Defiant Life (ECM)
Vijay Iyer / Wadada Leo Smith
Released March 21, 2025
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This recording session was conditioned by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.
Vijay Iyer
Defiant Life, Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith’s second duo recording for ECM after 2016’s A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke, is a profound meditation on the human condition, reflecting both the hardships and acts of resilience it entails. But at the same time, it also proves a testament to the duo’s unique artistic relationship and the boundless forms of musical expression it yields. For when Vijay and Wadada meet in music, they simultaneously connect on multiple levels:
“Our time together, from the moment we meet right until the moment we play, is most often spent talking about the state of the world, studying histories of liberation, and sharing readings and historical references, as a means of grounding ourselves purposefully in our present.” In his liner note, Iyer has transcribed such a conversation between himself and Smith at length, revealing a closer glimpse at the individual themes that inspired the album and the term “defiant” in particular.
Two of the songs on the album are dedicated to significant figures from the more and slightly less recent past – Wadada’s “Floating River Requiem” to the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba, assassinated in 1961, and Vijay’s “Kite” to Palestinian writer and poet Refaat Alareer, killed in Gaza in 2023. It is within this framework of thought and reflection that their music speaks without hesitation.
From darkness, the “Prelude: Survival” comes creeping into existence, drawing the listener in to its gloomy presence. In what feels like pitch black, Wadada and Vijay sparsely add colour, filling the canvas with associative sounds rather than explicit images. Then, bristling with an iridescent glow that’s emphasised by high-pitched organ-like electronic sweeps and swells (belonging to Vijay’s instrumental set-up alongside piano and Fender Rhodes), “Sumud” presents the striking idiosyncrasy with which the trumpeter and pianist interact as they untangle a deep aural landscape. A “cosmic” quality comes to mind when confronted with the pulsations and sound tapestries that unfold in this music, recalling their last duo effort in title.
“We work from our individual languages and materials,” notes Vijay in his extensive liner note, as well as “our methods of aural attunement, and what I would call a shared aesthetic of necessity”. A necessity both urgent and peaceful but sometimes also violent, ominously stated in “Sumud”, then endowed with a celebratory aura throughout the “Floating River Requiem”, still doubtful but with silver linings on “Elegy: The Pilgrimage” and devastatingly beautiful in the concluding “Procession: Defiant Life”.
Prompted on his rapport to Vijay and their shared ability to simply make music ‘appear’, Wadada remarks that “one of the things that’s so unique is our inability to allow ourselves to fix stuff [i.e., fully predetermine the music]. I think that to fix stuff we’d need a different kind of cap on our heads. And when we move into our performances, there’s a good level of focus that’s already there just because we’ve been thinking about it, but not fixing it, over a span of time. When we come into the area to actually build the pieces, we’re still open to those vast moments of inspiration. I think it’s pretty extraordinary to step into allowing it to move into us and out of us, allowing that present moment to have its appearance.”
Writing about the duo in the context of their last effort, The Washington Post noted how “Smith’s and Iyer’s playing interlaces beautifully. They share a sense of pacing, suspense and thoughtful choices of notes and phrases.” Iyer and Wadada’s shared love for detail and patience in constructing careful sentences and exchanges turn each developed structure into a sound-sphere of its own, and on Vijay’s “Kite” this manifests in a deeply lyrical and soothing reciprocity between Fender Rhodes and trumpet.
If Defiant Life is a contemplation on life as such, then it is its sense of wonder that comes to full expression here.
Track Listing:
1. Prelude: Survival (Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith) 03:25
2. Sumud (Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith) 12:19
3. Floating River Requiem (for Patrice Lumumba) (Wadada Leo Smith) 06:28
4. Elegy: The Pilgrimage (Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith) 12:45
5. Kite (for Refaat Alareer) (Vijay Iyer) 08:22
6. Procession: Defiant Life (Vijay Iyer, Wadada Leo Smith) 10:21
Personnel:
Wadada Leo Smith: trumpet
Vijay Iyer: piano, Fender Rhodes, electronics
Recorded July 2024, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, by Stefano Amerio
Photography by Caterina di Perri
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Review:
As passionate as each man is intelligent, both pianist/composer Vijay Iyer and trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith also manifest healthy egos. Accordingly, collaborations like Defiant Life require each man to contour his skills to complement the other sufficiently. Their shared humility is intrinsic to solidifying the inspiring bond that arises from the two not only playing, but composing together.
In the end, the generosity of spirit maximizes the potency of the art these men create on this second of their collaborations (the first was A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke (ECM Records, 2016).
“Prelude: Survival” is an opening cut that unfolds with such pervasive, mysterious grace, it sets the tone for the entire album. On “Sumud,” Iyer and Smith take their time The deliberate pace they maintain belies the relatively speedy recording of these half-dozen tracks in two days of single takes in Switzerland during July of 2024.
These musicians proceed through this number as if by their own sense of time. Iyer’s use of the Fender Rhodes electric piano accentuates the dreamlike aura conjured in combination with Smith’s slowly wafting horn lines. The juxtaposition of those tracks, like the rest of the program’s sequencing, is as wise as the placing of “Floating River Requiem (for Patrice Lumumba.)” Both acoustic piano and horn exude a great melancholy on this very next cut, but it is a painful sensation in the process of healing as the music evolves.
Similarly, the title image of “Kite” provides the duo a goal to which they can aspire. “Elegy: The Pilgrimage” is not much less melancholy than its surroundings, but it is in keeping with the underlying theme of this project—’faith in human possibility.’ Accordingly, there are glimpses of light, not only in the ringing of the higher piano notes over the steadfast low tones, but also from the trumpet lines radiating upward.
The hints of resolution there are as deceptive as those of Iyer and Smith’s shared resolve over the entire course of Defiant Life. Yet those threads are indeed present, if not exactly manifest, signifying a restraint that, fortunately, precludes even a smattering of anything heavy-handed. On the contrary, each successive cut is as absorbing as the last, if not more so.
To be sure, this second pairing of the souls and the intellects of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith is picturesque music from start to finish. Fittingly, the quiet but purposeful conclusion that is “Procession: Defiant Life” directly references the staunch attitude at the heart of the album’s title and, by extension, the full extent to which that mindset permeates the music.
Doug Collette (All About Jazz)
