Vijay Iyer

Hello all,

I happened to see the Vijay Iyer Trio at Birdland a couple of weeks ago, and I wrote a review (posted below) of the show. I figured that since Tara did a presentation on him, it would be relevant to include my review in this blog. I hope you enjoy it:

Time Flies When You’re Experiencing It

Lee Konitz sat at the bar in a white linen jacket at Birdland on Saturday night. He wasn’t performing, just checking out the scene. It probably wasn’t a coincidence he came by the night the Vijay Iyer Trio took the stage.
Mr. Konitz—who played alto saxophone with Lennie Tristano in the 1950’s—developed his dry, distinctive sound at a time when Charlie Parker mimics were flourishing. He sat serenely sipping his drink, his back to the stage, as pianist Vijay Iyer reverentially—but not self-effacingly—pointed out him out to the audience. Mr. Konitz, 82, and Mr. Iyer, 39, are of different generations, but they both understand their respective traditions and know what to take from and add to them.
Mr. Iyer is a polymath: an elegant man with profound thoughts in his head and on the piano. He has incorporated math, poetry, history and multiculturalism into his music. He studied physics at Yale. He operates with a complicated sense of purpose while keeping his artistic output relatable.
His trio—with drummer Marcus Gilmore and bassist Stephan Crump—plays complicated music, without drawing too much attention to complication. This group represents a new, ecumenical way of doing the piano trio: with touches of funk and Broadway and post-bop and hip-hop in its sound.
And there’s a balance in its sound and style that lets you know this group wants to be understood. You might not know what the time signature is at every moment, but the music still lets you in, makes you feel comfortable.
On Saturday, Mr. Iyer was pounding out chords with both his hands in seven-eight time for one jumpy section of a song. It sounded as regular as four-four—a good thing.
Rhythm is important to Mr. Iyer. “When you hear music,” said Mr. Iyer in an interview, “the rhythm is the underpinning of the way you experience it. In a way, the melody and harmony are secondary to that because rhythm guides you through the experience of time, and that’s such a fundamental quality of human experience.”
At one point, in M.I.A.’s “Galang,” Mr. Gilmore—the grandson of Roy Haynes—laid down a funk beat on the hi-hat, snare and bass. Whenever it appeared this beat might slip into glibness, he unfolded it with a snare-hit or an empty space that melded into Mr. Crump’s cushiony bass lines.
In Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere.” Mr. Crump laid down a walking bass line. Mr. Gilmore put down a beat that lassoed the propulsion of Mr. Crump’s bass line and turned it on top of itself. The melody, which Mr. Iyer played, floated clearly and beautifully above the mesh. In the Andrew Hill song “Smokestack,” Mr. Iyer played a pensive solo introduction that sounded, at times, like Thelonious Monk—with hints of stride and dissonant chord voicings and off-the-beat one-note interjections.
And in a way, this trio is playing in a vein that extends from Monk himself. Monk may have been inscrutable, but his music wasn’t. He wrote some of the catchiest and wittiest melodies in jazz. And he worked very hard at them, despite their seeming simplicity. The Vijay Iyer Trio, above all, preserved the original feelings of the songs they covered, while adding their own formal rhythmic calculations.
At the end of “Somewhere,” Mr. Gilmore looked over at Mr. Iyer and they both began to laugh. Mr. Konitz, still at the bar, took a sip from his drink and smiled.