Saturday, February 25, 2006  

Vijay Iyer & Rudresh Mahanthappa

Vijay Iyer: At Length and in Depth

Washington Post, Saturday, February 25, 2006; Page C07

A woman sitting at the table next to me looked shocked when pianist Vijay Iyer announced that the second song would run "45 to 50 minutes." The Kennedy Center's KC Jazz Club series normally features mainstream instrumental and vocal jazz, not the experimental music Iyer brought to the Terrace Gallery on Thursday.

The pianist and his group -- alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore -- had just finished playing a long version of "Trident" when Iyer broke the news about tune No. 2: The almost hour-long follow-up was a new seven-part suite, "Tragicomic." The one lady notwithstanding, a packed house seemed happy that Iyer followed his muse.

Iyer received an interdisciplinary PhD in music and cognitive science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998, turning in a dissertation titled "Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics." No surprise then that the pianist's music is rigorously intellectual. His compositions are often constructed around rhythmic cells that shift, condense and expand in unexpected ways, informed as much by South Indian Carnatic music as African and African American forms, including hip-hop. Iyer's harmonic sense usually supports his rhythmic urges, not the other way around, and he has mediated his influences to come up with a style that touches on the work of Steve Coleman and Cecil Taylor, yet is decidedly his own.

All those elements were displayed during the moody and floating "Tragicomic," whose individual sections were linked by group improvisations. Iyer and Mahanthappa smoothly interacted on the melody instruments, answering and complementing each other's lines in a way that comes from having played together for a decade. But the bulk of the heavy lifting seemed to rest on the shoulders of Crump and especially Gilmore -- grandson of bebop-drumming legend Roy Haynes. While Gilmore sounds nothing like his granddad (at least in this context), his ability to navigate Iyer's difficult, rhythmically jagged compositions showed that he has his relative's great musical sense. --Christopher Porter
--
Iyer MP3s right here.
Mahanthappa MP3s right here and here.

Posted by CP | Link |

---