Historicity (ACT Music)
Vijay Iyer Trio
Released August 28, 2009
Grammy Nominee for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group 2011
JazzTimes Top 10 Albums of 2009
Top 10 NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll 2009
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nbhlFbNGu11Sr2GxtKjqOeErG0n0Tl7hs
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/3I3uK5mo0uvj4TnSCxS2zk?si=RbZAz8gyQZq5pjficOX-DQ&dl_branch=1
About:
What does jazz have to do with mathematics? More than one might think, says Vijay Iyer: “Music contains a lot of abstract thought and concepts like rhythm, chords and structures. It deals with numbers and quantities, which is what mathematics does. There was a time when mathematics was associated with traditions that did not differentiate between spirit and intellect, and that is exactly what music is for me. For me it’s all about letting rational structures become intuitive.” The American pianist with Indian roots knows what he is talking about: before becoming a musician he studied mathematics and physics at Yale and UC Berkeley. Only after saxophonist Steve Coleman offered him the position of pianist in his band in the mid 1990s, did Iyer decide to devote himself completely to music.
Since then, thanks to his intelligence and highly original creativity, the 37 year-old who studied violin and taught himself piano has had an impressive career that has made him one of the key figures in the contemporary American jazz scene. Upon arriving in New York a decade ago he quickly accumulated acclaim with his own formations, while also collaborating with some of today’s most innovative artists, such as Amiri Baraka, Butch Morris, Roscoe Mitchell, and underground hip hop artist Mike Ladd. Iyer achieved international fame through years of collaborations with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, whom he met through Coleman, and who, like himself, is a first-generation American born of Indian parents. No fewer than twelve well-received albums have been recorded under his name thus far, and for several years now he has been the winner of numerous critic’s polls (Iyer was twice voted the #1 Rising Star Jazz Artist and #1 Rising Star Composer in the Downbeat Magazine International Critics’ Poll) and remarkable worldwide acclaim. Now the pianist has recorded his first CD exclusively for ACT. With Historicity, accompanied by Stephan Crump on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums, he spectacularly redefines the classic notion of the piano trio.
Iyer’s examination of the concept of historicity is the album’s center of focus. It’s about “being placed in the stream of history,” he explains in the liner notes. “Without a doubt, it’s the past that’s setting us in motion.” On Historicity, the pianist travels full circle from covers such as “Galang”, by global hip-hop star M.I.A, to Stevie Wonder’s “Big Brother”, back to his own very early pieces (“Trident” and “Sentiment”). Not least due to the fact that the trio almost sounds like a single person, associations here succeed as never heard before. Or as Iyer himself put it: “Music, it seems, also connects — carrying us smoothly across the tumult of experience, like water over rocks.”
On Historicity, Iyer masterfully takes themes that have been occupying him throughout his career to new limits. One of these – catchword mathematics – is working with sounds that are infused with ciphers, symbols and codes. From the very outset, the first and title track bristles with mind boggling changes in rhythm and tempo, modal and serial sequences, and all manner of encryptions. Yet with Iyer this never sounds over-experimental; it retains full power and is listenable throughout. An excellent example is the tremendous, at once lyrical and abstract version of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s “Somewhere” from the musical “West Side Story”.
The appearance of “West Side Story” which, put in modern terms, deals with the fate of immigrants, is surely not a coincidence. The quest for his own cultural identity and role in jazz, for familial roots and “American-ness”, is another big theme in Iyer’s work – one that led him early on to clear positions that extend beyond music. His last album, Tragicomic can be seen as a commentary on America’s position at the end of the Bush administration. Historicity can also be seen as such a more up-to-the-minute commentary, appropriately more optimistic and future oriented. Iyer’s work has always been steeped in a deep respect for the African-American blues- and jazz tradition (it isn’t hard to recognize Thelonious Monk’s influence in Iyer’s keyboard technique and sense of melody, or the progressive developments of Andrew Hill, who also appears as a composer on Historicity’s “Smoke Stack”); more uniquely his own however, is the alliance of contemporary jazz with the harmonic and rhythmically highly complex music of southern India. The incredible pull that this alliance can create, combined further with influences from contemporary hip hop and rock, is more than evident in the edgy and powerful “Galang”. Iyer and his colleagues deliver a thunderingly percussive take on M.I.A.’s groundbreaking hit, using grand piano, bass, and drums to evoke tablas, synthesizers, and drum machines.
Track Listing:
1. Historicity (Vijay Iyer) 7:50
2. Somewhere (Leonard Bernstein / Stephen Sondheim) 6:57
3. Galang [Trio Riot Version] (Maya Arulpragasam / Justine Frischmann / Steve Mackey / Ross Orton) 2:40
4. Helix (Vijay Iyer) 4:00
5. Smoke Stack (Andrew Hill) 8:09
6. Big Brother (Stevie Wonder) 4:47
7. Dogon A.D. (Julius Hemphill) 9:19
8. Mystic Brew (Ronnie Foster) 4:56
9. Trident: 2010 (Vijay Iyer) 9:09
10. Segment for Sentiment #2 (Vijay Iyer) 4:03
Personnel:
Vijay Iyer: piano
Stephan Crump: bass
Marcus Gilmore: drums
Recorded November 3, 2008 & March 31, 2009, at Systems Two, Brooklyn, NY, by Joe Marciano
Assistant Engineer: Max Ross
Mixed by Scotty Hard
Mastered by Mike Fossenkemper
Produced by Vijay Iyer
Review:
Here pianist Vijay Iyer, along with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore, honors what Iyer’s notes call “pre-existing works” by artists including Stevie Wonder, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, M.I.A., Julius Hemphill and Andrew Hill. Iyer also includes two pieces based on his own previously recorded work (“Trident: 2010” and “Segment for Sentiment #2”), as if to challenge himself to re-imagine his own ideas with the same relentless rigor that he applies to the work of others. (A pair of newly minted Iyer originals, “Historicity” and “Helix,” round out the set.)
The inclusion of the Hill composition (“Smoke Stack”) is especially appropriate, because Hill’s influence on Iyer’s playing is profound. Like Hill, Iyer often uses his two hands as dual rhythm instruments, laying down fiercely splayed chords and single-note sparks in patterns that nudge, swirl, dance and scamper against and between each other, creating daunting melodic and rhythmic contours along the way.
Iyer’s reading of the Bernstein/Sondheim classic “Somewhere” discards the aching pathos of the original in favor of a teeming, dark-hued exercise in tonal and melodic coloration. In his hands, M.I.A.’s “Galang” is shot through with piercing stabs and stuttering, wide-finger chordal patterns that intensify the mood of dissociation and dread. Iyer’s trio recasts Stevie Wonder’s “Big Brother” as a complex three-way interplay among instruments that function simultaneously as rhythmic and melodic voices. Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew” is set to a stately martial cadence that Iyer fractures and recasts with his alternately thrusting, flowing and roiling lines.
Iyer’s own works, meanwhile, are rife with the timbral, harmonic, rhythmic and melodic complexities that have become his trademark. His dual percussive/melodic keyboard voices create patterns so dense that sometimes one fears he’ll get lost in them. In the end, however, those patterns reveal themselves to be, not cul-de-sacs or sonic scribbles, but runelike markers that reveal the possibility of new forms and new beauty.
David Whiteis (JazzTimes)
