Accelerando (ACT Music)
Vijay Iyer Trio
Released February 2012
DownBeat Album of the Year Critics Poll
JazzTimes Album of the Year 2012
The Guardian Highest Rated Jazz Albums of All Time
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/browse/MPREb_hPWicEODIm9
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1dhbqRSCO88PQFIvBv5Rg8?si=lPya7hEwTRiKpDlgJfkUDQ
About:
Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer’s career has moved on an ever-accelerating arc over the past decade and a half, with the Indian-American artist earning a slew of international honors for his intrepid, multi-hued vision of 21st-century music. The latest chapter of this compelling story in contemporary jazz comes with the Vijay Iyer Trio’s Accelerando, an album driven by the visceral, universal, intoxicating experience of rhythm. To be released in March 2012 by the German independent label ACT Music + Vision, Accelerando sees Iyer and his telepathic trio mates – bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore – go both deep and wide. They light up material that ranges from a brace of bold Iyer originals and pieces by great jazz composers (Duke Ellington, Herbie Nichols, Henry Threadgill) to surprising interpretations of vintage and recent pop and funk tunes (Michael Jackson, Heatwave, Flying Lotus). Absorbing and infectious, this is jazz about not only the mind but the body.
With an advanced education in the hard sciences and his facility for complex music, Iyer could have been pegged as a “cerebral musician.” But, he insists, “I actually experience music on a visceral level, the way most people do. Dance is just a bodily way of listening to music – it’s a universal response. Jazz has always had some sort of dance impulse at its core. Bebop grew out of swing, which was a dance rhythm that became art music. I never want to lose that foundation of rhythmic communication in my work. That’s what Accelerando is concerned with, that physical reality of music. For me, music is action.”
Iyer has played with Memphis-bred bassist Stephan Crump since 1997 (when the pianist had first moved to New York City) and with Marcus Gilmore since 2003 (when the drummer, grandson of legendary jazz stickman Roy Haynes, was still attending New York’s LaGuardia High School). The overwhelming response to the trio’s 2009 album, Historicity, gave these musicians the opportunity to hone their group interaction in front of audiences around the world for two years. Iyer says: “We found more possibilities for spontaneous arrangement, textural and timbral extremes, and ensemble interplay. Our approach is less and less soloistic lately; it’s more about developing a collective energy and momentum. When you hear us now, you can tell that it’s us.”
As very contemporary musicians, Iyer and his trio mates have a wide purview when it comes to a group approach to rhythm. “The way we come to rhythm is inspired by Bud Powell and Max Roach, Ahmad Jamal, Ellington and Monk, but it is not limited to that,” he says. “There is the way James Brown approached it, and the way Jimi Hendrix, the Meters or Earth, Wind & Fire did it; there is the influence of Indian music, African music, Javanese gamelan. There is a whole world history of groove and pulse to draw on, and we do. When it comes to co-articulating a groove and thinking about the subtle dimensions of the beat, we aim to push and pull, to incorporate as many different ideas of orchestration, touch and dynamics as we can so that the rhythm breathes just like a body does.”
The range of material on Accelerando – from Ellington to Henry Threadgill to Michael Jackson to Iyer’s compositions – is dizzying, wonderfully so. Among Iyer’s original compositions, “Optimism” starts with a buoyant feel, but its crescendo “means that it builds way beyond anything hinted at by the opening material,” Iyer explains. “It erupts from the light to the visceral, and we have to push ourselves physically to achieve that.” The album’s title track was initially the final movement of a suite Iyer wrote for choreographer Karole Armitage that was performed in Central Park. “I’m interested in tempo as a structural element,” he says, “and this was an experiment to see if a constantly accelerating pulse could be the basis for dance. Luckily it worked. It was an amazing experience to write something for dancers and see it realized.”
One of the highlights of Accelerando is Iyer’s ingenious version of Threadgill’s “Little Pocket-Sized Demons.” The kaleidoscopic original version included two tubas, two guitars and a French horn. “It took a leap of imagination,” Iyer says. “The original has this carnival vibe – polyphonic and surreal. It was hard to express all that counterpoint with just six hands. We used arco bass to thicken up the sound and spread the beat to evoke the tubas. Thread came to a rehearsal and gave us pointers, which was so inspiring. Like Monk, Henry has this composer’s approach, but he is also someone, like Monk, who played in the church. You can hear that communicative power when he plays.” The soulful Ellington piece “The Village of the Virgins” comes from his 1970 ballet The River. Reducing his orchestral sound to the trio format “involved sleight of hand,” Iyer explains. “It both is and isn’t the original.” Herbie Nichols’ “Wildflower” is “a tune I really love,” Iyer says. “He was influenced by Duke and the stride pianists and by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. There is a lightness and elegance in spite of this harmonic darkness. It’s dissonant, but it makes you smile. It’s inspiring when someone reconciles the seemingly irreconcilable.” The album’s version of the Michael Jackson ballad “Human Nature” is a trio extension of Iyer’s solo piano arrangement heard on his 2009 album, Solo. “Interpreting a song like `Human Nature’ is about telling your own story, like Miles did not long after the original,” Iyer says. “That one or the Heatwave song or the Flying Lotus track were not obvious choices for a piano trio. But it’s good for us to reach beyond ourselves to different musical approaches and even beyond our instruments. It leads to discovery – and that’s the sound I really like.”
Track Listing:
1. Bode (Vijay Iyer) 2:20
2. Optimism (Vijay Iyer) 7:23
3. The Star of a Story (Rod Temperton) 5:46
4. Human Nature (John Bettis / Steve Porcaro) 9:39
5. Wildflower (Herbie Nichols) 4:10
6. Mmmhmm (Stephen Bruner / Steven Ellison) 4:33
7. Litle Pocket Size Demons (Henry Threadgill) 7:14
8. Lude (Vijay Iyer) 4:57
9. Accelerando (Vijay Iyer) 2:52
10. Actions Speak (Vijay Iyer) 5:38
11. The Village of the Virgins (Duke Ellington) 5:20
Personnel:
Vijay Iyer: piano
Stephan Crump: bass
Marcus Gilmore: drums
Recorded August 8 – 9, 2011 at Sear Sound, NYC
Produced by Vijay Iyer
Recording Engineer: Chris Allen
Mixed by Scotty Hard
Mastered by Mike Fossenkemper
Cover Art: “Mother as a Mountain”, 1985 by Anish Kapoor
Review:
Vijay Iyer is part of a venerable tradition that includes Anthony Braxton and George Lewis of musician-scholars in the creative music lineage. Visit his web site and you can find essays he’s written for Journal of Consciousness Studies and Music Perception. There are plenty of folks who swap those terms around the scholar-musicians hyphen but in Iyer’s case the starting point is the playing; theorizing comes out of direct experience. Accelerando may well help us understand Iyer’s theoretical work on temporality in improvised music, but is first and foremost a terrific trio recording. Iyer revives his version of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature,” which he debuted on his 2010 CD Solo, this time breaking up and reconfiguring the piece with his trio. The eclectic nature of the program is clearest, perhaps, in the sequence of covers that follows “Human Nature”: Herbie Nichols’ jumpy “Wildflower,” treated with a reverent bounce and spring-loaded soloing by Iyer, directly into “Mmmhmm,” a sweet melody with perky digitoid rhythms by electronica guru Flying Lotus, and the classic “Little Pocket Size Demons,” from the essential Henry Threadgill LP Too Much Sugar For A Dime, an appropriately devilish, driving piano motif kicking into one of the composer’s anthemic, shifting tunes. It’s an ingenious trip through genres, with a consistency of invention and interplay that keeps the through line clear. Iyer also adapts “The Star Of A Story” by Heatwave, which shows off the impressive cohesion nurtured by bassist Stephan Crump—wonderful, natural sound—and drummer Marcus Gilmore, who is as crisp as early Jon Christensen and as potent as Billy Higgins. Iyer’s compositions—five of them here—are Accelerando’s glue. The title track, written to accompany a dance performance, starts with an electronic drum part, gaining speed and steam. It’s a tack the leader sometimes takes: accrete sound in layers, building density to a peak. But he knows how to keep the whorls from putting a drag on momentum. You can hear an M-Base connection in the lean rhythmic complexity of “Actions Speak” and “Lude,” bass and drums fitting together in an extrapolated funk, amassing energy, then suddenly breaking down, dub-style. The program ends with a sly nod at Duke Ellington.
John Corbett (DownBeat)
