Vijay Iyer Sextet at Castle Clinton, June 23, 2011
A free concert will draw not just the people who know they like the artist, but also the curious, some of whom may be utterly unprepared for what they are about to experience. This show brought to us by the River to River Festival gave folks a chance to hear one of the most praised young jazz pianists, but apparently not all of them were ready for his complex and challenging music. The personnel this night were bassist Stephan Crump, drummer Marcus Gilmore, tenor saxophonist Mark Shim, longtime Iyer collaborator Rudresh Mahanthappa, and guest Graham Haynes, the elder of the band, on cornet (Haynes is Gilmore's uncle).
After the lengthy introduction of the band, the music kicked off with nearly atonal piano tinkling mixed with bass harmonics. Iyer's playing became less atonal, the drums joined delicately, and Haynes added some electronic bleats. Finally the saxes joined the communal noodling. Eventually a modal head burst forth with multiple asymmetrical meters. As though this weren't already indication enough that there would be no "business as usual" from Iyer's crew, the organization of the solos drove home the point further: rather than each instrumentalist taking a long solo, Mahanthappa, Haynes, Iyer, and Shim playing several short solos each in a round-robin arrangement. The moods and backing shifted often as well, generally funky in an off-kilter way that recalled the late-'80s M-BASE movement -- in which Haynes had been a participant.
At the end of the first piece, Crump kept playing, a low-end thrumming that Iyer joined on electric keyboard, to be followed by Gilmore; then they switched to a very sparse sort of oom-pah groove. The horns came in with a brief theme, Iyer took a long electric piano solo, and then it was back to the thrumming section but with light, long horn tones in octaves for a long melody.
Before the next piece, Iyer said that years earlier he'd written two-minute music cues for ESPN, and that maybe we'd recognize some of them. I think he was joking about that being connected to what was then played, but I don't know. Certainly the metrical pattern of 6/6/6/7 didn't seem built for sports-fan consumption. Once again, Iyer's music was as far from head/solos/head predictability as possible. Shim soloed, then he and Mahanthappa traded fours, uptempo and jittery; the trading sections were halved in length, then halved again, and finally were playing simultaneously. By this point the less adventurous portion of the audience began drifting towards the exit. A charted section that ended with a rising chord sequence brought the piece to its conclusion.
"And now for something completely different," Iyer announced: "Hood," a dedication to Detroit techno legend Robert Hood. Aptly for a techno tribute, we were finally given a straightforward 4/4 beat, but even then they overlaid other meters; the hi-hat, bass drum, and bass all played patterns of different lengths, so despite the repetition their relationships to each other thus shifted constantly. With Iyer on electric piano and the horns on short chords, it was reminiscent of Minimalist phase pieces, yet the techno dedication still fit. Iyer soloed over hi-hat and bass, with the piano material very minimal, short cells repeated and then abandoned for complementary cells. Then it was back to the head but with horns this time, building to a more continuous interlocking texture for a climactic ending.
Next came a Haynes feature piece, "Passage." Playing without accompaniment, Haynes looped his lines electronically and added electronic textures like those used in the beginning of the first piece. His cornet sound was electronically altered, edgy and echoey. Iyer eventually added electric piano (a Fender-Rhodes sound), Crumb joined quietly, and Shim occasionally added long notes. Haynes's timbres suggested Miles Davis's atmospheric style near the beginning of his move into fusion. Iyer switched to acoustic and Haynes dropped out; with just the rhythm section trio, it seemed like a new piece. The horns added sustained notes over Iyer's continuing solo; then he switched back to the Fender-Rhodes timbre to bring the piece closer to its opening sound and showing that it had, in fact, been one piece, not a segue.
A lot more of the audience fled at this point, missing the most rhythmically straight-ahead piece yet. Iyer took the chords of Asian Dub Foundation's "Buzzin'" and put an M-BASE-ish riff on top for "Out the Tunnel." Twisty, knotty horns counterbalanced the simpler rhythm. As part of the simpler structure, the solos became longer -- when Shim soloed, it was the longest outing at the forefront yet by anybody but Haynes or the leader. And when Mahanthappa moved into the spotlight, he also had more time to work, doing so at his most boppish, even including a melodic passage. Haynes soloed muted and electronicized, sounding as if heard from a great distance; with Iyer again using his Fender-Rhodes setting, it was rather reminiscent of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi group. Iyer then soloed accompanied by bass and drums, but at first he played so sparsely that it was almost more a laid-back conversation among equals than a solo, very spacey. Then his playing became more active, more clearly a solo, but Gilmore also upped the ante with a busy sort of bass'n'drum groove. Sustained horn chords joined as the density and intensity peaked, followed by a rhythm trio coda.
Once again there was audience exodus. Then came "Good the Ground," announced as a Gilmore feature. Though he began by himself, he was quickly joined by the band; once again, Iyer organized the structure in a non-standard way: he and Shim alternated seemingly charted figures with Mahanthappa and Haynes until they united for a few bars. Then Iyer soloed in a more flowing style than usual before Shim's solo took things back to this band's knotty norm over an accompaniment with surprising accents; Gilmore -- this had been announced as his feature, after all -- was very active, nearly as featured as Shim except volume-wise. Shim's solo vaulted into cries and screams in the freest and most dissonant/atonal playing yet over heavy chords from Iyer. Then came an actual Gilmore solo for which everyone else dropped out; like his grandfather, drum legend Roy Haynes, he favored a very motivic development of his solo, though with enough technical flash at the end for an effective climax before the head wrapped things up.
The evening's last number, eventually announced as "Franity," started with Iyer in mellow solo ballad mode, melodic but with some half-step side-steps in the chord progression and in 10/4 time. When Crump joined, he only played two or three notes per measure at first; it was only after Gilmore joined that the bass became busier. As density built, so did volume. Mahanthappa soloed in a mantric, Coltrane-like way with an oboe-ish timbre at times. One of Iyer's favorite devices surfaced again, long held notes (by Shim and Haynes) to complement not only Mahanthappa going nuts over them but also invigorating bashing by Gilmore and Iyer for a climax before the horns dropped out and we got the last band ID of the set over the rhythm section. The horns rejoined, buzzing and roiling as Iyer chimed, then a further drop-off to solo piano for a couple of bars for a quiet ending to the evening. All skeptics apparently having walked out already, the remaining audience gave vigorous appreciation for the evening's compellingly challenging creations.