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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: 10/7/23: The 'Uneasy' music of jazz pianist Vijay Iyer [1]

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Date: 2023-10-07  

When this post goes live there is a good chance I’ll still be watching the Phillies-Braves playoff game, so rather than liveblog the game and annoy everyone with my exuberant (or pained) interjections, as the case may be, I am opting instead to post the work of a brilliant jazz and classical pianist: Artist, producer and composer, Vijay Iyer.

Iyer was born in Albany, New York, the son of Indian Tamil immigrants. Downbeat’s 2012 Jazz Artist of the Year (an award he’s won four times), he also that year won their award for Pianist of the Year, Small Group of the Year (for the Vijay Iyer Trio), Album of the Year, and Rising Star Composer of the Year. He is a member of the senior faculty at Harvard’s Department of Music with a joint appointment to the Department of African and African-American studies, and has released multiple albums, most recently on the ECM label in various formats, solo, duo, trio, quartet, sextet and as bandleader. He performs regularly in New York City, throughout the U.S. and internationally. As quoted in his ECM bio, the New York Times has said ““There’s probably no frame wide enough to encompass the creative output of the pianist Vijay Iyer.”

Iyer regularly imbues his music with a social consciousness that's relatively unique among jazz musicians. In 2014 Professor Iyer was profiled by the New York Times’ Jon Pareles for an engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that involved some stunning multimedia presentation and choreography:

The opening piece, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, was topical. It was billed as a piano solo, and a piano stood alone on the stage as the audience entered. Then there was darkness, and when low light returned, the piano was surrounded with supine, motionless bodies: an encampment, or casualties. A quotation about “combat breathing,” by the anticolonialist author Frantz Fanon, was projected overhead. One of the bodies was Mr. Iyer’s, in a black suit; he moved to the piano to start playing low, almost furtive rumbles and clusters, rising to thick tremolos and fragile trills and runs. The bodies — choreographed by Paloma McGregor of Angela’s Pulse — climbed to their feet, moving into stylized gestures that have become familiar at recent protests over police killings: hands raised in surrender, images of being choked. The music coalesced into rhythmic, tolling modal chords, building like two-fisted gospel without the promise of release, then melting away, unresolved. “Black Lives Matter” read the screen overhead. It was an activist elegy.

His 2021 ECM Release, Uneasy is a thematic musical representation of the apparent slow-motion crumbling of the American experiment:

Recorded in a studio in Mount Vernon, NY three months before pandemic arrived, the album comes with a cover photograph of the Statue of Liberty seen through mist and against clouds. In his sleeve note, Iyer writes that Uneasy was originally the title of a collaborative piece with the choreographer Karole Armitage in 2011, exploring “the instabilities that we then sensed beneath the surface of things… the emerging anxiety within American life. A decade later, as systems teeter and crumble, the word feels like a brutal understatement.”

My personal opinion is that despite his extraordinary and eclectic reserve of expertise he is one of the most accessible and tuneful of modern jazz pianists, playing, as described in this New Yorker profile with “a warmth and a clarity, like that of a singer who enunciates carefully.“

This is “Combat Breathing” from the Uneasy album, as performed in the studio by the Vijay Iyer trio.

Here is Iyer on the biological foundations of music, quite an illuminating, even revelatory, take on the subject.

If this music piques your interest, I would highly recommend the albums Accelerando, Break Stuff, Far from Over and Uneasy.

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