{"id":5824,"date":"2016-04-08T21:15:01","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T21:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=5824"},"modified":"2016-04-08T21:15:01","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T21:15:01","slug":"wadada-leo-smith-and-vijay-iyer-find-their-cosmic-rhythm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2016\/04\/08\/wadada-leo-smith-and-vijay-iyer-find-their-cosmic-rhythm\/","title":{"rendered":"Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer Find Their Cosmic Rhythm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2486<\/a><\/p>\n

I was riding\u00a0the 3 train to Harlem, heading to an interview with pianist Vijay Iyer about \u201cA Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke,\u201d his collaborative suite with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, when I read the following front-page headline\u00a0in The New York Times:<\/p>\n

\u201cGravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein\u2019s Theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dennis Overbye\u2019s story<\/a>\u2014the most poetic piece of journalism I\u2019ve come across in the Times in many years\u2014gave the news about sonic evidence of, well, a\u00a0cosmic rhythm<\/em>: A \u201cfaint rising tone\u201d that, physicists say, \u201cis the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I\u00a0last spent time with Wadada Leo Smith<\/a>, he was leading a workshop for instrumentalists, during which he\u2019d pulled out an image meant to represent a \u201cblack hole.\u201d He wanted to investigate the idea of a black hole through tone and rhythm.<\/p>\n

You can find my review in the Wall Street Journal of the Smith-Iyer collaboration here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Or here:
\nLast week in a fifth-floor gallery of the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s new outpost for modern and contemporary works, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith hunched his shoulders, bent his knees and pointed his trumpet downward. Seated at a grand piano, Vijay Iyer began playing a soft upward ripple of notes. During their duet performance, Mr. Iyer occasionally reached for the laptop resting on his piano to trigger sounds\u2014a gentle drone at one point, a clear bassline at another\u2014or swiveled to the Fender Rhodes electric piano, on which he displayed uncanny delicacy. Mr. Smith played trumpet as he always has: with mesmerizing focus, little vibrato and a tone that can be either boldly declarative or soft to the point of breaking.
\nHere was the premiere of \u201cA Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke,\u201d a collaborative suite by Messrs. Iyer and Smith, commissioned by the Met Museum and inspired by the work of Indian modernist artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990). Audience members who had walked through a second-floor exhibition of Mohamedi\u2019s work found passages from her journals, from which titles for this suite and its seven sections were drawn. In Mohamedi\u2019s paintings, photographs and especially her drawings, they saw hand-rendered patterns of breathtaking diligence, suggesting precise architecture or the randomness of sand drifts, or both. At the concert, they could sense connections between Mohamedi\u2019s creations and the ways in which Messrs. Smith and Iyer sought beauty through orderly repetition and abstract flow, in how they toyed with proportions of sound and silence to explore emptiness and meaning.
\nMohamedi\u2019s work is riveting on display at the museum. Yet it loses power in smaller reproduction, as with the untitled 1970 drawing on the cover of the new ECM recording by Messrs. Iyer and Smith, \u201cA Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke,\u201d which presents their collaborative suite bookended by two other compositions. The reverse is true of the music. As reproduced through pristine studio recording, its effect is magnified and clarified. An opening section, \u201cAll Becomes Alive,\u201d lures listeners with long declarative tones from Mr. Smith\u2019s trumpet underscored by a hollow drone. Often, as in \u201cLabyrinths,\u201d Messrs. Iyer and Smith manage to conflate seemingly disjointed musical phrases with the casualness of conversation. \u201cUncut Emeralds\u201d is spare and gestural, yet precisely calibrated. \u201cA Cold Fire\u201d sounds as if about to combust. Two sections, \u201cA Divine Courage\u201d and \u201cNotes on Water,\u201d suggest ballads tantalizingly out of reach.
\nIf this suite is a shared response to Mohamedi\u2019s artwork, it more so expresses the relationship shared by Mr. Iyer, 44, and Mr. Smith, 74, who is one of his closest mentors. \u201cThis album is a document of how we create together,\u201d Mr. Iyer told me in an interview. That connection began in 2005, when Mr. Iyer began a five-year association with Mr. Smith\u2019s Golden Quartet. In that group, Mr. Iyer was introduced to \u201cankhrasmation,\u201d Mr. Smith\u2019s musical system that is informed but not constrained by jazz, and distinguished most starkly by a rhythmic flexibility that produces exquisite tensions and releases.
\nAccording to Mr. Iyer\u2019s liner note to the new CD, the two musicians became a \u201cunit within the unit, generating spontaneous duo episodes as formal links.\u201d \u201cWe had established a certain kinetic energy,\u201d Mr. Smith said in an interview. The two musicians first performed in duet at the Stone, in New York\u2019s East Village, in early 2015, and felt inspired to pursue the format further. Mr. Iyer\u2019s appointment as artist-in-residence at the Met Museum introduced him to Mohamedi\u2019s work. When the museum offered a commission to compose a piece in response, he turned to Mr. Smith as collaborator.
\nMr. Smith, whose 4-CD 2012 opus \u201cTen Freedom Summers\u201d was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is among the influential masters formatively affiliated with Chicago\u2019s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Mr. Iyer, who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013, stands tall among a generation whose ideas have been largely shaped by that legacy\u2014which spanned musical genres and artistic disciplines, and blurred lines between composition and improvisation as well as between individual creation and collective expression. Such a spirit was evident in Mr. Smith\u2019s earliest ECM recording, 1979\u2019s \u201cDivine Love,\u201d and Mr. Iyer\u2019s 2014 ECM debut, \u201cMutations.\u201d
\nHere, sparked by the rigor and meditative power of Mohamedi\u2019s art, that musical connection across generations finds a new frame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was riding\u00a0the 3 train to Harlem, heading to an interview with pianist Vijay Iyer about \u201cA Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke,\u201d his collaborative suite with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, when I read the following front-page headline\u00a0in The New York Times: \u201cGravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein\u2019s Theory.\u201d Dennis Overbye\u2019s story\u2014the most poetic piece of journalism … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Wadada Leo Smith and Vijay Iyer Find Their Cosmic Rhythm”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[397,58,375],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5824"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}