Indian-American pianist and composer Vijay Iyer’s three decades of accolades took off when, as a polymathic twentysomething, he was a California physics PhD student – at which point a sideline in classical music training and self-taught jazz piano took him into another world. Physics has always seemed to square with Iyer’s sharp-focused yet poetic musical muse – precisely analytical yet conceptually wide open, searching for fundamentals that can bend to anything from the psychology of music-making, to contemporary-classical composing, to musicology and audiovisual art.
Iyer observes that this trio with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey developed its intuitive real-time exchanges “onstage, out in the world, in spaces of community and encounter” – the title representing qualities of openness and receptivity essential to live collective improvisation, and to living.
The title piece and opener introduces the band like wraiths forming from mist, in quiet bell and gong-like sounds, and soft murmurs from piano and bass. Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace. Maelstrom and Tempest are similarly full-on, the first a rolling groove over a punchy backbeat, the second a jaggedly lyrical melody over a snaking Iyer left hand.
Reflective pieces intersperse with these sprints – bassist Linda May Han Oh is characteristically light-stepping and quick thinking on the spacey Panegyric and Where I Am. The covers Nonaah (from Roscoe Mitchell) and Free Spirits/Drummer’s Song (John Stubblefield/Geri Allen) draw distinctively different lyrical imaginations on to the palette, and Iyer’s capricious Ghostrumental turns a lilting theme into a trigger for storming improv from all three participants.
Also out this month
A radically different but thrilling piano threesome is Japanese pianist/composer Satoko Fujii’s new Tokyo Trio on Jet Black (Libra Records) – bubbling with tidal piano cascades, knotty rhythms and delicate improv dialogues, always zinging with Fujii’s knife-edge transitions from hurtling sound-streams to impishly agile melody. Two great European saxophonists – the UK’s John Surman and France’s Emile Parisien, lead the former’s Words Unspoken (ECM) and Parisien’s Let Them Cook (ACT). Surman’s quartet with effects-guitarist Rob Luft, vibraphonist Rob Waring and ethereal percussionist Thomas Strønen frame his darkly murmuring baritone sax and bass clarinet and poignantly airborne soprano sound on 10 mostly low-key but spaciously lyrical originals. Let Them Cook is also subtly electronic, but buzzing with ducking-and-diving grooves, sinister marches, fast free melody over percussion thrashes, and exhilaratingly scalding free-bop sax playing over racing jazz grooves.
