learn more about Ken Vandermark on his website.