NEW YORK — The crowd's enthusiastic response to the premiere of "Kaleidoscope" by bassist William Parker and his Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra on Sunday — day 10 of the fifth annual Vision Festival — showed that devotion to jazz's cutting edge is undimmed.

Staged this year at the New Age Cabaret in Greenwich Village, the Vision Festival once again managed to present jam-packed evenings without the support of a major corporate sponsor.

The festival featured an average of five performances a night, ranging from solo recitals to sets by small groups and big bands. In addition, many other art forms were showcased, with dance and poetry often performed alongside the music and artwork displayed throughout the space. The event wrapped up Monday.

"I can't believe how much good music is here for such a cheap price," Livia Carfone, a tourist from Italy, said. Tickets for the shows were $20.

"I couldn't pass up the chance to be a part of such a unique and wonderful experience," another festival-goer, Marie Getsug, 35, said.

The music got under way Sunday with a tasty duet from pianist Myra Melford and reed player Marty Ehrlich and continued with a duo of pianist Matthew Shipp and DJ Spooky, who wove a multihued tapestry of electronic sound around his partner's keyboard workouts.

DJ Spooky also performed with dancer Francesca Harper, enthralling the audience with a rapport that seemed telepathic.

In their set, the Little Huey orchestra delivered a stunning demonstration of how music can be composed and improvised at the same time. Special guest Kidd Jordan, a fixture on the New Orleans creative music scene, played a lengthy tenor sax solo, eliciting howls of approval from the audience.

The night easily could have ended there, leaving everyone satisfied, but there was more. Master percussionist Jerome Cooper came out for a solo performance on drums, woodwinds and electronic keyboards, warming up the crowd for a hugely climactic finish.

Guitarist James Blood Ulmer's Music Revelation Ensemble, which was formed in the '70s but rarely gets together to perform, hit the stage to a still-packed house at 1 a.m. Ulmer's blues-drenched guitar, along with Cornell Rochester's powerful drumming and Calvin Jones ' droning bass, drove saxophonist David Murray to some of his hardest and most free-blowing tenor playing in years. This band, whose recent album Knights of Power contains the song "Convulsion" (

99//~vv-484908/0212568_0103_07_0002.ra">RealAudio excerpt), needs to get out more often.

With night after night of shows like this for the price of a couple of movie tickets, the Vision Festival is definitely on to something.