The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Indian-American pianist and composer Vijay Iyer’s three decades of accolades took off when, as a polymathic twentysomething, he was a California physics PhD student – at which point a sideline in classical music training and self-taught jazz piano took him into another world. Physics has always seemed to square with Iyer’s sharp-focused yet poetic musical muse – precisely analytical yet conceptually wide open, searching for fundamentals that can bend to anything from the psychology of music-making, to contemporary-classical composing, to musicology and audiovisual art.

Iyer observes that this trio with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey developed its intuitive real-time exchanges “onstage, out in the world, in spaces of community and encounter” – the title representing qualities of openness and receptivity essential to live collective improvisation, and to living.

The title piece and opener introduces the band like wraiths forming from mist, in quiet bell and gong-like sounds, and soft murmurs from piano and bass. Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed (a fittingly ecstatic Iyer homage to Chick Corea’s interpretation) is unfolded over a rocking left hand and Tyshawn Sorey’s crackling polyrhythms, sparking one of several breathtakingly headlong Iyer solos on the set, coolly placing fragments and twists of the original theme into the onrush despite its scorching pace. Maelstrom and Tempest are similarly full-on, the first a rolling groove over a punchy backbeat, the second a jaggedly lyrical melody over a snaking Iyer left hand.

Reflective pieces intersperse with these sprints – bassist Linda May Han Oh is characteristically light-stepping and quick thinking on the spacey Panegyric and Where I Am. The covers Nonaah (from Roscoe Mitchell) and Free Spirits/Drummer’s Song (John Stubblefield/Geri Allen) draw distinctively different lyrical imaginations on to the palette, and Iyer’s capricious Ghostrumental turns a lilting theme into a trigger for storming improv from all three participants.

(https://www.theguardian.com)