Vijay Iyer - Historicity

The piano trio is a central configuration in the history of jazz, not only on its own but also as the anchor and center of gravity for many larger groups.

The so-called "rhythm section" backs, propels, supports, and is oftentimes the engine of the music and the wellspring that improvisation pours forth from. That's not to say it has primacy over other elements and participants of the music, but there is something essential about its alchemy and the ways in which piano, bass, and drums interlock, the dovetail joint (or maybe the tongue and groove?) of jazz.

Vijay Iyer has certainly done his time in various other configurations in live and recorded settings before embarking on the path of the trio, but here finds himself left to the intricacies and specifics of the trio.

His first two albums, Memorophilia and Architextures each feature about half trio tracks, with the rest including additional musicians. Since then he's primarily worked in a quartet setting, with other outings including his work with Mike Ladd.

Historicity finds him back in the trio setting, this time without qualification or guest artists. That his playing has changed since his first two releases should come as no surprise, however in looking back his playing now encompasses a lot of the compositional complexity that was heard in his earlier writing for larger ensembles.

His rapport with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore has reached a serene level of fluidity and communication that is the goal of any working ensemble, and the arrangements and improvisations breathe with an assured ease.

The album contains 4 originals and 6 interpretations of others' work, a broad swath of artists from Stevie Wonder to Andrew Hill, Ronnie Foster to Julius Hemphill, MIA to Leonard Bernstein. While the material varies widely in origin the playing of all them is anchored by a strongly rhythmic approach that never wavers - I've always felt Iyer's playing had a strongly percussive element and it is showcased throughout.

That's not to say that melodies aren't featured, but to my ears they're given more equal footing with harmonic and rhythmic considerations. On the cover of MIA's Galang, the rhythmic essence of the song is distilled down to its component parts and then recast with embellishments and bombast, all of it driven by the seemingly endless rhythmic inventiveness of Marcus Gilmore. His snare sounds like its either treated differently than on the rest of the album or maybe layered or replaced by a MIDI triggered sampled snare, and the way he creates and breaks down aspects of what I'd call "momentum" in his playing borders on the mind boggling.

That jazz has a long tradition of interpreting popular music is no secret, but the methodology for doing so has changed over time, and here we can see a fully formed example of what a modern approach. When the popular song was largely a melodic beast, it made sense to recast melodies to shine a light on their slope and texture, to lay them bare without words. Given the immediacy and importance of rhythm in hip-hop, or whatever you'd like to call the eclectic music of MIA, different elements deserve to undergo that process of focus and embellishment.

Along those lines, the covers of songs that could broadly be called "pop" music such as Somewhere, Big Brother, and Mystic Brew, bring all the elements of the song to a level playing field rather than just rehashing the melodic elements. I like to think of the work Iyer is doing here as a re-balancing of the elements of music, and at any time if you hone in on a given area or part, you'll hear it shining without being subservient to another element.

It's a difficult quality to describe but I think it relates to treating each individual component of the trio equally in how each musician participates in every element of the song. Every nook and cranny of texture and feel that can be squeezed out of this trio is found.

There are those rare albums where an artist exceeds all expectations you have based on a love for their previous work. Historicity is one of those albums.