Vijay Iyer Trio, Historicity
Featured Album
The choice of covers deftly balances accessibility and enlightenment. The trio’s take on “Dogon A.D.,” Julius Hemphill’s increasingly classic celebration of the mask-wearing Dogon tribe, creates guttural blues power through Steven Crump’s bass (Hemphill used cellist Abdul Wadud) and deploys a throb-and-plod heavy-metal pace that evolves into more compelling, shifting textures with just a slight reduction in force. The MIA track, “Galang,” is given what Iyer calls his “Trio Riot Version,” which includes a funky, brittle intro buttressed by Iyer’s plangent phrases (reminiscent of The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson), building into a lean, snazzy groove that’s innovative enough to appeal to MIA’s multi-culti, post-modern fan base, before confounding everyone with a brief, billowy bout of faux-orchestration.
And so it goes. Stevie Wonder’s soulfully slick “Big Brother” is subverted by a more slapdash, DIY feel. Conversely, the trio establishes the buppie-cool, facile groove of Ronnie Foster’s “Mystic Brew” (best known as a Tribe Called Quest Sample), then slows it down, fading the piano as the drums swell, then cranking up a tumbling, circular closing vamp.
Be forewarned: None of this is “easy listening” — patterns are continually skewed in the maelstrom of emerging ideas. Leonard Bernstein fans will chase the familiar melody of “Somewhere” fruitlessly. And Vijay Iyer covering Sam Rivers on “Smoke Stack” is a two-ply thicket that is wonderfully dense and spastic but not exactly a toe-tapper. Iyer is inclined toward both polymathematical precision and the joys of adding mustard and relish. The joy of Historicity is how well he indulges and fuses these seemingly disparate styles.
