Making art in times of suffering is never easy. Nor should it be, says Vijay Iyer, the American composer-pianist internationally lauded as one of the finest music makers of his generation. “That tension shapes the creative process at every stage,” he says in his warm, considered way. “Its counterpart, the response to its call, is the rejuvenating feeling of making music with, for and among people.”
Collaboration and exploration are at the heart of Iyer’s important, wide-ranging oeuvre. There have been compositions for big bands and classical ensembles; for orchestras and operas, film and ballet scores; for strings and percussion, solo violin and a mallet quartet. His work as a bandleader, most often for trios, has birthed eight albums for the ECM label. 2021’s “Uneasy,” the first disc to platform his trio with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, had critics in raptures. “It’s as if this band wants to seduce and discomfit you, stripping you of everything but the ability to think for yourself,” opined the New York Times.
That same sense of clarity and liberation, that same purposeness and generosity of spirit, is woven throughout “Compassion,” the trio’s second album together. Produced by Iyer and ECM’s Manfred Eicher and again recorded at Oktaven Audio outside New York City, it’s a work whose 12 diverse tracks – nine of them written by Iyer – also traverse bold new territory, creating shapes and space at the intersection of blues, classical, soul and free jazz with a virtuosic flair all the more remarkable for its audacity.
It helps, perhaps, that the members of this state-of-the-art trio have longtime connections: New Jersey native and erstwhile composer, educator and bandleader Sorey has previously lent his impressionistic playing, his astonishing sound instrument, to the likes of Iyer’s 2003 album “Blood Sutra” and his 2017 ECM recording “Far From Over.” But this trio marks a career highlight: “These two musicians have such a welcome sense of form, such a strong sense of being,” Sorey has said.
The Malaysian-born, Western Australia-raised Oh, an Associate Professor at the Berklee College of Music, has taught alongside Iyer and Sorey at the International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music at Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, where – from 2017 to 2021 – the two men were co-artistic directors.
“There’s a sense of resourcefulness in the music I play, especially when I’m improvising,” says Oh, who has worked with trumpeter Dave Douglas, saxophonist Joe Lovano and Grammy-winning guitarist Pat Metheny, with whom she tours the world. She has released six albums as leader, each with a fresh approach and line-up. “You have to be ready for what’s coming, and that flexibility transfers into other areas of your life.”
“I’ve been lucky to have had terrific mentors, peers and bandleaders. Like [jazz pianist and composer] Geri Allen, who never told me, ‘You should try out for this’ but would instead ask ‘Will it empower you?'”
“Compassion’s” ebullient version of John Stubblefield’s “Free Spirits” honours Allen with a passage from her composition ‘Drummer’s Song’, which the trio recorded in full on “Uneasy,” and which felt right, in the moment, to reference again.
“We developed this music onstage, out in the world, in spaces of community and encounter,” says Iyer, who holds degrees in maths and physics from Yale University, a doctorate in music cognition from University of California, is a Harvard professor (as is Sorey) and the recipient of awards including the MacArthur ‘genius grant’ Fellowship (as is Sorey). His penchant for free form innovation in public forums including The Kitchen, one of New York City’s oldest non-profit multi-disciplinary spaces, is the stuff of jazz legend. He says he’s grown used to people applauding moments when the musicians hear – really hear – each other.
“Vijay likes to put people together to play his music,” says vocalist Arooj Aftab, who in 2018 came together with Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily to perform improvisational music as Love in Exile, a trio whose eponymous album – a shadowy soundworld textured by electronics and Aftab’s mentholated voice – was nominated for Best Alt-Jazz album at this year’s Grammys. “We listened to each other and led each other down paths without getting lost, which is a rare quality to find in musician friends.”
In the same way that “Love in Exile’s” personal-is-political intent is implied by its title, by tracks called things like “To Remain/To Return” (“It’s about our journeys as immigrants, people who have had homes in different places and inherited many heritages,” says Aftab), “Compassion” also offers truth, asks for understanding.
Several of Iyer’s compositions reference historical figures admired for their humanity (Archbishop Desmond Tutu in ‘Arch’) or deserving of a reinvented narrative (the ballad-like ‘It Goes’ envisions Emmet Till, murdered in a racist incident aged 14 in 1955, as a respected elder). There are tracks that allude to painful events, to chaos and disorder, the knowledge that things might always fall part. But there is gladness and hope, too, not the least in Iyer’s homage to Chick Corea’s version of Stevie Wonder’s “Overjoyed,” and his whirling cover of “Nonaah” by American iconoclast Roscoe Mitchell, a former mentor.
“Compassion” is an album with weighty intellectual heft, delivered with supreme lightness of touch. It’s a work birthed by a collective that is part of a larger whole.
And by compassion. “I wanted to hear that word as much as possible,” Iyer says.
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Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.
Header image: Ebru Yildiz via Shorefire Media