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Now That’s Jazz…
It’s always nice to welcome back Bay Area artists who took off for New York and actually made it there. Vijay Iyer, who juggled academia and performance in the East Bay – he earned a Ph.D from U.C. Berkeley with a dissertation titled Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics while playing jazz piano in dives around town – moved to New York in 1998 and gradually established himself as one of the leading lights of creative improvised music. He’s a prolific recording artist whose every release has garnered more praise than the previous, culminating with a Grammy nomination for his last album Historicity. Now, Vijay’s just-released Accelerando is already attracting raves for his radical yet sensual trio interpretations of tunes like Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” and Herbie Nichols’ “Wildflower.”
Vijay is an original. With influences ranging from Steve Coleman’s M-Base rhythmic experiments in the 1980s to Indian ragas and African dance and drumming, he’s created a music that moves horizontally, much like an ocean current, ebbing and flowing, propelled by the interlocking rhythms of his band and his brooding, rumbling piano playing. Traditional jazz trio roles are abandoned or exchanged; sometimes Vijay’s piano drives the rhythm, while the drummer supplies embellishment. The music doesn’t swing, it pulses, and it’s crazily buoyant. Familiar songs Vijay tackles are swept up by the forward motion of his sound, digested, flattened, stretched and ultimately served up in thrilling ways. It’s as if he’s created an entirely new genre of music, and he may well have done so. Each album brings a new advance, a new twist to the concept.
In New York Vijay has collaborated with hip-hop MC Mike Ladd for a couple of song cycles about language and identity. He’s had an orchestral work performed by the American Composer’s Orchestra, and has received several grants and fellowships. He is on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and the New School.
Vijay’s trio is an intriguing choice to start off the final Roy-alty day at the festival. Though his usual drummer, Marcus Gilmore – Roy Haynes’ grandson – couldn’t make the gig, another Haynes, son Graham, will be sitting in. Graham is a virtuoso cornetist and electronic music maven who’s been part of the New York experimental scene since the 1980s. The drummer for the gig, Tyshawn Sorey, has a symphonic sweep to his playing that will undoubtedly mesh perfectly with Vijay’s ideas. Bassist Stephan Crump has been supplying the intuitive pulse Vijay needs for years.
Is there anything Roy-al about this band, besides the presence of an actual Haynes? Absolutely! The pulse that Roy Haynes supplies to all his musical settings, the volition to push, to excite, is here, only in a different shape and direction. Call it a continuum – and Sheila Jordan is right in the middle with her vocal enchantments and sharp listening ears – that connects the past with the present and shows the way to the future that Vijay is hinting at.
That’s jazz.
This marks the fifth time the Healdsburg Center for the Arts and the Healdsburg Jazz Festival have cooperated on a “
Where: Raven Theater, 115 North Street, Healdsburg
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