The pianist Vijay Iyer composed the title observe to his new trio album, “Uneasy,” again in 2011 for a collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. It was nonetheless a number of years earlier than the 2016 presidential marketing campaign, when so lots of the nation’s outdated wounds and resentments would burst onto public show, however he already felt some undercurrents stirring.
“It was 10 years after 9/11, and having been in New York for all that time, any kind of moment of relative peace felt precarious,” he mentioned just lately by telephone from his residence in Harlem. “I’m speaking not just about the attack itself, but all of the aftermath: the blowback, the backlash against communities of color, the atmosphere of surveillance and fear.”
“It was the Obama years, so there was a certain kind of exuberance about possibility, and there was also a kind of unease,” he added. “It was a time of the Affordable Care Act and of drone warfare, gay marriage and mass deportations.” With digital surveillance turning into a truth of life, he was struck, as an American-born artist of South Asian descent, by the sensation “that this thing Americans love to call freedom is not what it appears to be,” he mentioned.
Another decade has now handed, and the model of “Uneasy” that seems on the album, out Friday, appears to be carrying a mixture of heavy thought and wealthy optimism — a typical mix in Iyer’s work. He’s joined by two barely youthful musicians with sizable followings of their very own, Linda May Han Oh on bass and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. As improvisers, they’ve bought a number of issues in widespread: the flexibility to play with a lithe vary of movement and resplendent readability, within the type of well-schooled jazz musicians, whereas stoking a form of writhing inner stress. Crucial to that steadiness is their capability to attach with one another in actual time, virtually telepathically.
The title observe unfolds ominously over greater than 9 minutes, beginning off in a darkish cloud of doubt, with Iyer’s low piano repetitions hovering round a sluggish, odd-metered sample. Later, the group upshifts — abruptly, however with out completely dropping its cohesion — right into a faster, charging part with an entirely totally different rhythm, Iyer’s proper hand darting in evasive gestures whereas Oh holds down the scaffolding and Sorey provides motion and sizzle.
The trio first got here collectively in 2014 on the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, the place Iyer, now 49, and Sorey, now 40, function creative administrators. The two have been collaborating since 2001, when Sorey wowed Iyer at a rehearsal. During a break, Sorey began casually noodling on the piano, and Iyer quickly realized he was taking part in an excerpt from Iyer’s most up-to-date album. It wasn’t even from the music’s melody; it was a part of Iyer’s improvised solo on the recording.
“He was just this 20-year-old,” Iyer mentioned. “So I already knew, like, oh, this is a bona fide genius right here.” (Indeed, within the years since, each Iyer and Sorey — who’s now as well known for his long-form compositions as he’s for his drumming — have been awarded MacArthur “genius” grants. They have additionally each grow to be professors of music at Ivy League establishments.) Sorey joined the collective trio Fieldwork, with Iyer and the saxophonist Steve Lehman, and their partnership blossomed.
In 2013, Iyer took over as creative director at Banff — a artistic enclave in Alberta, Canada, the place college students collect yearly for a three-week improvisation workshop — and he discovered himself inviting Sorey to show alongside him annually. Eventually, he formalized their relationship as a partnership, welcoming Sorey as his co-director.
Oh, 36, had collaborated right here and there with each Iyer and Sorey earlier than additionally turning into a daily teacher at Banff. She mentioned she appreciated the fluidity of the divide between instructors and college students that the workshop fostered. Speaking by telephone from her residence in Australia, Oh recalled the poetry of how Iyer inspired college students to consider the notes they performed on their instrument in relationship to the vary of their very own talking voice.
Playing Iyer’s compositions, she mentioned, will be like understanding “beautiful little puzzles,” and she or he referred to as Sorey a really perfect teammate.
“It’s a lot of fun to tread that line between what is inbuilt in that structure and what we can sort of dialogue on, and have a conversation over that,” she mentioned. Sorey is “so thorough with the inbuilt things in the composition, but he’ll create these sparks that you really don’t expect,” she continued. “It’s just constant energetic dialogue.”
Oh also has a knack for establishing sturdy foundations with out sinking right into a sample. Playing collectively, she mentioned, “We can be reactive and proactive at the same time.”
Iyer was fast to emphasise the significance of Sorey’s supportive type, calling it exceptional for an artist who has so much to say on his personal phrases. He described beginning to nod towards one music in the course of taking part in one other, perhaps simply flicking at a phrase, after which feeling Sorey instantly dive into it, anticipating his subsequent transfer, as if to catch him. “Because he hears everything, it means we can just do anything,” Iyer mentioned.
In an interview, Sorey mentioned he at all times felt “most at home in situations where it’s only three players,” describing this specific trio as “basically one organism.”
“That feeling of intimacy leads to a certain type of trust where there can be no wrong done,” he mentioned.
The group entered the studio in 2019, however Iyer didn’t cull the tracks they’d recorded into an album till the next yr, when the identify “Uneasy” felt much more painfully apt. “It was under the conditions of the hell that was 2020: tragedy and loss and the political battle of the century,” he mentioned. “Then, on the other hand, an incredible uprising of, particularly, young people fighting for justice for Black people, and for everybody. That is imagining a future.”
Some of the music titles converse to this theme: “Children of Flint” refers back to the water disaster in Michigan; “Combat Breathing” was composed in 2014 in solidarity with Black Lives Matter activists, and introduced as a part of a “die-in” on the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But so do the sounds themselves — tetchy and bristling, whereas evincing an inspiring degree of unity and compassion.
When it got here time to decide on the quilt artwork for the album, Iyer rejected almost a dozen recommendations from Manfred Eicher, the top of ECM Records, earlier than deciding on a black-and-white double-exposure by the Korean photographer Woong Chul An. It reveals the Statue of Liberty, blurry and grey, seemingly caught between the clouds within the sky and one other puff of clouds hanging simply above the ocean.
“When I saw it, I didn’t know how to feel about it,” Iyer mentioned. “For one thing, what does it mean for me to have this on my album cover? What does this even represent?”
Ultimately, he was drawn to the hazy ambivalence that the picture conveys. “This one is a distant image of the Statue of Liberty, not as this looming prideful symbol but as almost what looks like this rejected figure,” he mentioned, pointing to the truth that France had provided the statue to the United States in celebration of the tip of chattel slavery right here.
“As this symbol tends to represent freedom in America, it is also tied to abolition,” he mentioned. “So the fact that those concepts are bound is, I felt, important to highlight. They seemed to sit in an uneasy relation to one another, freedom and its opposite.”
