by Nate Chinen
Holding It Down was favorably covered in the national media. But it wasn’t the sort of artwork that courts an enthusiastic embrace. “I don’t think musicians listened to it,”8 Iyer said a few months after its release. “And whoever listens to jazz records, they didn’t listen to it. It scanned as out of the category. It just kind of didn’t register. For a lot of reasons. It’s a hard topic to face.”
Iyer was sitting at the kitchen table of the East Harlem brownstone where he lives with his wife and daughter. (His wife, Christina Leslie, is a computational biologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center; their daughter was born two weeks before the premiere of Mutations I–X, which Leslie’s research informed.) Moments earlier Iyer had been downstairs in his garden-level music room with the Brentano String Quartet, finishing a rehearsal of Time, Place, Action, another commissioned suite.
Iyer’s lingering grievance over a faint reception for Holding It Down was striking, given that his work was once completely overlooked and now covers so much ground. Mutations would soon be released, inaugurating his highly visible tenure on ECM. He was about to begin his first semester at Harvard, teaching courses including a graduate seminar called Theorizing Improvisation. To the extent that Iyer had stood between worlds—bridging academic and real-world applications, composition and improvisation, the avant-garde and the mainstream—he was finally in the privileged position to close the distance between them.
But there was still something weighing on him, and it had to do with the terms of the art form to which he’d sworn himself. “It needs to be addressed that there is somehow such a huge set of disconnects, under this umbrella of jazz, that people can operate in complete ignorance of one another,” he said. “Being willfully blind to each other.”
He recalled an exchange he’d had with one of his detractors during the MacArthur fracas, a seasoned jazz pianist with a more straight-down-the-middle style: “Basically I said, ‘What is it that we are calling the jazz tradition? Is it more than a series of exclusions?’ ”
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Early in Iyer’s life as an professional musician, while he was in graduate school, he had an experience that clarified the range of available possibilities for artistic expression. He was just starting his involvement with Asian Improv aRts when a prominent member of its constituency, a saxophonist and flutist named Gerald Oshita, died at age fifty. Oshita had done pathfinding work in both improvised and contemporary classical music, often applying a philosophical framework rooted in his Japanese ancestry. Among his notable affiliations was a collective trio with Thomas Buckner, a vocal baritone, and Roscoe Mitchell, a fellow saxophonist and composer. This trio favored a branch of formal abstraction and experimentation directly related to Mitchell’s work under the banner of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
“So right after Gerald died, in 1992,” Iyer recalled, “Roscoe came to the Bay Area and did a solo concert, and it totally changed my life.”9
This twenty-minute segment that he did as part of a larger program just opened up a whole new world: it really was a person in a meaningful dialogue with his instrument on this inquisitive path: what happens if I create this set of resistances, and what is the most marginal behavior that’s going to lead to a productive result? So he sat there and blew air through the horn without making any tones. He created this whole flow and statement out of what would not be seen as music. You couldn’t notate it; he didn’t even play any notes! Every now and then, a tone would emerge almost by accident. A decade later, I got to be on the stage while he was doing that shit—posing more questions than answers, which I love.
Iyer began to draw connections between the scenes he was exploring and the legacies they represented, which amounted to a much broader conversation than the one happening in the jazz press. Lewis, a dedicated mentor, helped him to make these connections, often providing a historical and theoretical context that he couldn’t have sussed out without guidance. He performed with Lewis in various settings, and in 1995 he took part in an orchestral project assembled by Cecil Taylor, one of his paramount piano heroes, for the San Francisco Jazz Festival. By 2001 Iyer was working in Mitchell’s quintet, and in the equally exploratory ensemble called the Note Factory. Later there came a working affiliation with another AACM veteran, the trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, in his Golden Quartet.
The multiplicity of perspectives and approaches in this experimental tradition proved irresistibly attractive and meaningful for Iyer. (When he created a music-publishing company for his own compositions, he called it Multiplicity Music.) Rather than an insurrectionary break from the jazz idiom, he saw it as a vital extension. He found a sly but profound resonance in the use of so-called little instruments—bicycle horns, toy rattles, actual bells and whistles—by Mitchell and other members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
“Just letting that become a space for creativity, where it’s not about mastery,” he said. “It’s actually just about play and about relation. So it critiques the notion of virtuosity in very much the same way. It’s not just about being this heroic, virtuosic soloist. It’s kind of about baring something that no one else will bare, and for that reason you become this kind of conduit.”10
Along with the groups he led under his own name, Iyer explored this strain of avant-gardism in a collective trio called Fieldwork, initially with a pair of Bay Area colleagues, the drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee and the tenor saxophonist Aaron Stewart. Later the lineup of Fieldwork shifted to include Steve Lehman on alto saxophone and Tyshawn Sorey on drums—two fellow explorers with high-academic credentials, protégés of Lewis in the composition program at Columbia University. Fieldwork’s signature, a bristling and constantly interactive negotiation among the improvisers, expressed a transparent debt to the AACM, but also a pointed fascination with electronic music, Carnatic and African musics, and underground hip-hop. Each member of the group composed material suited to its strengths. And while Fieldwork released several strong albums, including Door in 2008, its most consequential music was made in workshop settings and concert residencies.
The group made a notable pair of appearances in March of 2016 as part of Relation: A Performance Residency, a nearly monthlong series curated by Iyer at the newly opened Met Breuer museum on Fifth Avenue in New York.
An outgrowth of Iyer’s work as artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (another major institutional endorsement), the residency amounted to a declaration of creative unity even more sprawling and inclusive than Open City. Running every day but Monday, when the museum was closed, it took place in a gallery just beyond the lobby of Marcel Breuer’s historic brutalist building, which originally housed the Whitney Museum of American Art. The room had a seating capacity of under seventy-five people, but excellent production values, including a sound technician and a video feed for archival use.
As the title suggested, “Relation” was about social connections, and Iyer programmed the series to feature artists both in and just beyond his peer group. But Iyer was there at the piano on most days, despite the demands of his teaching schedule at Harvard. He performed in chamber groupings with most of the artists who’d been involved in Open City, including Suri and Cole. He played in duo settings with Mahanthappa and with another brilliant pianist, Craig Taborn, with whom he had worked in Mitchell’s Note Factory. He revisited Tirtha, a collaboration with two South Indian musicians, the tabla player Nitin Mitta and the guitarist Prasanna. During the intervals between musical performances, there were often screenings of Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi, a spectacularly colorful film by Prashant Bhargava, featuring Iyer’s score—a combined response to the spring festival of Holi and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—as performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble.
At one point in the residency Iyer played a ticketed concert in a proper hall with Wadada Leo Smith, drawing from a new suite commissioned by the Met Breue
r. The suite, A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke, was related to a second-floor exhibition of works by the Indian modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi, whose geometric abstraction resonated with the music. It was released as an album on ECM.
Iyer also made several appearances at the Met Breuer with Crump and Gilmore. They had released their third trio album, Break Stuff, the previous year—somehow a stronger achievement than either Historicity or Accelerando, and a reproach to anyone who would file Iyer’s music away in some alternative margin rather than at the thrashing heart of the modern jazz discourse. This wasn’t just a matter of the album’s links to the jazz repertoire—masterly treatments of a Monk tune (“Work”), a Billy Strayhorn ballad (“Blood Count”), and a Coltrane anthem (“Countdown”). It was more a function of flow and intuition, the shared metabolism of a band that pulsed to its own rhythm.
The first trio set at the Met Breuer occurred out of public view, during the evening of the museum’s press opening. A party was under way; members and patrons crowded the lobby in cocktail attire. Back in the lobby gallery, there were never more than a dozen people listening, but Iyer and his bandmates attacked the music as hungrily as if playing a sold-out concert, which had become their standard experience around the world.
They played “Dogon A.D.,” Hemphill’s burst of angular funk, with a terse equipoise. “Hood,” an original dedicated to the minimalist techno pioneer Robert Hood, took the shape of a large, looming crescendo made up of quicksilver accentual details. And then there was the new album’s title track, originally commissioned by a competing institution, the Museum of Modern Art.
Swirling and incantatory, with a deftly slanted groove, “Break Stuff” conveyed breathless exertion but also a cool reserve. Iyer, calmly stirring up rhythmic eddies at the piano, seemed deeply in his element with it. He’d named the tune with a mind tuned to transgression, but he was also working “in the break,”11 as his colleagues in academic jazz studies might put it—expressing a desire for reinvention, rooted in African-American revolutionary practice, that ultimately evoked not brokenness but its opposite, a continuum.
Fieldwork, Door (Pi)
Vijay Iyer, Far from Over (ECM)
Vijay Iyer, Mutations (ECM)
Vijay Iyer, Reimagining (Savoy)
Tyshawn Sorey, The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi)
9
Changing Sames
The Soulquarians didn’t set out to revolutionize the pulse of modern jazz. Maybe it’s an overstatement to imply that they did. But there can be no doubt that the slouchy, loose-jointed, atmospherically humid funk that they alchemized in the studio—specifically, Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village—had a reach well beyond the scope of neo soul, the inexact genre coalescing around them. A considerable number of young jazz artists were paying close attention to what they were doing, at any rate. A few even got in on the ground floor.
What they encountered was something familiar at the root. Black music, in its broadest possible sweep, was a rallying cause for the core members of the Soulquarians: D’Angelo, a R&B singer and pianist oozing every sort of charisma; Questlove, a whip-smart drummer steeped in soul and hip-hop arcana; James Poyser, a thoughtful keyboardist well versed in gospel, funk, and fusion; and J Dilla, a crate-digging producer with the wizardly ability to turn a simple backbeat into something tilted, woozy, or smudged.
This foursome initially convened with the express purpose of creating a follow-up to D’Angelo’s 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar. There was significance in their choice of Electric Lady Studios, which had been christened by Jimi Hendrix in 1970, later serving as the incubator for classic albums by Stevie Wonder and the Rolling Stones before it fell into a commercial slump. Russell Elevado, a recording engineer with an artisan’s fondness for vintage equipment, tipped D’Angelo off to the fact that Electric Lady was still operational, available, and more or less untouched since its heyday. “We were literally blowing dust off of the Fender Rhodes that was in there,” he recalled. “I was wiping dust off of the microphones.”1
For a handful of years straddling the turn of the century, the Soulquarians treated Electric Lady as a clubhouse—a perpetual hang unburdened by the usual ticking clock of the recording studio. Sometimes their work involved more input than output: Questlove and D’Angelo would hunker down to study bootleg videotapes from old Prince and Stevie Wonder tours, like a coaching staff reviewing game film. Sometimes the energy shifted to accommodate a drop-in guest with fresh ideas. Progress was vague, halting, nonlinear. But the creative vibe of these hothouse experiments attracted other works-in-progress: while D’Angelo and company held court in Studio A, the rapper Common began recording his new album in Studio B, and others (the rapper Mos Def, for example) followed suit in Studio C. These simultaneous recording projects often shared personnel, a sonic aesthetic, even concrete musical ideas: a riff or a groove conceived for one artist might be put to better use by another, leading to some tactical horse trading. Still, the overwhelming mood was one of urgent creative independence, a conviction that ran counter to the prevailing commercial mode at the time.
“I think it really is a movement,” Elevado told me. “All these people had a vision, and they’re finding people of the same vision, at the same time. I think where it stems from is these hip-hop grooves—and it’s coming out of the old seventies funk records, and R&B. But I think hip-hop was the one element to fuse these people together.”2
More than half a century ago, Amiri Baraka wrote a penetrating essay called “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” for his collection Black Music. A reassertion of African diasporic traditions like call and response, and an attack on the dilution brought on by western influence—both the Christianizing and commodifying kinds—it championed the spirit-seeking avant-garde of Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, along with sublimities like “the hard, driving shouting” of James Brown. (Baraka’s crosshairs were trained on white bohemians like the Rolling Stones, and on “whitened” black musicians hewing to a conformist middlebrow.) Waving away genre terminologies, Baraka placed ecstatic rhythm and blues on the same discursive plane as jazz’s New Thing—an argument that would come to feel uncannily prescient during the Soulquarian age, and in the mutative period that followed:
And Rhythm and Blues music is “new” as well. It is contemporary and has changed, as jazz has remained the changing same. Fresh Life. R&B has gone through evolution, as its singers have, gotten “modern,” taken things from jazz, as jazz has taken things from R&B. New R&B takes things from old blues, gospel, white popular music, instrumentation, harmonies (just as these musics have in turn borrowed) and made these diverse elements its own.3
Voodoo is the album that eventually emerged out of D’Angelo’s Electric Lady residency. Arriving several weeks into the year 2000, it debuted at number one, driven in large part by the smash success of its third single, “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” a sensuous, Prince-like slow jam. (The accompanying video, depicting the artist’s naked body, chiseled and smoldering, had something to do with the song’s reception.) Beyond the single, Voodoo stood out at once for its principled stand against the prevailing aesthetic of pop-R&B, which had been steadily marching toward digital clarity and precision. This album trafficked instead in murk and sweat, warp and grit. There were throwback energies in the music: not just vintage Prince but also Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. The critic Jayson Greene has called it “a murmured album, music made from the implications of other music.”4 On more than one level, that meant jazz.
D’Angelo had literally been a boy wonder on piano in his native Richmond, Virginia, the sort of musician with an incredible ear and natural facility but little patience for formal training. He was thirteen when a classical piano teacher recommended him to the music program at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he auditioned for the jazz pianist and educator Ellis Marsalis. By D’Ange
lo’s own account, he would have studied with the patriarch of the Marsalis clan if not for some cosmic timing: Ellis already had one foot out the door at Virginia Commonwealth, having committed to a position at the University of New Orleans.5
Voodoo isn’t a jazz album, but it contains discrete elements that could have come from no other musical source. The guitarist Charlie Hunter, who’d made his name in the nineties with a series of new-breed soul-jazz albums on Blue Note, provides the essential glue on several tracks, playing bass as well as guitar parts on his custom eight-stringed axe. One track, “Spanish Joint,” incorporates an Afro-Latin vamp that would be right at home in Hunter’s playbook. But the coauthor of “Spanish Joint” is actually another jazz artist, the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, whose contribution on the album extends to a number of strategically terse but soulful horn lines.
There was another, deeper, but less obvious sign of jazz influence on the album, and it had to do with the placement of rhythm. Voodoo revels in the tension between metronomic clarity and hazy imprecision. On more than a few tracks, the bassist Pino Palladino hangs way behind the beat even as Questlove keeps it locked in place. D’Angelo’s vocal phrasing often adds to the sense of displacement, lying so far back that he almost seems to drag. When Voodoo was released, a great number of musicians actually found it difficult to listen to, because of the gluey disorientation imparted by these grooves. It all sounded weird, perverted, wrong. But this was a cultural predisposition, informed by the mechanistic tyranny of pop progress. As Palladino once said, speaking to Jason King: “That sort of back phrasing has been going on in jazz for a long time. D’Angelo honed in on that and used the rhythm section to back phrase as opposed to using solo instruments to back phrase. That was a huge jump forward there, in my opinion.”6
