The music that pours out of pianist Vijay Iyer often feels perpetually coiled.
There is an interior density to his sound and style that confers he is a dynamo, but what he can withhold serves as a vital complement to what he unfurls. Even in the midst of his most effusive bursts or serpentine passages, nothing seems ornate.
The 52-year-old son of Indian Tamil immigrants to the United States, Iyer has amassed a resume that is ridiculously impressive. Ivy League degrees in mathematics and physics, a masters in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, then a Ph.D. program he assembled himself at Berkeley on technology and the arts, focusing on music cognition.
Then the music recordings.
Iyer’s initial albums blended jazz and some of his classical training with his Indian musical heritage. As he evolved, his renown as a composer has prompted commissions from classical ensembles and multidisciplinary projects in film, dance and spoken word. But the jazz realm of twining composition and improvisation is rightfully his most celebrated métier.
Between 2012 and 2018, he was voted Jazz Artist of the Year four times in the Downbeat magazine international critics’ polls. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellow “genius grant” in 2013 and a year later received a lifetime appointment to teach at Harvard in the departments of Music and African American Studies.
I have seen Iyer perform many times, most frequently at the Walker Art Center, but was especially dazzled by his show at the Detroit Jazz Festival over Labor Day weekend in 2022. The nearly hour-long set was a continuous swirl or recognizable songs and daring spontaneous interplay, melting the distinctions both within and between set compositions. The trio format has generally fostered his most memorable performances and recordings, and his launching pad at the festival were compositions from the album “Uneasy,” recorded in 2019 with bassist Linda May Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey (replaced by Jeremy Dutton in Detroit) and released after a COVID-related delay in April 2021.
Iyer was scheduled to play in Minneapolis at the Dakota just a couple of months later, in November 2022, again in a trio with Dutton but with Matt Brewer replacing Oh on the contrabass. In a late October phone interview prepping for a feature preview of that show he replied to my raves about the Detroit gig with an acknowledgment of his growth.
“I think over the years the trio consciousness has evolved into this very dynamic dance where I don’t plan the sets; we just have the repertoire and manage these portals from one thing to the next,” said Iyer. “I don’t even have to be looking at anybody, just listening as carefully as I can and tracking the energy. That determines the decisions we make about when and where we should go.”
Not long after we’d talked, Iyer contracted COVID, forcing the postponement of the Dakota show for more than a year – until tonight. In the interim, Iyer came to the Walker with a very different trio – with vocalist Arooj Aftab and Shahzad Ismaily on bass and various electronics. As with their recently released album, “Love in Exile,” their Walker show was an ethereal, experimental excursion into live composition.
More to the point, Iyer is set to release his second trio album with Oh and Sorey on Feb. 2. Entitled, “Compassion,” its dozen compositions – including nine Iyer originals – will certainly be among the swirling repertoire Iyer will invoke alongside Dutton on drums and another longtime Iyer cohort, Harish Raghavan, on bass.
“Compassion” has a spiritual hue, cast by its frequent homages to those now deceased, who inspire compassion. A cover version of Stevie Wonder’s ballad “Overjoyed,” arose out of Iyer being loaned a piano that once belonged to the late Chick Corea, who played the song on the same instrument during his final livestream before succumbing to cancer. Iyer calls his version, “a celebratory variation, as if refracted by the piano’s aura.”
Elsewhere, “Arch” is dedicated to the South African archbishop and anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu, who passed in December 2021. Three other Iyer songs are taken from “Tempest,” written for a project dedicated to victims of the pandemic that premiered in Brooklyn in 2021. “Prelude: Orison” takes its theme from the Iyer composition, “For My Father,” dedicated to his dad, who he describes as “the most compassionate man I have ever known.” The song, “It Goes,” originally was set to verses that imagined Emmett Till still among us at age 82 rather than the victim of a racist murder in Mississippi at age 14.
During another phone call with Iyer last week, I mentioned how frequently death shadows the new album’s inspiration.
“Yeah,” he replied, and paused. “Maybe the threshold of the living and the dead is somehow closer to us and a conversation across that threshold is made a little more explicitly. Certainly over the last four years the proximity of death has become more evident and operative in our lives.
“Also, this music we call ‘jazz’ has always had a reverence for what is called ‘The Tradition.’ It is a shared language, an inheritance, I guess. In the creative act of covering a song by somebody, you are thinking of them in a way that transcends life, that is more immortal, you know?”
Later on in the conversation, Iyer spoke about the final track on “Compassion,” a cover of the John Stubblefield composition, “Free Spirits,” which inspired Iyer via the cover version by the late pianist Mary Lou Williams. At the end of “Free Spirits,” the trio suddenly shifts into a refrain from “Drummer’s Songs,” by another deceased female pianist and Iyer mentor, Geri Allen. The trio had already covered “Drummer’s Songs” on the “Uneasy” album.
“The last track is an example of how it occasionally felt like something else was taking over,” during the recording process, Iyer said. “It’s this homage to Mary Lou Williams through the Stubblefield piece, and then that fragment of Geri’s piece; the way we ended up engaging it was a ritual space – empty and yet full. You know – and I almost kept this on the record – when we were finished, Tyshawn (yelled) ‘Hell yes!’ It was a feeling we all had, to inhabit a space that was inherited and allow ourselves the freedom to move in it.”
The first time I ever spoke with Iyer, back in 2012, before he performed two full nights of music at the Walker with six different musical configurations, he spoke about wanting to create an “arc of experience” during the course of a live performance. More than a decade later, he repeated the same desire with slightly different phrases, but the realization of that goal has crystallized and become much more apparent.
“When you have a continuous arc, it has more of a cinematic sprawl to it and people can engage it whenever and however they want. I think music sounds best when it is in motion, when we are alive to it without habits,” Iyer said. In that respect, “the repertoire becomes an occasion for this process, which is about discovery and connection”
Iyer noted other elements that likewise might tweak the way the music is presented at the Dakota. He has recently begun working on a project involving the rugged music of the late pianist Andrew Hill, who he says, “is up there with (Thelonious) Monk as a direct impact on me as a player, as a composer and just my whole outlook on music. So it is possible we might bring in one or two of his pieces.”
There are also geographical connections. “I grew up with Prince; he is one of my all-time heroes so any time I go to Minneapolis I think of that. Also of close collaborators (pianist) Craig Taborn and (percussionist) Douglas Ewart. So this is more than a ‘drop by” gig.
In the intimate confines of the Dakota, no less. Buttressed by a rhythm section that has been groomed via experience to be both intuitive and telepathic, Iyer will be coiled, spring-loaded for the arc of experience.
Vijay Iyer Trio feat. Harish Raghavan & Jeremy Dutton, Friday, Jan. 19 7 p.m. Tickets are $30-$40. More information here.
