It is interesting to compare the work of Vijay Iyer (piano, Fender Rhodes piano, electronics) and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, with their ECM stable-mates, Markus Stockhausen and Florian Weber. The latter pair also released a piano-and-trumpet duo album earlier this year, with the difference that Stockhausen also played flugelhorn on what was, as in the case of Iyer/Smith also a debut album for that duo.
Stockhausen and Weber (see nearby review) appear to essay limpid grace and delicacy, skating over the glacial coolness of their music as lightly as possible. Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith are inclined to aim for a more linear sense of power over, and grasp of the material at hand. They also deal in complex, circular explorations, as in the track The Empty Mind Receives.
The album opens with Iyer’s composition Passage, which is angular, baleful, forceful, suggestive of a fraught journey of some kind, where push is required. That sense of physical weight and strength continues on All Becomes Alive, the second track, and also the first of the title suite, dedicated to Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990).
A Divine Courage - the longest track on the album, at over nine minutes - features Smith playing long, sombre notes over Iyer’s low bass burr. It’s primal and elemental, a mysterious craggy rock from which the sound is carved by both visionary musicians.
Vijay has described Wadada Smith as his “hero, friend and teacher” and the relationship developed when the younger man performed in Smith’s Golden Quartet. Produced by Manfred Eicher at New York’s Avatar Studios in October 2015, a cosmic rhythm with each stroke is challenging but engaging work, brooding and purist, uncompromisingly cerebral. Stockhausen and Weber can be sensuous and even playful on the rare occasion on this record, but in the end these boys go for the hard tack.
Paddy Kehoe
