Break Stuff (ECM)
Vijay Iyer Trio
Released January 16, 2015
DownBeat Five-Star Review
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=EhyFappobkQ https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=z7bYcIeN-II
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5PBA6FITIETRwVymaaDquG?si=0zKGytt9RLKD2gFvgZIMaQ
About:
Break Stuff features Vijay Iyer’s long-running
and widely-acclaimed trio with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus
Gilmore, a band in existence for eleven years now. “We keep learning from each
other and from experiences and try to set challenges for ourselves so that
growth is part of the equation.” It’s a group whose musical language is
informed by more than the jazz piano trio tradition. While Iyer acknowledges
the influence of, for instance, Ahmad Jamal, Andrew Hill and Duke
Ellington’s Money Jungle album (with Charles Mingus and Max Roach)
upon his own trio aesthetics, he points out that his group has also been
inspired by “James Brown’s rhythm section, Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys, Miles
Davis’s rhythm section, Charlie Parker’s rhythm section, soul music from the
1970s, electronic music and hip-hop from very recent times…” The list goes on.
The piece “Hood” on the new recording is a tribute to Detroit minimal techno
producer and DJ Robert Hood. “He did all this really interesting music with
numerical patterning – different rhythms unfolding through each other, but
still in a very clear dance music framework, very textural and sound-oriented.
You hear the evolution of timbre. It became a point of reference for us, to see
if we could capture some of that spirit in a purely acoustic framework.”
As for the album title, “Break Stuff” is what transpires after formal elements
have been addressed. Vijay Iyer calls the break “a span of time in which to
act. It’s the basis for breakdowns, break-beats, and break dancing… it can be
the moment when everything comes to life.” A number of the pieces here are
breakdowns of other Iyer constructions. Some are from a Break
Stuff suite premiered at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, some derive
from Open City, a collaboration with Nigerian-born writer Teju Cole and
large ensemble. The trio energetically recasts almost everything it touches,
but on “Work”, Vijay pays a disciple’s faithful homage to his “number one hero
of all time”, Thelonious Monk. “There’s something very tactile about ‘Work’.
It’s like you’re putting your hands in the exact position that Monk put his
hands. What did it feel like to be that person and come up with figures like
that? Many Monk tunes are peculiar, but this one’s especially irregular. We
altered the form only slightly. I just added some blank spaces to reflect on
what’s going on in the song.”
“Countdown” reconsiders the classic Giant Steps era Coltrane tune
inside a rhythmic framework inspired by West African music and in particular by
the drumming of Brice Wassy, a formative influence for Marcus Gilmore. “I think
about John Coltrane every day,” says Iyer. “He’s such a towering figure who
showed us so much in such a short time. In some ways we are all always paying
tribute to him.”
“Blood Count”, the last piece of music written by Billy Strayhorn, is played
solo by Vijay. “There’s something very profound and emotionally overwhelming
about that piece, partly because you can hear Strayhorn contemplating his own
mortality. I’d been a big fan of the Duke Ellington album And His Mother
Called Him Bill, a posthumous tribute to Strayhorn, where Johnny Hodges does a
heart rending version of that song.”
“Mystery Woman”, originally part of the Break Stuff suite and sharing
a scalar figure with the title track, is driven by compound pulses which owe a
debt to the mathematics of South Indian drumming and a mridangam rhythm shown
to Iyer by Rajna Swaminathan. “Basically I tried to translate what she was
playing onto the piano, put notes to it and turned it into a piece.”
The three ‘bird pieces’ on this album – “Starlings”, “Geese”, “Wrens” are from
the Open City project, loosely based on Teju Cole’s novel: “This
sequence of passages is focussing on birds of New York, and it opens up themes
about migration, about immigration, about difference. These alternative
perspectives on the city, from inhabitants who aren’t listened to, generally,
become an interesting outline in the book.” As these recorded versions are
reductions from large ensemble work, “there is a lot of space in them, also
because they are somehow about flight and were meant to live with text. This
again becomes a ‘break’, an empty space in which things can happen. It has this
feeling of potential that I like, and it falls on the listener to complete it.”
“The logic of repurposing has always been part of what the trio does: we take
something that wasn’t meant for our format … and just shoehorn it in. And that
leads us somewhere that is new for us. The feeling of discovery gives it a
certain energy.”
Vijay Iyer, Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore have played together a great deal
over the last decade and more, but they’ve also maintained many other
activities in parallel.
“Marcus is sideman to the stars – playing with Chick Corea, Gonzalo Rubalcaba,
Steve Coleman, Flying Lotus, loads of people.” Gilmore has most recently been
heard in ECM contexts with the Mark Turner Quartet on Lathe of
Heaven and on David Virelles’ Mbókò. “And Stephan is very active in
collaborating with a great many people on the scene in New York. He works on
projects with his wife [singer-songwriter] Jen Chapin, and composes a lot for
his own groups. So when we regroup, something else has been in our ears. That
gives us fresh perspectives on the material and the dynamics we’ve established
among ourselves.”
Break Stuff is the third ECM release from Vijay Iyer. It follows the chamber
music recording Mutations and the film-and-music project Radhe
radhe: Rites of Holi.
Track Listing:
1. Starlings (Vijay Iyer) 3:52
2. Chorale (Vijay Iyer) 4:35
3. Diptych (Vijay Iyer) 6:47
4. Hood (Vijay Iyer) 6:10
5. Work (Thelonious Monk) 6:14
6. Taking Flight (Vijay Iyer) 7:15
7. Blood Count (Billy Strayhorn) 4:34
8. Break Stuff (Vijay Iyer) 5:26
9. Mystery Woman (Vijay Iyer) 6:21
10. Geese (Vijay Iyer) 6:38
11. Countdown (John Coltrane) 5:57
12. Wrens (Vijay Iyer) 6:47
Personnel:
Vijay Iyer: piano
Marcus Gilmore: drums
Stephan Crump: double bass
This album is dedicated to David Wessel, Amiri Baraka, and Y. Gopinathan
Recorded June 2014, at Avatar Studios, New York
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Engineer: James A. Farber*
Assistant Engineer: Akihiro Nishimura
Design: Sascha Kleis
Cover Photography by Juan Hitters
Review:
Vijay Iyer’s creative gifts are many, but more and more it seems his most striking trait centers on design expertise. The 43-year-old pianist may revel in the momentary wonder that’s born of jazz’s collaborative exchange, but when it comes time to present those achievements to an audience, he makes sure that every nuance is aligned for maximum impact. This tack was in play on the celebrated trio records Historicity and Accelerando, but it seems to truly define the action on Break Stuff. Positioning, flow, calibration, order—each is keenly considered here, and each helps make this the trio’s most compelling date so far. Balance is paramount. Iyer’s interests trigger a wealth of ideas, and from the trio’s rhythmic slants (one track conjures Robert Hood’s crackling techno beats) to the pianist’s keyboard touch (Andrew Hill’s sense of stealth gets a nod at various points), the larger picture is always kept in view. The program’s three “bird” tunes (“Starlings,” “Geese” and “Wrens”—four if you count “Taking Flight”) are fragments from a larger work Iyer built with novelist Teju Cole, and they offer discrete approaches for the band’s investigations. Moving from a welcoming reverie that foreshadows the album’s sweep to a textural meditation both luminous and abstruse to a bittersweet adieu that brims with allure, Break Stuff’s emotional arc is always being bolstered. Critical to this album’s success is the fact that the Vijay Iyer Trio is, at its core, a working band. The music’s particulars are executed wonderfully by bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Mood swings—and there are several—build unity, not disarray. The best example is the jump from the machine-like repetition of “Hood” to the sage wobble of Thelonious Monk’s “Work”—the dead serious meets the utterly whimsical. Likewise, the segue from the pensive solo version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count” to the album’s frenzied title cut reveals the trio’s natural latitude. There’s big mojo in those transitions, and ultimately they underscore Iyer’s purpose. He wants his music to go everywhere.
Jim Macnie (DownBeat)
